Wyllys, now a member of Lula's party, does not shy away from sharing his take on the significance of Sunday's vote. Highly polarized Brazilians are heading to the polls this Sunday for the second round of the presidential election, a closely contested vote between incumbent far-right Jair Bolsonaro and former leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the left-wing Workers' Party (PT). Democracy in Brazil is intermittent.ĭescribing Barcelona as one of his "favorite European capitals" and apologizing for not speaking Catalan as he answered questions in Portuguese-tinged Spanish, Wyllys praised the city's "defense of democracy and republican values." Bolsonaro, "a disgrace for the world" ![]() Your browser does not support the video element "Barcelona has taken in, over the decades, many political exiles"īarcelona, by contrast, "has always been a place of refuge," he said, citing the many Latin American intellectuals and political exiles who found safety in the Catalan capital during the dictatorships of the 1960s and beyond.īrazil has a long history of military coups and dictatorships. ![]() But he is clear when he speaks of his "exile" and of Brazil as too dangerous a place for him. Wyllys does not have refugee status as he says it was easier and faster for him to obtain Spanish residency as a graduate student than as an asylum seeker. He first went to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, before heading to Barcelona to pursue his Ph.D. "Those people would surely kill me too," he said. When far-right Jair Bolsonaro won the general election later that year, Wyllys resigned from his post as a Partido Socialismo y Libertad MP. Wyllys believes it was his anti-racist, LGBTI, and environmental activism in favor of indigenous people's rights that put him in the eye of the storm, making him the perfect "scapegoat of the far right" embodied by the Evangelical church, armed forces, and agribusiness.īut there was one decisive event that made him decide to leave Brazil: the assassination of human rights activist and Rio de Janeiro councilor Marielle Franco in 2018. "The events that drove me to exile were serious death threats against me and my family," Wyllys told Catalan News in a recent interview, adding that there was also "an intense smear campaign" against him – it is perhaps not much of a leap to assume that this is what inspired the subject of his doctoral research. He is also a journalist and an artist.Īnd while he declares himself a big fan of the Catalan capital, the journey that led him there was not an easy one. One of Brazil's first openly gay MPs and the winner of the country's fifth season of Big Brother, he now resides in Barcelona, where he does doctoral research on fake news. Jean Wyllys (Alagoinhas, 1974) is a kind-looking, soft-spoken middle-aged man.
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