Savor the Good

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LISTENING: to 'kiss me'
FEELING: sleepy
SEEING: my cat's latest scratch swell on my arm

Loser Flávio Bolsonaro arrived in Florida Wednesday, claiming he is Brazil's rightful president. Ha! Losers are so fucking annoying.

The actual victor of the country's election, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won by over 4 million votes. Many of his supporters traveled by boat from remote Amazonian territories to cast their votes. A grassroots campaign managed to win a lawsuit ordering the government to support Indigenous people and improve their voting access by providing free transportation and materials in their native languages.

It's a momentous victory, one I wasn't expecting. It's a reminder to hold onto hope. I can easily succumb to the dread and despair. I wanted to understand the reality on the ground, so I reached out to my comrade Lori Regattieri, who lives in Brazil.

I met them during my trip to the West Bank last year. We instantly connected as fellow queer people who feel deeply and love hard. They work a lot with Indigenous communities and has their fingers on the pulse of the country's political landscape. They also understand the intersections of Big Tech and climate justice in their role as an adviser with Green Screen Coalition, a group of funders committed to bridging these sectors among organizing movements.

Here's our conversation, edited for clarity and length.

YESSENIA FUNES
So what are the vibes over there?

LORI REGATTIERI
I've been partying since Sunday from the moment polls closed. My friends and I — queers, Black and Brown people, rappers, cultural producers — we just went crazy on Sunday. And I think it was around 9:04 p.m. when the parties erupted everywhere. We really wanted to scream out and say: We did it! There is so much more work to be done, but we did it! Lula is the president! We can breathe now.

It's beautiful to see that the whole world is looking at Brazil and trying to understand how this happened. It's so special. It's our lives at stake. The lives of my friends. The lives of Indigenous people. The forests. It's about decent jobs. It's about universal healthcare. This victory is about so many things, but mostly it's about our lives. The vibes are full of joy, hope, and collective effort.

YESSENIA
I don't think anyone over here was expecting Lula to win. Especially because of how close the first round was. His loss felt inevitable. But that must have been a shift to go from that oh no feeling to oh yes!

LORI
Yeah. I mean, I was so tired. We were really scared because there was a chance that Flávio Bolsonaro could actually win. And he had all these far-right politicians who are anti-feminist, anti-Indigenous, anti-environment who did win their seats. So when that bloody Sunday ended, the Monday was terrible. Everybody woke up from a nightmare.

Then, on that horrible night, students from the Federal University Fluminense in the state of Rio organized a march against fascism. And it was really organic, out of the blue. Through WhatsApp and Instagram, people messaged each other. This was the spark all of us needed to wake up.

It wasn't a huge crowd, but it was the crowd that we needed at that moment. Those sparks that sometimes seem naive, well, they're not. You never know. After that Monday when everybody was so down, those students took to the streets with courage and the will to change everything. After that day, everything really changed.

"This was the spark all of us needed to wake up."

YESSENIA
This is important context you shared about the country's overall political landscape. Lula is great, but he now has to contend with the other sections of government. It's not going to be easy to pass policies he might want. What does this mean for international climate conversations? Why is it important that Lula won?

LORI
Brazil has had the lowest record of deforestation in eight years. This is amazing. This is record-breaking. And this is the work of Marina Silva, the minister of environment and climate change. After Bolsonaro, we had a lot of criminalization and flexibility in environmental safeguards. So once Lula came back, he made a commitment to the Indigenous people, the traditional communities that protect the forest, and also to the environmental safeguards that protect traditional lands from the Amazonian forest to the Cerrado.

He showed that it is possible to have economic growth with sustainable development — and with the people who are protagonists in the movements for water justice, especially Indigenous people. Lula did more Indigenous land demarcations than any other president. This makes the agribusiness really angry, unfortunately. For international climate conversations, it's so important Lula won because Brazil's commitment to end deforestation by 2030 still stands.

The next point is about mining and U.S. interest in rare earth minerals. Big Tech really needs data centers, GPUs, the minerals to expand their own industry. For the international climate conversation, it's important that we have a serious conversation about the global supply chain and mineral extraction and the role of accountability and transparency for Global South countries to thrive while maintaining environmental safeguards and the livelihoods of Indigenous and traditional communities. For international conversations on trade, treaties, or bilateral agreements, we have sustained work over the next few years with Lula and Brazilian climate diplomacy.

