Brazilian LGBTI activist Jean Wyllys: 'Barcelona has always been a place of refuge'

Jean Wyllys (Alagoinhas, 1974) is a kind-looking, soft-spoken middle-aged man. 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. He is also a journalist and an artist. 

And while he declares himself a big fan of the Catalan capital, the journey that led him there was not an easy one.  

"I needed to stay alive"

"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.

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.  

But 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.

When far-right Jair Bolsonaro won the general election later that year, Wyllys resigned from his post as a Partido Socialismo y Libertad MP.

"Those people would surely kill me too," he said. "I needed to stay alive."

He first went to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, before heading to Barcelona to pursue his Ph.D.

Barcelona, a "place of refuge"

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. But he is clear when he speaks of his "exile" and of Brazil as too dangerous a place for him.

Barcelona, 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.

Brazil has a long history of military coups and dictatorships. Democracy in Brazil is intermittent.

Describing 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"

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).

Wyllys, now a member of Lula's party, does not shy away from sharing his take on the significance of Sunday's vote.

"If Bolsonaro wins the elections, it will be a disgrace for the world and Brazil," he said. "All the work Europe, the United States, and Canada have tried to do for climate change will be in vain."