09-07-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Apocalypse in the Tropics' is the democracy documentary Trump doesn't want you to see
Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is facing trial for his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2022 election that removed him from power.
On Monday, July 7, United States President Donald Trump, who disputed the results of the 2020 election that temporarily removed him from power, came to his defense.
'Brazil is doing a terrible thing on their treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro,' Trump wrote on Truth Social. 'He is not guilty of anything, except having fought for THE PEOPLE. … LEAVE BOLSONARO ALONE!'
So yeah, Petra Costa's documentary ' Apocalypse in the Tropics ' — which not only details Bolsonaro's rise and fall but how democracies can be subverted and dismantled — is pretty timely.
It also provides a blueprint for reclaiming and strengthening democratic systems, which might be the main value for Americans viewers of the film, which opens Friday, July 11, at Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco and streams on Netflix beginning Monday, July 14.
Costa, who explored the threat to democracy in Brazil in her 2019 documentary 'The Edge of Democracy,' also on Netflix, doesn't shy away from drawing parallels between Bolsonaroism and Trumpism.
Bolsonaro moved hard to the right and was embraced by Brazil's Evangelical Christian movement on his way to ascending to the presidency in 2018. When he got to power, he set about remaking the government by weakening its institutions, including Brazil's Supreme Court.
Costa also accuses the president of bungling the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a contentious re-election campaign in 2022 in which he squared off against rival and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
But Costa also delves into the history of democratic and socialist movements in Latin and South America that hoped to narrow socio-economic gaps. Key players include former U.S. President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as well as none other than Evangelical Christian leader Billy Graham, who spoke at a massive rally in Brazil in 1974 while the country was under a military dictatorship.
'What is certain is that Brazil became a laboratory for a brutal form of capitalism and vertiginous social inequality where millions of people began to seek the hope they needed in the Evangelical faith,' Costa narrates in the film.
In the last four decades, Costa reports, the percentage of Brazilians who identify as Evangelical Christian has risen from 5% to 30%, significantly boosting Bolsonaro's political appeal. In his 2022 campaign against Bolsonaro, da Silva embraced Evangelical social issues, noting in one campaign speech that abortion and all-gender restrooms 'came straight out of Satan's mind.'
At the heart of 'Apocalypse in the Tropics,' though, isn't so much current events but a longing to return to old ideals. A consistent thread is the conception of Brazil's capital of Brasilia as a utopian seat of government, architecturally embracing the three branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — as separate but equal checks and balances.
There's a lot of old footage from the 1950s of Brasilia being designed and built, which reveal this detail: Original plans had a church at the center of the design, as nearly all Brazilian cities and towns have. But it was removed to establish the idea of a separation of church and state.
