What If the Body-Territory Were a Unit of the State? - Brazil 2026 Presidential Election

The final article in the series does not seek the “right” plan. It proposes a practical way to ask what each political project is able to see — and what remains outside its field of attention.

Imagine that you have eight important questions to ask whoever intends to govern Brazil.

Security.

Employment.

Health.

Housing.

Education.

Food prices.

Violence.

Retirement.

Now try a small experiment.

Imagine that tomorrow there is a National Income, deposited regularly through Citizen Drex, sufficient to guarantee a basic economic floor without that money arriving as a loan or as new personal debt.

Look again at your eight questions.

Which one would disappear?

Perhaps none.

But perhaps one of them would lose intensity.

Maybe the question:

“Will I be able to eat next month?”

would become:

“What kind of work do I want to become better at?”

Maybe:

“I cannot leave this relationship because I have no income”

would become:

“Do I want to remain here?”

Maybe:

“My child needs to start working immediately”

would become:

“Can my child finish school?”

This simple exercise reveals something important.

Public policy does not only change income.

It can change which questions continuously occupy our internal space.

This is where 5D Body-Territory begins.

A citizen does not end at the edge of their skin

The State usually divides us into categories.

Tax ID.

Income.

Address.

Age.

Education.

Diagnosis.

Employment.

These data are important.

But a person does not live in separate compartments.

Their body simultaneously encounters:

food;

temperature;

housing;

violence;

relationships;

debt;

work;

information;

water;

pollution;

transportation;

memory;

and expectations about the future.

Márcia Tait, Alcides Peron, and Marcela Suárez recover the Latin American concept of body-territory precisely to question rigid separations between what happens to bodies and what happens to territories. In their analysis of digital colonialism, data, technology, and materiality simultaneously cross both. (tandfonline.com)

BrainLatam proposes expanding this idea:

What if Body-Territory were treated as a minimum unit of observation by the State?

Not to surveil every citizen.

But to stop imagining that health, economy, environment, information, and security are independent problems.

Inequality also reaches the body biologically

This integration is not only philosophical.

A study led by Latin American researchers such as Agustina Legaz, Sandra Báez, Sebastián Moguilner, and Agustín Ibáñez analyzed 2,135 people across the Americas and found an association between greater structural inequality and lower brain volumes and connectivity, with stronger associations in the Latin American populations studied. The authors describe this phenomenon as the biological embodiment of macrosocial conditions. (nature.com)

Ibáñez and collaborators also propose a neuroecological approach connecting the exposome, environment, human health, and One Health: what happens to the brain cannot be fully understood without considering the environmental and social conditions that continuously reach it. (acikerisim.medipol.edu.tr)

A Decolonial Neuroscience would add:

there is no single “Brazilian brain.”

There is a brain living in a particular territory, after a particular history, within specific economic, linguistic, environmental, and cultural relationships.

Eight questions may reveal more than eight promises

Here is a simple 5D Consciousness practice for elections.

Write down your eight questions.

Then pass each one through five spaces:

Body: what does this issue produce in the body and in health?

Relationships: who depends on whom in order to address the problem?

Territory: where does this experience happen, and what local conditions change it?

Information: who is teaching me how to interpret this problem?

Future: if this policy works for twenty years, what possibilities will it create or destroy?

Take “public security.”

At first, the question may be:

“Who will arrest more criminals?”

After passing through the five spaces, it may become:

“What territorial conditions are producing recruitment, fear, and violence before the first crime happens, and what still needs to be punished when prevention fails?”

Neither question is forbidden.

The second simply sees more dimensions.

What if we applied this to the candidates?

The official plans currently made available by the TSE show very different projects for Brazil, and the 2026 presidential race has 13 registered candidacies. (tse.jus.br)

The goal here is not to say which one is “correct.”

It is to ask how each project could see more.

