In a few days' time, the most important election of 2022 is scheduled to happen.

No, I'm not talking about the U.S. midterms.

I'm talking about the second round of voting in another one of the hemisphere's most populous

and important democracies.

My guest is Vincent Bevins, who joined me from Brazil.

Vincent is a journalist who knows that country very well from

2011 to 2016. He was a foreign correspondent based there for the Los Angeles Times. Before that,

he worked in London for the Financial Times. And in 2017, he moved to Jakarta and began covering

Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. Most recently, and I suspect this is where at least some of you will have heard of him from,

he's the author of The Jakarta Method, Washington's Anti-Communist Crusade

and the Mass Murder Program that shaped our world.

We discussed, among other things, the kind of curious Americanization of Brazilian politics.

We discussed the political coalition that Bolsonaro is assembled and the mixture of fanatical

hard-right ideology and capitalist self-interest that it consists of.

We talked about two recent and incredibly strange episodes that have been electorally detrimental to

Bolson Arrow in the final weeks of the election. We discussed what happened in the first round

and what appears to be happening in the second.

Brazil is going to be going to be voting in the second round in a runoff of its presidential

election on October 30th. Before we get to the runoff, Vincent, can you walk us through what

transpired in the first round a bit? I mean, the general impression seems to be that Lula de Silva

somewhat underperformed what polls suggested was possible.

So can you walk us through the results of the first round and maybe give us your impression

...