Glenn Greenwald - Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

SECURING DEMOCRACY

SECURING DEMOCRACY

My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bols onaros Brazil

GLENN GREENWALD

2021 Glenn Greenwald

Published in 2021 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-450-8

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lisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation
and Wallace Action Fund.

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Cover design by Abby Weintraub.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Index available at haymarketbooks.org

For my husband, partner, and soul mate, David Miranda; our two children, Joo Vitor and Jonathas; and the country that gave them, and so much more, to me: Brazil

CONTENTS

Preface

A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME SCOOP

In March 2015, I traveled to Sweden to participate in an event about journalism with former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein. Entitled Greenwald Meets Bernstein: From Watergate to Snowden, it was billed as a discussion between the journalist who broke the biggest story of the prior generation (the Nixon administrations 197273 cover-up) and the journalist who broke the biggest story of the current generation (NSA surveillance).

I had never met Bernstein, but we had exchanged a few barbed insults through the media at the start of my Snowden reporting. A few days prior to our trip to Sweden, Bernstein generously reached out to me by email and proposed that we have dinner the night before our event. He suggested that it would be a good opportunity to clear the air of any residual resentment so that we could have a civil, constructive dialogue. I quickly thanked him for the invitation and accepted.

We met at a restaurant on the top floor of the hotel where we were both staying. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he quickly raised the old episodes in which we had criticized one another. By that point, they were already a couple of years old; also, people had said far worse things about both of us on many occasions. So it took only a few minutes for both of us to laugh off those minor affronts, agreeing that we did not take them personally. We then moved on to have a very compelling, interesting, and entertaining dinner discussion.

Truth be told, I was excited to meet him. As a child I was obsessed with Watergatewhich happened when I was six or seven years oldand, when I was a few years older, I spent endless hours reading and studying All the Presidents Men , the best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Bernstein about their experience journalistically investigating and exposing the Nixon administrations role in the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. I had also repeatedly watched the 1976 film adaptation, in which Woodward is played by Robert Redford and Bernstein by Dustin Hoffman.

Our dinner discussion was wide ranging, but one part of it particularly stuck with me in the years that followed. Im sure you already know this, he said to me halfway through the meal, but Ill emphasize it anyway: this Snowden story is a once-in-a-lifetime scoop. Youll never have anything as big or impactful as this again. So make sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

Though it was a bit jarring to think of it in those terms, I knew there was a good chance he was right. The whole premise of the event in Sweden, after all, was that we had each reported the most important story of our respective generations. By definition, its unreasonable to expect that any journalist will be able to help break and report multiple stories of that magnitude.

But then, on Mothers Day in 2019, a series of events commenced that once again placed me at the heart of a sustained and explosive journalistic controversy. The reporting I subsequently undertook with a team of young journalists brought to light stunning information about grave corruption, deceit, and wrongdoing by extremely powerful political actorsthe crux of the journalistic mission, as Ive always seen it. For that very reason, the endeavor also prompted serious risks.

Unlike the Snowden story, which had global implications for Internet-era privacy and entailed reporting in more than two dozen countries, this story was focused almost entirely on one country: Brazil. But in so many ways, this experience was at least as intense, and the consequences of the reporting at least as profound and enduring. I spent the second half of 2019 and the early months of 2020 publishing one highly sensitive story after the next that rocked the political and legal landscape of one of the worlds largest, most vibrant, and most violent countries, and then navigating an array of threats and dangers that arose from them.

This series of exposs began just five months after the January 2019 inauguration of Brazils new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. Despite his depiction as the Trump of the Tropics by the Western press, Bolsonaro is far more of a throwback to the old US-backed, despotic right-wing leaders of the Cold War than he is representative of the modern right in North America or Europe.

As an army captain during Brazils murderous twenty-one-year military dictatorship that ended only in 1985, and then as a fringe member of Congress for the twenty-eight years that preceded his election to the presidency, Bolsonaro has long explicitly endorsed the military regime as a superior form of government to Brazilian democracy. He has often said that his only criticism of Brazils military dictatorship is that it did not kill enough people, torture pervasively enough, or impose the level of repression needed to eradicate the leftist opposition entirely.

Adept at the media game, Bolsonaro has spent years courting the attention of the press with extreme statements. When he was merely a sideshow in Congress, these remarks seemed outlandish; expressed from within the presidential palace, however, they have a more terrifying ring. He has said hed rather learn that his son was dead than gay, and that the military regime should have killed thirty thousand more people, pointing to the example of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; and, in his last speech before voting began in the 2018 presidential election, he vowed a cleansing the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian historya jarring vow in a country that has experienced, quite recently, sustained torture and murder of dissidents by its government.

The anonymous source who contacted me on Mothers Day said that he had hacked many years worth of the communications of some of Brazils most powerful political officials, claiming that the huge archive he had compiled revealed systematic and grave corruption on their part. In mid-May, the source began uploading to my telephone tens of thousands of hacked documents and chats, which then quickly turned into hundreds of thousands.

Just as the source promised, the hacked materialswhich he had downloaded from the officials telephones and which they had exchanged using the Telegram messaging appproved that some of Brazils most admired and influential figures were deeply corrupt. But for so many reasons, the landscape for reporting this archive was fraught with dangers, uncertainties, and obstacles.

To begin with, Brazilunlike the United States and Europe in the era of the Pentagon Papers, the Panama Papers, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowdenhad never seen a mass unauthorized leak of this kind. Whether any of the countrys institutionsits courts, its legal agencies, even its mediawould regard our reporting as journalism, as opposed to some sort of criminal action, was quite unclear. There was simply nothing in the culture or history of Brazil that provided a road map for how reporting on such a leaked archive would be received.