Kim Patroca Kataguiri is a Brazilian politician, activist, lecturer, and one of the founders and leaders of the Free Brazil Movement, a liberal group that promotes individual freedom of choice, free-market economic policies, and reduction of government bureaucracy. In October 2018 he was elected a congressman for the 20192022 term, being the fourth most voted.
Political career
According to Kataguiri, his involvement in politics began in August 2013 when he was 17-years-old. In a history class at his college in São Paulo state, his teacher asserted that Brazil's "popular cash transfer program applauded by many experts around the globe was responsible for the expansion of Brazil's middle class and for lifting millions of citizens from poverty during the last decade." Kataguiri was not convinced: "That just seemed wrong. The family allowance might be necessary, but it has flaws and the main reasons for our high economic growth was the commodities boom and our relationship with China." He was also struck by how his peers readily accepted Brazil's model of state capitalism as practiced by the ruling Workers' Party. Rather than respond to his teacher in class, Kataguiri posted a video to YouTube, which quickly went viral. Kataguiri said: "This was when I realized I could use the internet to defend free market values." He posted to YouTube more satirical videos, which gained millions of views as Brazil fell into recession and political crisis. Kataguiri then founded the Free Brazil Movement, "a libertarian group that espouses free-market values". The first goal of the movement was to impeach Dilma Rousseff, the then-president of Brazil who belongs to the left-wing Workers' Party, for her failure to stop corruption in the state-owned oil and gas company Petrobras. Kataguiri characterizes the Workers' Party as "the nemesis of freedom and democracy." Kataguiri says the broader goals of the movement are "to liberalize the state. We want less tax, less bureaucracy and the privatization of all public companies." On 15 March 2015, more than a million Brazilians attended anti-Rousseff protests around the country. In São Paulo, Kataguiri addressed 200,000 protesters in the largest demonstration in the city in a generation. In October 2015, Time magazine named Kataguiri as one of the most influential teens of 2015. In the 2018 general election, Kataguiri was elected to the federal Chamber of Deputies for the state of São Paulo. Receiving 465,310 votes, he came fourth in his state, being the fourth most voted amongst all candidates.