Lula

Lula’s program combines social policies, public investment, inequality reduction, and ecological transition. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

Body-Territory would expand this approach by asking not only how many people received a benefit, but:

Did food insecurity fall?

Did economic anxiety decrease?

Did time available for care and education increase?

Did the territory become more environmentally resilient?

Did the person gain greater real capacity to choose?

Flávio Bolsonaro

Flávio Bolsonaro emphasizes security, entrepreneurship, spending reduction, and greater private-sector participation. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

Body-Territory could connect autonomy and security to what happens before violence:

income;

school dropout;

economic dependence;

criminal recruitment;

territories controlled by criminal organizations;

and families’ capacity to refuse destructive economic relationships.

Romeu Zema

Romeu Zema places efficiency, markets, privatization, and a smaller State at the center of his proposal. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

Body-Territory would ask:

What are we calling efficiency?

If a policy saves R$1 today but increases illness, water loss, territorial displacement, or environmental costs tomorrow, is it still efficient?

Ronaldo Caiado

Ronaldo Caiado’s program brings together security, agribusiness, management, and fiscal responsibility. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

Here, Body-Territory could connect rural productivity to water, climate, and health; and public security to the social and territorial conditions that precede crime.

Augusto Cury

Augusto Cury gives major importance to emotional health and socio-emotional education. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

The addition would be important:

Do not transform materially produced suffering into an exclusively emotional problem.

A child can learn self-regulation.

But the child also needs food, safe sleep, and a territory where imagining a future is possible.

Renan Santos

Renan Santos proposes deep institutional reforms, security measures, and State restructuring. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

Body-Territory would add socio-environmental limits:

not only asking whether a reform increases productivity, but which social and ecological capacities it preserves or reduces over decades.

Clariana Barão

Clariana Barão emphasizes social protection, public administration, and evidence-based management. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

The expansion would be to make Body-Territory part of that evidence:

not only spending and administrative outcomes, but lived conditions of health, autonomy, environment, and possibility.

Edmilson Costa, Hertz Dias, Rui Costa Pimenta, and Samara Martins

These candidacies present different structural critiques of capitalism, property, and the financial system. (www1.folha.uol.com.br)

Body-Territory adds a question that must also be asked of deeply redistributive projects:

Who decides after the transformation?

Redistributing wealth should not mean replacing private concentration with a State structure unable to recognize territorial autonomy, cultural diversity, and different ways of life.

For Hertz, redistribution could incorporate ecological metrics.

For Rui, economic transformation could be connected to autonomy and territorial responsibility.

For Samara, workers’ and women’s rights could also include the material conditions that make those rights exercisable within a territory.

Wilson Grassi

Wilson Grassi’s proposal offers a particularly interesting bridge through One Health, connecting human, animal, and environmental health. His plan is also among the official documents made available by the TSE. (tse.jus.br)

Body-Territory would expand that circuit:

human + animal + environment + relationships + economy + information + future.

Pablo Marçal

For Pablo Marçal, we continue not to assign a specific Body-Territory expansion until there is, within the official documents consulted, an equivalent programmatic document that allows comparison under the same criteria. (tse.jus.br)

Return to your eight questions

Now try another test.

Choose the question that causes you the most anxiety.

For example:

“Will I be able to find a job?”

Ask:

If I had a minimum economic floor, would this question disappear?

Perhaps not.

So which part of it would change?

Perhaps you discover that you do not simply want “any job.”

You want:

training;

time;

mobility;

security;

the possibility to create;

or the capacity to say no to abusive work.

This is what we mean by looking for causalities within your own anxiety.

It does not mean claiming that economic suffering is imaginary.

It means precisely the opposite.

It means discovering which external condition is continuously occupying internal space.

National Income is not a promise of happiness

We need to make this clear.

Receiving income does not automatically produce well-being or creativity.

But Brazilian data show that economic conditions can be deeply related to health.

