David Miranda, Brazilian gay rights activist and legislator, dies at 37
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David Miranda, a Brazilian gay rights activist and former lawmaker who assisted his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in disseminating information from classified U.S. documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, died May 9 at a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. He was 37. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Greenwald announced the death, which occurred a day before Mr. Miranda’s 38th birthday. After being hospitalized with a severe gastrointestinal infection in August, Mr. Miranda spent nine months in intensive care, where he battled additional infections but occasionally rallied, according to Greenwald. No immediate cause of death was reported.
The son of a prostitute, Mr. Miranda was raised by a neighbor in a desperately poor Rio neighborhood. He rose to prominence as a groundbreaking gay politician and fierce opponent of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022. Mr. Miranda ranked among Time magazine’s 100 “next generation leaders” in 2019 because of his outspokenness on behalf of Brazil’s poorest and most-marginalized communities.
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Mr. Miranda, who met Greenwald in 2005 on Rio’s Ipanema Beach, entered politics in 2016, when he became, by all accounts, the first openly gay man elected to Rio’s city council. Two years later, he ran for the federal legislature with the Socialism and Liberty Party, known by its Portuguese initials PSOL.
Mr. Miranda lost the 2018 election but gained a seat the following year after lawmaker Jean Wyllys, another openly gay member of PSOL, left the country following death threats. Mr. Miranda was elected to fill his seat.
“Obviously, I’m afraid for my life or what can happen to my family,” Mr. Miranda said in a radio interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2019, “but in moments like this you have to be brave. People need a voice.”
Before entering politics, Mr. Miranda gained international attention while carrying computer files related to documents leaked by Snowden, a computer intelligence consultant whose employer worked with the National Security Agency.
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In 2013, Snowden had released a trove of classified material to Greenwald and Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker living in Germany. Among the disclosures were details on surveillance by the NSA and other agencies.
Several months later, Mr. Miranda was enlisted by Greenwald to ferry a thumb drive from Poitras back to Brazil. During a stopover at London’s Heathrow Airport, Mr. Miranda was detained under Britain’s anti-terrorism law and held for nine hours.
“I was sure I was going away to Guantánamo forever,” he later said. But he made it home to Rio and sued the British government, claiming it violated his rights as a journalist. A British tribunal ruled in 2014 that Mr. Miranda’s detention was lawful although it was “an indirect interference with press freedom.” (Snowden did not return to the United States, fearing arrest, and was granted Russian citizenship in 2022.)
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“Journalism is not a crime,” Greenwald said after his husband’s detention, “and it’s not terrorism.”
Mr. Miranda and Greenwald met in 2005 when the latter, then a lawyer in Manhattan, traveled to Brazil for a two-month vacation. On the beach, Mr. Miranda was playing volleyball and accidentally knocked over Greenwald’s drink. He apologized profusely, in Portuguese.
Mr. Miranda and Greenwald went out to dinner that night and began living together less than a week later. Their mutual attraction, Greenwald later told the New York Times, was like “two asteroids colliding,” and they soon married.
“I didn’t speak much English,” Mr. Miranda told Out magazine in 2011, “and he only knew a few words of Portuguese, but we communicated everything important. When you meet the right person, you know it.”
To stay in Brazil with Mr. Miranda, Greenwald had to stop practicing law. He threw himself into blogging, first with Salon and then for the Guardian. He developed a following writing about the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their effect on civil liberties back home. Greenwald’s pieces attracted the attention of Snowden years before the leaks.
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In 2014, The Washington Post and the Guardian were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series of stories that exposed the NSA’s global surveillance programs. The lead journalists on the project — The Post’s Barton Gellman and Greenwald for the Guardian — based their articles on Snowden’s disclosures.
“Of everyone who had a hand in the 2013 revelations of global mass surveillance, my dear friend David Miranda was perhaps the most righteous — and pure,” Snowden tweeted after hearing of Mr. Miranda’s death. Snowden wrote that Mr. Miranda “never faltered” during his questioning by British authorities.
Life on the streets
David Michael dos Santos Miranda was born on May 10, 1985, to a prostitute in Jacarezinho, one of Rio’s most impoverished districts. He never knew his father, and his mother died when he was 5.
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Mr. Miranda was raised by a neighbor, but he went off on his own at 13. To get by, he shined shoes and cleaned buildings and sometimes scrounged from trash bins for food. Later, with Greenwald’s encouragement, Mr. Miranda graduated in 2014 with a marketing degree from a school in Rio.
Mr. Miranda’s involvement in the Snowden leaks inspired him to enter politics, first by mounting an unsuccessful appeal to Brazilian authorities to grant Snowden asylum. A year after his election in Rio, he was joined on the city council by Marielle Franco, a Black woman with a female partner and a child.
She became a mentor and “a mother figure,” Mr. Miranda said. Their joint initiatives included a law allowing transgender people to use their preferred names on government documents.
“Fighting for the LGBT community,” he said, “is the core of my bones and blood.”
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In 2018, while being driven home after giving a speech, Franco was fatally shot. Mr. Miranda told Out magazine that he believed it was a targeted killing. (Two former policemen were later arrested in the crime and are awaiting trial.)
“They could have pretended it was a mugging,” Mr. Miranda said, “but they didn’t bother. They wanted to send a message.” Mr. Miranda said being a pallbearer at Franco’s funeral “might have been the hardest moment of my life.”
After Franco’s death, Mr. Miranda, Greenwald and their two adopted children traveled in cars with bulletproof glass. Mr. Miranda canceled some engagements for security reasons.
In the federal legislature, Mr. Miranda led efforts for hate crime laws to protect LGBTQ+ communities. He also worked on investigative projects with Greenwald, who left the Guardian and helped found a news site, the Intercept, in 2014. (Greenwald resigned from the Intercept in 2020.)
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Mr. Miranda helped Greenwald with a 2019 story that quoted from hacked cellphone conversations between prosecutors and a judge overseeing a corruption case against former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose jailing cleared the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory. (Da Silva, widely known as Lula, came back to defeat Bolsonaro in 2022 and regain the presidency.)
The bombshell story made Mr. Miranda and Greenwald targets of Bolsonaro, who had already declared himself “a proud homophobe,” and his supporters. In 2020, Greenwald was charged with “cybercrimes” by the Bolsonaro government. The case was later dismissed by a judge who said Greenwald had “instigated” hacking but was protected by press freedoms.
In addition to Greenwald, survivors include their sons, João and Jonathan.
In July 2019, the Times reported that Mr. Miranda was living alone and racked by “loneliness and alienation” in the capital, Brasília. He served out his term, however, and planned to run for reelection in 2022. His candidacy was withdrawn in October during his hospitalization.
“Fighting for justice is necessary, an obligation,” wrote Mr. Miranda in 2018, “even if it is always risky.”
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Source: The Washington Post
