Free Brazil!

Meet the millennial libertarian activists who helped bring down a president.

- Jim Epstein

“Less Marx, More Mises” read signs held by some of the protesters who filled the streets of Brazil’s cities on March 15, 2015. With a headcount estimated at more than a million, the demonstrators were calling for an end to Dilma Rousseff ’s disastrous populist presidency. An organization of libertarian millennials called Movimiento Brasil Libre, or the Free Brazil Movement, led the charge. With the country crippled by recession and a corruption scandal dominating the headlines, the demonstrators expressed their anger in explicitly libertarian terms.

The Free Brazil Movement is the activist wing of the country’s surging libertarian movement. Founded in 2013, the group played a key role in ending 13 years of left-wing Workers’ Party control.

Two months after the first massive protest, the Free Brazil Movement led a 33-day, 750-mile march from São Paulo to the federal capital of Brasilia while carrying an impeachment bill to deliver to Congress. Following another year of protests and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, lawmakers took action. On May 12, 2016, Rousseff was forced to step down on charges of secretly borrowing money from state-owned banks to paper over the government’s fiscal problems.

The Free Brazil Movement’s primary focus, however, is changing politics through culture. With a leadership composed mostly of filmmakers and musicians, the group operates on the theory that most people pick their political views based on a desire to fit in. Thus, the way to change the country’s politics is to create a new libertarian cultural identity that allows young Brazilians to be cool without fashioning themselves lefty revolutionaries.