Opinion – Mathias Alencastro: Hope that international coverage is strengthened in the next cycle

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The intensity of Brazil’s withdrawal from the international system over the past four years is only comparable to the speed of its return since the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

The high number of international delegations, visits by heads of state and the prospect of organizing some of the main global summits in the coming years in the country make Lula, as a former president, the first Brazilian leader to be sworn in with international leader status.

Lula will discover a more complex world, as has often been repeated, but also more like Brazil. In a classic essay on Brazilian international economics in the Bolsonaro era, Alex Hochuli asserts that the “Brazilianization of the world”, or the premonition that the powers would one day carry Brazil’s racial, urban and economic contradictions, has finally come true.

When Xi Jinping and Joseph Biden use the mottos “common prosperity” and “build again and better”, they are appropriating the discourse of developing country governments.

Inequality, an almost exclusive theme of the Global South in the first Lula era, now plays a central role in the evolution of the political systems of the superpowers. As Bruno Latour said to this Sheet in 2020, “if Brazil finds a solution for itself, it will save the rest of the world”.

The pandemic and the Ukrainian War have only reaffirmed the importance of international politics in everyday life. But it needs to be explained with quality. The Lula era coincided with an important moment for Brazilian international journalism, with the increase in foreign correspondents around the world.

With the advent of social networks, they began to be treated as redundant and even superfluous. The cuts have led newspapers to rely more and more on wire services for coverage. At first, everything seemed to work. The networks allowed for the democratization of information, and African and Asian journalists began to have much greater influence in international coverage.

The rise of authoritarianism, however, showed the limits of this solution. More than ever, we need excellent journalists to determine the veracity of the facts on the ground, escape the parallel reality of the internet and, now, tell the story of Brazil’s new international insertion to the rest of the world.

I arrived at Sheet by accident. Moved by the 2015 attacks in Paris, I sent a testimonial to my future first editor, Luciana Coelho. The strange world of Donald Trump and Brexit paved the way for the column. I was always reluctant to follow suggestions, but I followed Fábio Zanini’s advice: diversify. I spoke of China, the Midwest, Twitter and Neymar. But I didn’t fully live up to that promise and kept returning to my three obsessions: Africa, the modernization of the left, and the future of Europe.

None of this would be possible without the editor who accompanied me for years, Daigo Oliva, and my lifelong companion. I’m leaving for Brasilia. I leave the Sheethoping that the coverage of international politics, so important in the Bolsonaro years, will be tremendously strengthened in the next cycle.

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