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Since its appearance in 2020, Brazil and Mexico have been among the most affected countries in the world by covid-19. Their respective presidents, Jair Bolsonaro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), have played a leading role in specific policies during the pandemic. Their choices were both singular and counter- intuitive. On the health front, AMLO initially underplayed the seriousness of the situation, and the Brazilian president, Bolsonaro, defended a frankly negationist attitude, with a dramatic balance sheet, without his popularity being seriously affected. On the economic front, they have chosen policies that contradict not only each other but also their own supposed ideological stances. Bolsonaro, who is ranked on the far right, has implemented an emergency transfer program on a scale comparable to those of developed countries and the most massive the country has ever seen. Conversely, AMLO, considered a progressist, provided just a minimum policy package, maintaining his previous electoral program. By adopting a comparative approach and mobilizing a unique and diversified set of data, the objective of this paper is to explore these apparent contradictions. After having established the precise diagnosis of the policies implemented to deal with the crisis and the economic and health situation in the two countries during the 2020-2022 period, we propose an original interpretation grid of the central role played by the two presidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at analyzing two types of eristic argumentative interactions held in CNN Brazil YouTube channel: an interaction between debaters and mediators in the 'Debate 360' show and an interaction between the comments of the social network users about the same debate. The study draws on Plantin's (2008) interactional perspective on argumentation, on Amossys's (2018) view on argumentative polemics, on Walton's (1998) conception of eristic dialogue and on Culpeper's (2011) and Blitvich's (2010) discussion on interactive impoliteness. The corpus is composed, in terms of the debate, of twelve argumentative interventions and, in terms of comments, of a chain of nine utterances, all of them characterized by the instantiation of eristic features. The analysis focuses on (1) the interaction between two specialists, mediated by two journalists, about a controverse theme - the usage of hydroxichloroquine on Covid-19 patients, and (2) the interaction between the social network users in reaction to the debaters' argumentation. The study shows which characteristics of polemics are instantiated in both interactions, specifies the features of the eristic dialogue that characterize the interactions and indicates how impoliteness acts are associated with argumentation. The results enable to comprehend how eristic argumentative interactions work in the digital environment and how the formation of ideological bubbles affords opportunities for conflicts of opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]