Jair Bolsonaro represents a dark moment for Brazil, and the question is how much damage he can do

Bolsonaro's programme includes encouraging police to kill "suspects" with impunity, attacking workers’ rights, rejecting and verbally attacking LGBT communities, and destroying the Brazilian Amazon forest

On a beautiful day, the waters of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach glisten in the sunshine, with rainbow coloured fish visible from the sands. When the tide turns, so do the contents and colour of the sea. It often contains human faeces from the city’s dysfunctional sewage system, which turns the water brown.

The election of extreme-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro – due to assume the presidency of Brazil on 1st of January – represents a political-economic equivalent of the turn of Copacabana’s tide. The main reason for Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil is a political backlash by the rich and powerful, and large sections of the middle class, against the prior Workers’ Party (PT) attempts to ameliorate the conditions of the poor.

Bolsonaro has promised to unleash a war against criminals by encouraging police to kill "suspects" with impunity, to destroy the left, to attack workers’ rights, to restore family values by ideologically rejecting and verbally attacking LGBT communities, and to ramp up the environmental destruction of the Brazilian Amazon forest under the name of economic development. Bosonaro was formerly a captain in the Brazilian military; he has strong backing from its top brass, and he has spoken favourably about Brazil’s dictatorship.

Bolsonaro’s election, and his extreme right-wing politics, potentially embodies the swell of a regional "brown tide". Brown is a colour associated with European inter-war fascism, the militarisation of politics, and the abolition of democracy.

From the early 2000s onwards, a number of left-wing presidents, supported by workers and peasant movements, began implementing progressive reforms across the continent. The most notable of these were Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luis Inacio da Silva (popularly known as Lula) in Brazil, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. These leaders used receipts from the global commodity super cycle – rising prices of soy, iron ore and oil – to implement relatively generous social programmes. This trend became known as the Pink Tide. However, in the context of economic stagnation and political reaction, that tide is being increasingly reversed across the region.

Recent victories by conservative politicians who rejected pink tide politics – such as Miguel Piñera in Chile in 2010, and Mauricio Macri in Argentina in 2015 – comprised quite traditional right-wing political movements. Whilst reversing the progressive social policies of their predecessors, neither of these presidents has gone as far as Bolsonaro ideologically or in their openness to the military’s potential involvement in national politics.

How can we explain the resurgence of this political-military movement?

The long-term perspective takes us back to the territories’ independence from Iberian rule in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The new rulers pursued a strategy of global economic integration based on the principles of comparative advantage. Agricultural and mineral export production based on very cheap and politically disenfranchised labour was the order of the day. These arrangements were, and still are, encapsulated by the caption on the Brazilian Flag – Order and Progress, which many critics interpret as order for the many, and progress for the rich.

Throughout Latin American history there has been a very powerful political constituency – the rural oligarchies, the financial sector, sections of export-orientated industrialists and elements of the state and military – that have resisted any attempt to challenge this set-up.

However, there have also been regular mass movements by the regions' workers and peasants to ameliorate their conditions. Up until the 1930s such attempts were largely unsuccessful. But following the great depression of the 1930s and the collapse of the export economy this changed. Increasingly confident workers’ movements, buoyed by Communist ideology, contributed to a shift in the region’s political economic set up.

Following the Second World War, many Latin American countries adopted policies designed to facilitate catch-up development with advanced capitalist countries through industrial diversification and domestic market expansion. At times this strategy was combined with concessions to the labour movement – including limited trade union rights and better pay and conditions, although always under tight state-control – as part of an anti-Communist co-optation strategy. The highest profile presidents in the region to pursue these strategies were Joao Goulart in Brazil, Juan Peron and his followers in Argentina, and the Christian Democratic party in Chile. In Chile popular pressure even led to the election of Salvadore Allende, who aimed to construct a Chilean road to socialism.

In all of these cases however, the old economic order in alliance with the military, launched vicious counter-attacks on these relatively pro-labour governments: Military coups and dictatorships followed – in Brazil in 1964, in Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and in Chile in 1973.

The dictatorships terrorised their populations, torturing and killing thousands of workers and political opponents, banning political parties and independent workers’ organisations, and using rape as a tool of terror against women. Whilst they differed in their economic ideology – the Argentinian and Brazilian dictatorships continued to deepen state involvement in the economy, while under Pinochet Chile embraced free market ideology – all pursued intense labour repression. The long-term tendency to integrate the region into the world economy based on very cheap labour was resumed.

Political democracy was re-established across the region from the 1980s onwards. It was made possible because, as Jeffrey Webber notes, the radical left had been annihilated, paving the way for the emergence of political parties ready to adopt continued anti-labour, neo-liberal policies in the context of a severe debt crisis. From the 1990s onwards democratic expansion across the continent coincided with the polarisation of wealth and emergence of new kinds of poverty.

In the short term, we see the rise and fall of the pink tide governments during the first decade or so of the 2000s. These governments were elected by populations who had suffered the consequences of the prior neo-liberal economic regime. However, once the commodity super-cycle collapsed and revenues disappeared, progressive governments were left high and dry.

Bolsonaro’s election marks a further right-ward shift across the region and it marks the end of the road for the current pink tide in Brazil. It also potentially represents the emergence of a new set of political forces, with a core role for the military, aiming to eliminate the progress made by prior governments and social movements.

Whilst the immediate future in Brazil is dark, the current will no doubt change again. The question is how far can Bolsonaro go in his attacks on the left, and how long will it take for the opposition to oust him from power.

Benjamin Selwyn is professor of international development at the University of Sussex and is author of Workers, State and Development in Brazil (2012) and The Struggle for Development (2017)