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Surprised so few people talk about Brasil here. Their election (2nd round) is today. It looks like Lula is the slight favourite but even his supporters concede that Bolsonaro has a good shot. For those not in the know, Lula is the social democrat with Bolsonaro best described as "Trump of the Tropics".
Yet a complicating factor is that the new congress has already been elected and it was much more right-wing than expected. So Lula's room for maneuver will be significantly constrained if he happens to win.
There does seem to be a structural undercurrent at play here. A very fast-growing demographic in Brasil are the evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly favour Bolsonaro. Traditionally, Catholicism has been the bedrock of the nation's social fabric, inherited from the Iberians. So a very fervent form of Protestantism is unquestionably a break from the past where Catholicism was viewed as intertwined with national identity. Whoever wins this presidential election will have to grapple with this changed reality in Brasil.
Incidentally, this also suggests the lazy assumption that "as America gets more diverse it will invariably get more liberal" could potentially not come to pass.
I'm surprised this isn't a more widespread phenomenon in Catholic countries (or maybe it is and I'm just uninformed). Pope Francis is a walking counterexample to the infallibility of the Church. The natural response is either to give up the faith entirely, or go full sola scriptura.
I know that evangelical missionaries have been working hard in South America since the the turn of the century: apparently the number of protestant missionaries in South America increased 690% between 1910 and 1969, much more than in other regions. So a lot of this is not a recent phenomenon, but the result of efforts made many decades ago by a lot of mission organizations. As far as I can tell, Africa and Asia were the primary focus of protestant missionaries during the 19th century, primarily because the people there were "unreached" (that is, not any variety of Christian already) while the South Americans were at least Catholic. Why convert Catholics when there are so many pagans who've never even heard of Christ? In the early 20th century, the collapse of China meant it was a much more dangerous mission field, which only got worse during WWII. So apparently a lot of missionaries pivoted from Asia to South America. After WWII the PRC made it extremely difficult to be a foreign missionary in China and Southeast Asia was collapsing into a variety of armed conflicts, so South America continued to receive more focus than it had previously. Notably, while different brands of protestant sometimes butted heads in Africa and Asia, they generally decided that none of them were as bad as the Catholics and tended to work together in South America instead of in competition.
The real story is the rise of Pentecostalism. Pentecostals are a variety of evangelical that is very much "charismatic": that means speaking in tongues, faith healing, prophecy, miracles, etc. It's taken off like wildfire in South America, particularly among the poor. Pentecostalism can be particularly appealing to the poor because generally in order to become a leader of a Pentecostal church you don't need to go to seminary, you just need to be chosen by the Holy Spirit. What that comes down to is having enough people believe that you were chosen to lead the group. It means they have a lot more trouble with problematic theology, but it also means you can start a new churches very quickly.
The Pentecostals are also the fruit of all those decades of protestant mission efforts: one the the first things protestant mission organizations did was set up schools to teach people to read and distribute millions of Bibles. Once enough poor people can read the Bible themselves, they're going to end up attracted to denominations like the Pentecostals that are very egalitarian with little hierarchy. The kind of church where anybody can stand up in the middle of worship and start preaching.
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