People really do not want the state
putting its fingers in their lives.
Coming up
Reason TV travels to Brazil
for a look at how a group of libertarian activists
helped bring down a president.
It definitely says great things
about Brazilian democracy.
Why is libertarianism catching on so fast in Brazil?
And that is how you win over undecided voters right there.
More than understand our ideas
people have to like our ideas.
If they want to be cool they don't need to be on the left.
They can be in our group.
Now this is kind of my life.
Can these young activists help defeat the big government populism,
stifling the economy
of Latin America’s most populous nation?
This is the worst recession we've had
in recorded history.
It's like an office wannabe,
but we are not like serious guys,
so it's not technically an office.
In this cavernous production studio,
a group of mostly twenty-somethings work through the night,
often sleeping by their desks.
They’re making videos, uploading content to social media,
and strategizing.
We're a group of friends,
and things do not work well
if the guys who enter into our team
don't become a friend of ours.
This is the headquarters of the Free Brazil Movement.
It’s the centerpiece of the country's growing libertarian movement,
And the group has already helped bring about a remarkable turn of events.
The Free Brazil Movement has been a driving force
behind the ongoing impeachment
of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,
who in May was forced to step down.
A left-wing populist,
Rousseff was impeached for fiscal impropriety.
It definitely says great things about Brazilian democracy.
We always had politicians just running free
and doing whatever they wanted with public money.
So this is a very, very big deal.
But the impeachment effort probably would have fizzled
if the Free Brazil Movement hadn't helped organize
a succession of demonstrations
that involved millions of anti-Rousseff protesters.
The anger of the Brazilian people with their government
was cast in explicitly libertarian terms.
In Brazil,
all the people are libertarian
in many ways,
like, people really do not want
the state putting its fingers in their lives.
When you start to explain those things
people, 'oh yeah, the government's way too big
yeah, yeah, this is the real problem.'
To keep the pressure on for removing Rousseff from office,
members of the Free Brazil Movement
led a 33-day march from Sao Paulo
to the federal capital of Brasilia.
It was a 750-mile trek,
which they did while carrying an impeachment bill to deliver to congress.
After arriving in Brasilia,
they sat down with congressional leaders
to make their case.
We are going to defeat the socialists in Brazil
the way that they hate most:
by democracy.
Brazil is now in the second year of recession
and this is the worst recession we've had
in recorded history.
The Brazilian economy has been contracting over the last couple years,
and the unemployment rate recently climbed
above 11 percent.
On the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom,
which categorizes countries
based on the level government interference in the private economy,
Brazil ranked 122.
Starting a new business in Brazil
takes about 14 times as long as it does in the United States,
according to the World Bank.
Here’s the big mystery in Brazil
and in much of Latin America:
How is it that so many
citizens continue to believe that government can solve their countries’ problems
despite so much lived experience to the contrary?
The theory behind the libertarian movement in Brazil
is that most people derive their politics not from reasoning
but from culture.
So the way to change public policy is to create a new cultural identity that’s all about
freedom.
If you want to be cool, you have to be from the left.
If you are not from the left,
you are a guy who don't like gays,
you don't like
poor people,
you don't like black people.
What is the [Free] Brazil Movement?
Brazil Movement is other way that young guy or a young girl
go.
They don't need to be on the left group now.
They can be in our group.
To promote this new libertarian cultural identity,
the Free Brazil Movement functions in part
as an alternative media outlet
with its more than 1.3 million Facebook followers.
The media in Brazil receives lots of money from the government,
and we had to create
a sort of parallel media.
In terms of Facebook, we're stronger than any politician in Brazil, and
we have more views,
more reach,
than any, any media group.
As a video production shop,
the Free Brazil Movement scored one of its biggest hits
in 2014
with a joke advertisement for Paulo Batista,
a long-shot candidate for the Sao Paulo state legislature.
This is a politician flying
with a tie
and spreading the libertarian message
using a beam that comes from his eyes
that turns bad public services
into good private services.
It drew a front page story in The New York Times
and was featured on the John Oliver show.
Perhaps my favorite candidate this year is this guy—
Paulo Batista,
who seems to be running
on a platform of having laser vision
that can transform the country
and who ends the ad by flying through space for twenty solid seconds.
We have not edited this.
This is genuinely how his campaign ad ends.
And that is how you win over undecided voters right there.
The video was aimed not at promoting Batista’s candidacy
but at rebranding the concept of privatization.
Privatizing that was a word that the left made a disaster
in terms of public policy.
It became something that people, 'oh it's nice',
because people were starting to use as a meme.
Like,
'oh, I had a girlfriend who is not looking pretty nice in this picture,'
so she receives the privatizing beam
and she becomes hot.
We have footage from our demonstrations
where like thousands of people are screaming in the middle of avenues,
'we should privatize those public companies now!'
Critics of the Free Brazil Movement say that its message has mostly caught on
with the middle class in Sao Paulo and the South,
making less traction in Brazil’s far poorer Northern states.
Brazil is a very, very poor country,
so to be fiscally conservative
you have to convince,
and this is the hard part,
you have to convince people that being fiscally conservative
means
in the medium to longer term,
having more money to spend in education and health.
