[ad_1]
David Miranda, a child from the slums of Rio de Janeiro who was a leading voice for gay rights in Brazil’s Congress and who played a supporting role in the leak of confidential documents by Edward J. Snowden, died on Friday in Rio de Janeiro. He is 37 years old.
Her husband, American journalist Glenn Greenwald, said Mr Miranda died in the hospital’s intensive care unit after a nine-month battle with a stomach infection.
It was Mr. Miranda’s role in the Snowden leaks that led to his political career.
In 2013, Mr. Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, handed over classified documents about America’s surveillance programs to Mr. Greenwald and several other journalists, angering American officials and sparking an international debate about mass surveillance and privacy. .
Mr. Miranda helped lead efforts to seek asylum in Brazil for Mr. Snowden, who had flown to Hong Kong from Hawaii and was wanted for criminal charges by the United States. The campaign attracted the support of several Brazilian celebrities, and the foreign relations and defense committee of the Brazilian Senate recommended granting asylum.
Ultimately that effort failed, and Mr. Snowden flew to Russia, where he obtained citizenship.
In the same year, 2013, Mr. Miranda was detained and interrogated for nine hours by British authorities at London’s Heathrow Airport while he was traveling from Berlin to Rio. They brought documents related to the Snowden leaks, and the government seized their phones, laptops, cameras, memory sticks and DVDs.
An appeal in the case led to a 2016 court ruling that a key part of the law under which he was detained, the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000, was “incompatible with the European convention on human rights.”
At tweet on Tuesday, Mr. Snowden praised Mr. Miranda for his courage.
“I will never forget that when Britain broke its own laws to detain David as a ‘terrorist’ for daring to help his journalism – and threatened to throw him in prison for the rest of his life – he never wavered,” Mr Snowden wrote. “However, he dared to do it.”
The experience was a political awakening for Mr. Miranda and gave him name recognition to pursue a political career in Brazil. In 2016, he ran for a City Council seat in Rio, pledging to defend LGBT rights and fight inequality. He was one of the first gay members of the council.
Monica Benicio, a Rio councilwoman and gay rights advocate, said in an interview that Mr. Miranda has been a born leader who “became a symbol of the fight for LGBT rights in Brazil and abroad.”
In 2019, when Jean Wyllys, an openly gay member of Congress, resigned and went into exile due to death threats, Mr. Miranda was nominated by the Socialism and Liberty Party to replace him.
He immediately became a foil for Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is known for his derogatory comments about women and gays and black people. Shortly after Mr. Wyllys gave up his seat, Mr. Bolsonaro tweeted“Good day!”
“One LGBT person left, but another came in,” replied Mr. Miranda. “You are in Brasília,” the country’s capital.
Mr. Miranda has been attacked by Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress, putting him off balance as he tries to win a position in an institution where most lawmakers are wealthy whites.
“I think I don’t have it,” he said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times. “Everybody seems to know what they’re doing.”
The battle with Bolsonaro’s government intensified a few months later, when Mr. Greenwald’s news organization, Intercept Brasil, published a report indicating that Mr. Bolsonaro’s main opponent in the race, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had been wrongfully imprisoned for just six months. before the election, raising questions about the legitimacy of Mr. Bolsonaro’s victory.
Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Miranda said they both faced death threats as well as “official retaliatory actions.”
Mr. Miranda continues to be a fierce opponent of Bolsonaro’s government, criticizing budget cuts. education and culture and accused him of mishandling the Covid-19 pandemic.
He is running for election in the seat he held while hospitalized for a gastrointestinal infection in August 2022.
David Michael dos Santos Miranda was born on May 10, 1985, in Rio de Janeiro. He was the son of a prostitute, who died when he was 5, and was raised by his aunt in Jacarezinho, a favela in the city. He dropped out of school at the age of 13.
He was 19 when he met Mr. Greenwald, then a 37-year-old New York lawyer, on a beach in Rio after accidentally knocking Mr. Greenwald’s drink with a ball.
Three days later, they moved in together. Mr. Miranda then continued his studies and obtained a degree in journalism. They adopted two children in 2018 and a third in 2021.
In addition to Mr. Greenwald, his sons João Victor, Jonathas and Marcelo are still alive.
In October, Brazilian voters overthrew Mr Bolsonaro and elected Mr Lula to replace him.
Mr. Pipe praised Mr. Miranda on Tuesday as a young man with an “extraordinary trajectory.”
That trajectory — the path of a gay, Black orphan from the slums of Rio to the halls of Congress — Mr. Greenwald told The Times, “is all too rare in a country with so much racial and economic inequality.”
[ad_2]
Source link