Deal with the Devil: LIBERTARIAN REFORMERS AND AUTHORITARIAN NATIONALISTS BATTLE IT OUT TO RESHAPE BRAZIL.

• Author: Epstein, Jim

ON THE MORNING of March 14, 2016, in a tiny office in Rio de Janeiro, a libertarian businessman named Winston Ling met with Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing congressman running a longshot campaign to be president of Brazil. Some of Ling's closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil's libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition.

Three years later, Bolsonaro is president. Ludwig von Mises scholars, free market think tankers, and even anarcho-capitalists now occupy top-level positions in his administration, where they hope to slash the government bureaucracy of the nation ranked as the absolute worst by the World Economic Forum in the category of "burden of government regulation"--a country that goes beyond regulating the number of hours that workers spend on the job to micromanaging the size and make of the punch clocks used to record their arrivals and departures. "I'm losing all my guys to government," says Helio Beltrao, founder and president of the Brazilian Mises Institute, with a grin.

But other prominent libertarians are outraged over their former comrades' willingness to ally themselves with a politician The Intercept has called "the most extreme and repellent face of a resurgent, evangelical-driven right-wing attempt to drag the country backwards by decades."

Bolsonaro is not a libertarian; in many ways he is sharply un-libertarian. He has been working to make it easier for police to kill civilians with impunity. He has repeatedly praised the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He has flatly declared himself "in favor of torture." And in 2002 he said, "If I see two men kissing in the street, I will hit them." "It shows that their commitment to individual liberty is actually not that strong," says Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, a libertarian columnist at Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper. They want "a more authoritarian style of government that can bring about their economic policies more easily."

Ling argues that the country didn't have time to entertain fantasies of a truly principled free market politician rising to power. In 2016, when he met with Bolsonaro, the leftist Workers Party had controlled the presidency for 13 years. Brazil's unemployment rate was approaching 12 percent, and the economy had contracted by more than 3 percent the prior year. "For me this was life or death," he says. "I truly believed if someone else were elected president, Brazil would go down."

The beginning of Bolsonaro's presidency has been chaotic. The free marketeers have made some significant progress in cutting red tape but must also contend with powerful special interests that want to maintain the status quo. Concern is growing that their participation in Bolsonaro's administration will damage the libertarian movement and help the Workers Party win back credibility. If Bolsonaro fails to meaningfully liberalize the economy, says Pedro Ferreira, a co-founder of the libertarian Free Brazil Movement, "we're going to be in a lot of trouble."

A TROUBLESOME ALLIANCE

JAIR BOLSONARO IS best understood as "Trump without th success in business," says Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a Brazilian political scientist, career diplomat, and prominent pro-market intellectual. "He's a populist, nationalist, xenophobe, [and] misogynist."

A former Army captain with an undistinguished military career, Bolsonaro served 27 years in the National Congress before he was elected president, passing just two minor bills during his entire tenure.

He was best known for his incendiary public comments. In a 2011 interview, he told Playboy that he would be "incapable of loving a homosexual son," preferring that a gay child "die in an accident." In 2016, he said the "biggest mistake" of the dictatorship that used to rule Brazil "was to torture and not to kill." In March, he asked the nation's armed forces to commemorate the 55th anniversary of that coup.

In his first months in office, Bolsonaro's most substantive policy proposal has been a draconian anti-crime package that includes more lenient treatment of police officers who kill while on duty. for a while. In 2017, law enforcement killed 5,144 civilians, or 14 people per day. In March 2018, two former Rio de Janeiro police officers were arrested on charges of murdering Marielle Franco, an openly gay city council member, by shooting her in the head with a submachine gun. According to Human Rights Watch, extrajudicial executions by cops are common. In 2003, Bolsonaro said that "as long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, those death squads, in my opinion, are very welcome."

Yet Bolsonaro also has an uncanny ability to connect with voters, which is what drew...