Enter 20-year-old Kim Kataguiri,
the grandson of Japanese immigrants,
a part-time law student in Sao Paulo,
and the Free Brazil Movement's biggest star.
One of his specialties is communicating how free market reforms
benefit the poor.
Just observe what the left has already done.
They've created the perfect formula.
More than understand our ideas,
people have to like our ideas,
so i think that's the great secret.
We have like 205 million people in Brazil.
I mean you will never make 205 million people understand
any idea in a profound way.
Education, for an example.
We don't explain that the voucher system is more efficient
and it has worked in other countries,
and the private companies can take better care of the schools.
We just ask,
'So do you want the poor people to study in the same school as the rich people?'
I mean it really looks like a leftist speech,
but we're defending the voucher system.
Selling to the people ideals of not only liberty,
but also of equality.
And showing that equality is not only a value of the leftists,
but we also can do it.
On a Thursday evening, a group of college students meet up at at a bar
in a residential neighborhood of Sao Paulo.
They’re members of Students for Liberty,
an international organization that brings together libertarians on campus.
It has a presence in 107 countries
including the U.S.
But based on the count of local coordinators who've signed up with the group,
the Brazilian chapter is bigger than Students for Liberty in every other country combined.
Everybody can see that government is not working for us as it should.
I was thinking if there is an option, and I discovered that there is.
And now this is kind of my life.
The reason Students for Liberty’s has seen exponential growth in Brazil
in contrast to other countries
is something of a mystery.
Mariana Lion points to the collapse of socialism in the region
—particularly in Venezuela.
So I think that this is the secret,
is when everybody starts to realize
that we can go from here
to somewhere worse.
It may also be that the Brazilian branch of Students for Liberty
has particularly good organizational tactics.
Coordinator Roni Stefanuto Rodrigues recruits new members
by spending about two hours a day
listening in
as strangers discuss the latest news on Facebook.
When he finds someone making libertarian-sounding arguments,
he reaches out.
It's like a headhunter.
They are on the way to becoming a libertarian,
and I always say, 'hey, I have this book,
do you want to read?'
The libertarian movement in Brazil would never have gotten off the ground
if it weren’t for a handful of think tanks
that started laying the groundwork many years ago.
One major player is Mises Brasil,
which occupies a shared office in this building in Downtown Sao Paulo,
and is unaffiliated with the U.S.-based think tank with the same name.
The chief of operations is 24-year-old Geanluca Lorenzon.
The question that I ask myself was,
'Why do we talk about freedom in our songs and our lyrics
and in our poetry all the time,
but simply this doesn't reflect in politics.'
And the reason is because we didn't have content.
Mises Brasil publishes daily articles on libertarian issues
and gets about a million page views per month.
It's also both commissioned and brought back into print
Portuguese translations of the major works of Austrian economics.
Mises Brazil was founded in 2007
by investment banker Helio Beltrao.
He says the intellectual climate in Brazil has undergone a profound shift.
They would look at me like, 'Helio has read something that made him crazy.'
And I think that changed,
over the last ten years,
or maybe less,
and now they only think I'm radical.
Now that libertarian activists have helped push Dilma Rousseff out of office,
where does that leave the country?
Rousseff was replaced by her vice president,
Michel Temer.
A former congressman who has been in politics for nearly thirty-years,
Temer has been implicated in Brazil’s ongoing corruption scandals.
On a scale from one to ten,
ten being the most corrupt,
I would say he's a six.
Though libertarians have little faith in Temer the person,
they say the impeachment has created political incentives
that are leading him to make some positive changes.
What Temer is betting his government on is
to bring about much needed economic reforms
to get unemployment down.
And he's counting on this to happen
in like
six or eight months
so he can stay in office.
The politicians have interest in maximize their time in office,
and if we turn libertarian ideas
politically profitable,
then either way we're gonna win.
And I think it's good not to have this populist figure
of the person who brought us freedom.
Who will bring freedom to the people
is the ideas themselves.
The impeachment is just the start of the game,
and we should put the pressure over him,
kick all of those corrupt guys, who are there,
and they are still there,
and pressure him to make the good economical
and the good democratic reforms that we need
to change our political system.
I don't see any way of changing policy
besides getting involved in politics.
There’s also a movement afoot to elect actual libertarians
to political office.
Thirty-one-year-old economist Fabio Ostermann
has been an important behind-the-scenes figure
in libertarian circles.
And now he’s running for mayor of Puerto Alegre,
a southern city with a population of about 1.5 million.
I think Brazilian libertarians
are getting ready to take this next step.
Ostermann has led a takeover of Brazil's
Social Liberal Party,
which is planning to put forward
many more libertarian political candidates
in the near future.
We're a party that defends both gay marriage,
decriminalization of marijuana,
and also of course free markets,
free trade,
deregulation of the economy,
privatizations.
And we know that we will be displeasing a lot of people
by defending these ideas.
But we feel like it's right thing to do.
We're not yet a libertarian country.
We're actually very far from that, unfortunately.
But this is a very special moment for libertarians in Brazil
because we're showing up as an option,
as an alternative.