Longtime friend tells of president’s obsession with social justice and fears for country’s future under another Bolsonaro presidency

On 1 January 2023, a few hours after being sworn in for his third stint as Brazil’s president, a ravenous Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sneaked away from a celebratory cocktail party packed with politicians and diplomats to grab a snack with one of his oldest friends.

“This is your penultimate term,” that friend, the Dominican theologian and writer Frei Betto, recalls telling Lula as the pair chewed the fat in a back room of the foreign ministry in Brasília.

The former president’s far-right supporters have discovered a new interest in prison conditions as incarceration looms

He fought the law and the law won.

Two months after receiving a 27-year sentence for trying to “annihilate” Brazil’s democratic institutions, former president Jair Bolsonaro finally looks jail-bound.