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(I have big problems with Glenn Greenwald but I am glad to see his stand
against Brazil's Donald Trump.)
NY Times, July 21, 2019
‘The Antithesis of Bolsonaro’: A Gay Couple Roils Brazil’s Far Right
By Ernesto Londoño
RIO DE JANEIRO — The votes had been tallied, and the skies of Rio de
Janeiro crackled with fireworks as supporters celebrated the decisive
election of a far-right populist, Jair Bolsonaro, as Brazil’s president.
But not everyone was jubilant. David Miranda, a socialist Rio de Janeiro
council member who had campaigned for Congress, reached for a bottle
that October night to mourn his electoral loss. His husband, Glenn
Greenwald, a spitfire American journalist, popped a Xanax. The political
era that dawned felt like a gut punch for the gay, biracial couple.
“We are the antithesis of Bolsonaro,” Mr. Miranda said in an interview.
“We’re everything they hate.”
Since then, the two men find themselves on the front lines of the
country’s increasingly bitter political divide. In June, Mr. Greenwald’s
news organization published reports suggesting that Mr. Bolsonaro’s main
opponent in the race was improperly jailed just six months before the
election, raising serious questions about the legitimacy of Mr.
Bolsonaro’s victory and testing the mettle of Brazil’s democratic
institutions.
Now, Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Miranda — who ultimately took a seat in
Congress — are under attack by Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies. They have
faced death threats and, according to a conservative Brazilian website,
the federal police are investigating Mr. Greenwald’s finances.
Government officials have neither confirmed nor denied the report, but
the suggestion that Mr. Greenwald is being targeted by the state for his
news reports has ignited an outcry over press freedom in Brazil.
Mr. Greenwald — one of the two journalists who obtained and disseminated
the trove of secret intelligence documents leaked by the National
Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013 — said he had
doubted he would ever break a more consequential story. The Snowden
revelations set off a global debate about government surveillance and
privacy.
But the stakes of the exposé in Brazil seem higher in some ways, he said.
The information published by The Intercept Brasil, a news organization
co-founded by Mr. Greenwald, challenged the integrity of a wide-ranging
corruption investigation that ensnared some of the most powerful figures
in Brazil’s political and business establishment over the past five
years, landing many of them in prison.
Among them was the leftist former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
who was jailed and prevented from taking part in a presidential race in
which he had a large lead over Mr. Bolsonaro.
The man presiding over that investigation, the federal judge Sérgio
Moro, became a folk hero of sorts for many Brazilians fed up with graft
and violence. Later nominated by Mr. Bolsonaro to be justice minister,
Mr. Moro became one of the most popular members of his cabinet, lending
legitimacy to the president’s promise to tackle rampant crime and crack
down on corruption.
But a massive archive of private chats between members of the judiciary
involved in the sprawling corruption investigation, obtained by The
Intercept Brasil from a source it did not reveal, contains exchanges in
which Mr. Moro appears to cross ethical and legal lines in his handling
of Mr. da Silva’s case.
The exchanges show that Mr. Moro provided strategic advice to
prosecutors and passed along an investigative lead. Judges must be
impartial arbiters under Brazilian law. Mr. Moro has denied wrongdoing.
“I’m a big defender of the free press, but this campaign against Carwash
and in favor of corruption is bordering on ridiculous,” Mr. Moro said in
a statement, referring to the name of the corruption scandal.
The Intercept Brasil’s steady stream of articles has led to calls for
Mr. Moro’s resignation, and made Mr. Greenwald, 52, the chief target of
praise and fury for those on opposite ends of Brazil’s political divide.
The scandal has also become the first test of the resilience of Brazil’s
democratic institutions under the leadership of a president who has
spent much of his political career railing against democracy and lauding
the 21-year period of repressive military rule in Brazil that ended in
1985, Mr. Greenwald said.
“There is a huge question about what kind of country Brazil is going to
be,” Mr. Greenwald said during a recent interview at his heavily guarded
home in Rio de Janeiro. “Will it be a country with functioning
democratic institutions, or is it going to become the repressive
authoritarian state that Bolsonaro desires and craves?”