We have a government that is engaged and interested in dialogue and in sustaining commitments. That's the most important thing.

YESSENIA
In the U.S., Election Day is next week. People are early voting right now. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up for reelection as well. I am curious about what Lula's victory signals for the world and for climate justice.

LORI
It's crazy because I feel that I'm a part of history. We don't know what's going to happen. I think everywhere in the world, people are going to start asking questions about this attention economy and the role of Big Tech and the propaganda ecosystem they rule. In Brazil, the media really normalized fascism. How can we create an independent public interest media ecosystem that is able to support young journalists and media creators on what's important for society?

It's not just about Big Tech. It's also about Big Media. If we continue to treat media as a market-based economy, what we see is that there is no plurality at all. We need to pay attention. In Brazil, we are able to hack the algorithm. We have created this self-learning environment where we are educating ourselves on how this engineering works. And people are being creative and acting.

We had this WhatsApp channel created in the three weeks between the first round and the second round. And this changed everything because we had 10 million people in the WhatsApp channel for Lula.

YESSENIA
I heard about this!

LORI
Yeah. This was against all odds. Every day, we had missions. There were no traces of fake news. It was all about mobilization. So how can we create network effects? We need to remember Occupy Wall Street. We need to remember everything that happened before the online platform economy was emerging.

And we need to talk to each other again. This is beyond regulation. It's about culture, right? We were able to connect our strategies and actually build a community beyond politics. This is really crucial. People are not talking about politics in politics channels. They are talking about politics when they are talking about the soap opera or their favorite artists. So this is something very important we understood with this election. We needed to be where people are because the far right is already doing that. They have their own music style. They have their own memes. They have their own jokes.

"We need to learn a new language to reach people. Maybe we need to listen more."

Another self-learning was: How do we talk to people? People's reality now is so fragmented. When I'd go hand out pamphlets during my lunch break, I would ask people about their concerns this election instead of telling them what I thought. I listened.

YESSENIA
When I was door knocking for Zohran Momdani last year, that was part of our strategy. Let's open with curiosity, and hear what they have to say. It didn't always work, but even telling people that no matter who they're voting for, their voice matters. That was such a beautiful way to spend my time. That reconnection is an important skill.

LORI
Yeah! This election, we had the biggest turnout in 20 years. It was a big campaign to get people to understand that their vote matters. And it's not just about elections. It's about how to build the government that we want.

To build prosperity and to thrive as a Global South country, we need to take our government back. Every day is about dignity. Every day is about coming back from work and having a meal with your children, your parents, your husband, your wife. To have the will to wake up the next day. To go to work and feel proud. We need to learn a new language to reach people. Maybe we need to listen more. We learned that. And I think most of all, we really learned about the joy that can make people interested in politics.

It's when politics connects to the struggles of their everyday lives. This has been my biggest learning — after being a part of so many movements, especially our time together in Palestine. How do we talk about the struggles we are seeing in the world today to bring people closer? How do we make sure we are engaging with people with humility? We really are so small in a world of rivers and forests. We have such a beautiful biodiversity everywhere: olive trees in Palestine.

How do we talk about what matters to people? About hopeful futures? It's possible. People are engaged because everyday life is really hard. So when we talk about what matters to them, that's when we connect with the global solidarity we need to build the world we want to live in. 🌀

Currently Reading

I am grieving the loss of Dolores Huerta. She was a legend. Read my interview with her in 2022 for Atmos here. As we cast our votes over the next week, listen to her words. They're so relevant now: "What we have to do is make sure that the candidates we support are on board. Not only to combat global warming, but also on board in terms of supporting labor unions. Where we need to focus our energy right now and for the next year is in supporting candidates — whether it be on the school board, city council, board of supervisors, commissioners, state legislatures, or Congress — who support combating climate change and who will be willing to invest resources into transitioning workers."

I am shocked by how this country continues to use immigrants as a spectacle. Sam Levin and Sam Levine (can't believe these two share a byline) report for The Guardian.

Poem

LUNA, LUNA
I look at the moon
and all I see are her eyes
gazing, longingly

fuck, she's so divine
skin like coffee, caramel
sigh, I breathe her in

the moonlight bathes her
beneath la luna and lights
her hips are on mine

a ceremony
an ancient, ancestral dance
we howl to the moon

-ylf-

- Yessenia xx