David Miranda, a child from the slums of Rio de Janeiro who became a leading voice for gay rights in Brazil’s Congress and who played a supporting role in the leaking of classified documents by Edward J. Snowden, died in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday. He was 37.
His husband, American journalist Glenn Greenwald, said Mr Miranda died in a hospital’s intensive care unit after a nine-month battle with an abdominal infection.
It was Mr. Miranda’s part in the Snowden leak that led to his political career.
In 2013, Mr. Snowden, a former contractor at the National Security Agency, handed over a trove of top-secret documents about US surveillance programs to Mr. Greenwald and several other journalists, enraging US officials and sparking an international debate about mass surveillance and privacy . .
Mr Miranda helped lead an effort to obtain asylum in Brazil for Mr Snowden, who had flown from Hawaii to Hong Kong and was wanted by the United States for criminal charges. The campaign received the support of a number of Brazilian celebrities, and the Foreign Relations and Defense Committee of the Brazilian Senate recommended that asylum be granted.
Ultimately, the attempt failed and Mr. Snowden flew to Russia, where he was later granted citizenship.
That same year, 2013, Mr. Miranda was detained for nine hours and questioned by British authorities at London’s Heathrow Airport while en route from Berlin to Rio. He was carrying documents related to the Snowden leaks and the government confiscated his phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks and DVDs.
An appeal in the case resulted a 2016 court ruling that an important part of the law under which he had been detained, the UK Terrorism Act 2000, was “incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights”.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Mr. Snowden mr. Miranda for his bravery.
“I will never forget when the UK broke its own laws to detain David as a ‘terrorist’ for having the audacity to support an act of journalism – and threatened to put him in a dungeon for the rest of his life. throw – he never wavered.” Mr. Snowden wrote. “Instead, he challenged them to do it.”
That experience was a political awakening for Mr. Miranda and gave him the name recognition to seek a political career in Brazil. In 2016, he ran for a seat on Rio’s city council, pledging to defend LGBT rights and fight inequality. He became one of the council’s first openly gay members.
Monica Benicio, a Rio councilor and gay rights advocate, said in an interview that Mr. Miranda was a born leader who “became a symbol of the fight for LGBT rights in Brazil and beyond”.
In 2019, when Jean Wyllys, an openly gay congressman, resigned and went into self-imposed exile because of death threats, Mr. Miranda appointed by the Socialism and Liberty Party to take his place.
He immediately became a foil for Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who was known for his inflammatory comments about women and gay and black people. Shortly after Mr. Wyllys gave up his seat, Mr. Bolsonaro tweeted“Fantastic day!”
“One LGBT person leaves, but another comes in,” replied Mr. Miranda. See you in Brasília, the country’s capital.
Mr. Miranda was attacked by Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress, throwing him off balance just as he was trying to make his way in an institution where most of the legislators were wealthy white men.
“I felt like I didn’t fit in,” he said an interview from 2019 with The New York Times. “Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing.”
His battle with the Bolsonaro government intensified a few months later, when Mr Greenwald’s news organization, Intercept Brazilpublished reports suggesting that Mr Bolsonaro’s main opponent in the race, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had been wrongly imprisoned just six months before the election, raising questions about the legitimacy of Mr Bolsonaro’s victory .
Mr Greenwald and Mr Miranda said they had both received death threats as well as “official acts of retaliation”.
Mr Miranda remained a fierce opponent of the Bolsonaro government, criticizing its austerity measures education And culture and blaming it for mishandling the Covid-19 pandemic.
He was running to be elected to the seat he held when he was hospitalized in August 2022 with a gastrointestinal infection.
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 an aunt in Jacarezinho, a favela in the city. He dropped out of school when he was 13.
He was 19 when he met Mr. Greenwald, then a 37-year-old lawyer from New York, on a beach in Rio after accidentally knocking over Mr. Greenwald’s drink with a ball.
Three days later, they moved in together. Mr. Miranda soon resumed his studies and earned a degree in journalism. They adopted two children in 2018 and a third in 2021.
In addition to Mr. Greenwald, their sons João Victor, Jonathas and Marcelo outlive him.
In October, Brazilian voters ousted Mr Bolsonaro and elected Mr Lula to replace him.
Mr Lula praised Mr. Miranda on Tuesday as a young man with an “extraordinary trajectory.”
That trajectory – the path of a gay black orphan from a Rio slum to the halls of Congress – Mr Greenwald told The Times, was “all too rare in a country plagued by massive racial and economic inequality. ”