Mr. Greenwald would probably not have ended up so invested in Brazil’s
future were it not for a day in February 2005 when he was sitting alone
on an Ipanema beach, nursing a broken heart, and a young man
accidentally knocked over his drink with a ball.
Mr. Miranda, who was then 19, apologized profusely in broken English.
Mr. Greenwald, who was 37, accepted the apology and asked the young
Brazilian out to dinner. Three days later, the pair had essentially
moved in together, to the dismay of friends on both sides, who saw
nothing but red flags as two radically different lives began to meld.
Mr. Greenwald had a law practice in New York. Mr. Miranda, the son of a
prostitute who died when he was 5, had been raised by an aunt in
Jacarezinho, a poor favela in Rio, and dropped out of school at 13.
“I was not at all the type that ever fell in love with someone at first
sight,” Mr. Greenwald said. “But the passion, David’s intensity, it was
like two asteroids colliding.”
Mr. Miranda soon enrolled in college and Mr. Greenwald began writing
about national security and legal matters in a blog called Unclaimed
Territory. Among his many loyal readers was Mr. Snowden, who turned over
to Mr. Greenwald and the American documentary-maker Laura Poitras a huge
cache of secret intelligence documents.
In August 2013, while Mr. Miranda was transporting a memory drive with
Snowden files from Ms. Poitras’s home in Germany back to Brazil, he was
interrogated for hours and threatened with arrest during a layover in
London.
The experience prompted Mr. Miranda, 34, to lead a campaign to get the
Brazilian government to offer Mr. Snowden asylum, an effort that ignited
his interest in running for office. Soon after, Mr. Greenwald started
writing about Brazilian politics. The pair soon crossed paths with Mr.
Bolsonaro, who represented the state of Rio de Janeiro in Congress.
In 2014, Mr. Greenwald decided to profile Mr. Bolsonaro in The Intercept
Brasil, which was then a new online news site funded by Pierre Omidyar,
the American billionaire who founded eBay.
It fell to Mr. Miranda to interview Mr. Bolsonaro, a former Army captain
who was then a largely powerless representative notorious for making
incendiary comments about women, gay and black people. The story ran
under the headline: “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in
the Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.”
In 2017, when Mr. Bolsonaro was gearing up to run for president, he and
Mr. Greenwald exchanged barbs on Twitter. After the journalist referred
to Mr. Bolsonaro as a “fascist cretin,” the politician responded with a
crude reference to anal sex.
Mr. Miranda ended up taking a seat in Congress in February, after a gay
lawmaker in his party who had been sent death threats went into
self-imposed exile. Soon after Mr. Miranda was sworn in, one of Mr.
Bolsonaro’s staunchest allies in Congress, Representative Joice
Hasselmann, began suggesting that he had purchased his seat in Congress.
The claim is preposterous, Mr. Miranda and Mr. Greenwald say, but it
came just as Mr. Miranda was struggling to get his bearings in Congress,
where most lawmakers are white and hail from privileged families. The
first time he grabbed the microphone to speak, his hand trembled, he said.
“I was feeling like I didn’t belong,” he said. “Everyone else seemed
like they knew what they were doing.”
By April, the loneliness and alienation he felt in Brasília led to a
breakdown.
“I am not doing well,” Mr. Miranda said he told his therapist, who
prescribed anti-depressants. The lawmaker took two weeks off and stayed
home with the two sons he and Mr. Greenwald adopted last year.
Soon after Mr. Miranda returned to the capital, the political
establishment was rocked by the first leaked Carwash chat.
Threats and taunts against Mr. Miranda and Mr. Greenwald have kept the
pair largely confined to their home. They venture out only with armed
guards, sleep little and lightly, and fear for the safety of their children.
Yet the two said they have no regrets about the cause they took on,
calling it a make-or-break moment for the rule of law in Brazil.
“This can wind up strengthening democracy,” Mr. Miranda said. “It will
depend on how institutions decide to act.”
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