In 2026, Camila Barreto Bonfim, Flávia Alves, Maurício Barreto, and Daiane Machado analyzed more than 38 million people from the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort. Participation in Bolsa Família was associated with a 23% lower risk of psychiatric hospitalization, with an even stronger association among socioeconomically vulnerable populations. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

This does not prove that money “cures” suffering.

It shows that material conditions participate in it.

The experience of Maricá offers another piece.

In an analysis of more than 3.4 million transactions using the Mumbuca local currency, Eduardo Diniz and colleagues found strong local recirculation of money, while also identifying concentration of payments among a small number of establishments. (journals.sagepub.com)

In other words:

distributing income matters.

Observing where it goes afterward also matters.

That is exactly why Citizen Drex, National Income, Biome Income, and public intelligence should not be treated as separate policies.

Body-Territory does not choose for you

This may be the most important part of the final blog.

Body-Territory is not an algorithm saying:

“You should vote for this candidate.”

It is almost the opposite.

It is a tool for increasing the number of dimensions you are able to perceive before choosing.

So before voting, we can do something simple:

Write down your eight questions.

Imagine National Income exists.

See which questions disappear.

Notice which ones merely change form.

Then ask which questions would remain even with income, health, and security.

Those may reveal something even deeper about what you expect from a society.

And finally return to the candidates.

Do not ask only:

“Who promises to solve my eight questions?”

Ask:

Which project is able to see the causes that make these questions occupy so much of my life?

Perhaps this is one of the functions of a mature democracy.

Not to choose whoever promises to remove all uncertainty.

But to increase our ability to see where those uncertainties are coming from.

Because in 5D Body-Territory, freedom is not only having options.

It is having sufficient conditions to perceive that options exist.

And perhaps the great test of the Brazil 2026 Presidential Election is finally this:

If the State began with the Body-Territory, how many of the problems we try to repair afterward could be perceived before they happen?

References

TAIT, Márcia M.; PERON, Alcides Eduardo dos Reis; SUÁREZ, Marcela. Terrestrial politics and body-territory: two concepts to make sense of digital colonialism in Latin America. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2022. DOI 10.1080/25729861.2022.2090485. (tandfonline.com)

LEGAZ, Agustina; ALTSCHULER, Florencia; GONZALEZ-GOMEZ, Raul; BÁEZ, Sandra; MOGUILNER, Sebastián; IBÁÑEZ, Agustín et al. Structural inequality linked to brain volume and network dynamics in aging and dementia across the Americas. Nature Aging, 2025. DOI 10.1038/s43587-024-00781-2. (nature.com)

IBÁÑEZ, Agustín et al. Neuroecological links of the exposome and One Health. Neuron, 2024. DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.04.016. (acikerisim.medipol.edu.tr)

BONFIM, Camila Barreto; ALVES, Flávia; BARRETO, Maurício L.; PATEL, Vikram; MACHADO, Daiane B. Cash Transfers and Psychiatric Hospitalization for At-Risk Populations in Brazil. JAMA Network Open, 2026;9(4):e266571. DOI 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.6571. (jamanetwork.com)

TOLEDO, Lidiane; FIALHO, Erika; ALVES, Flávia; BARRETO, Maurício; MACHADO, Daiane B. et al. Associations between the Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer programme and substance use disorder hospitalisations. The Lancet Global Health, 2025. DOI 10.1016/S2214-109X(24)00508-4. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

DINIZ, Eduardo H.; PORTO DE ALBUQUERQUE, João; CAMPOS, Jarvis; FIGUEIREDO, Bruno Andrade de; YAMAGUCHI, João Akio Ribeiro; FAZITO, Mozart. Tracing the flow of money to reveal spatial effects and inequalities in cash transfer programmes. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2026. DOI 10.1177/0308518X251413928. (journals.sagepub.com)

SUPERIOR ELECTORAL COURT — TSE. Government Proposals — 2026 Elections. Official repository used to compare the programs of the presidential candidacies. (tse.jus.br)