The event that has probably marked the life of Jair Messias Bolsonaro most intensely occurred in 1970 in the small town where he lived with his brothers and his parents, an unlicensed dentist who for a living came to venture as a gold prospector and a housewife who had such a bad pregnancy that she wanted to baptize him as Messias because he considered his birth a miracle. The given name, Jair, is for a soccer player.
Bolsonaro was a 15-year-old teenager — and Brazil a dictatorship — when a large military deployment revolutionized the tedious routine of Eldorado, 180 kilometers south of São Paulo. A contingent of soldiers landed there hunting for Carlos Lamarca, a deserter captain who had joined the insurgents, and as he fled they got into a gun battle with the police in the plaza. The landing of soldiers, the roadblocks and searches impressed that boy born in Glicério (São Paulo). Over time, he reluctantly entered the Army, left the institution through the back door, had a long and mediocre career as a deputy and, to the surprise of many of his compatriots who ignored or despised him for years, became president. of the Republic in 2018.
As the first president, the extreme right-winger – 67 years old and father of five children with three wives – has broken many economic promises, but promoted a payment for the poor that reaches more people and with more money than the old Bolsa Familia program, has made the arms sales and dismantled Brazil’s environmental policy. Favorite of the most conservative voters thanks to his firm opposition to expanding abortion or LGTB + rights and idol of Brazil that abhors “communism” and gender equality policies, he aspires to win another mandate in the October 2 elections against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 76 years old.
Despite the economic crisis and the disastrous management of the pandemic, Bolsonaro has maintained the unwavering support of a third of the electorate during these four years.
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For months, Lula has been leading some polls whose forecasts the president and the Bolsonaristas consider manipulated and liars. As if they were preparing the ground to question the electoral result by emulating their admired Donald Trump in the United States. It would be the culmination of a strategy of sustained attacks on institutions such as the Supreme Court, his main counterweight during this mandate, although he was also accused of committing excesses in that effort. The erosion of Brazilian democracy is evident.
Journalist Carol Pires, 36, author of a fascinating sound profile of Bolsonaro titled Narrated Portrait, discovered during his investigation the significance of that episode that occurred half a century ago in Eldorado. For her, the main feature of Bolsonaro’s personality is that he “already from a young age was a paranoid man, given to conspiracies.” His defenestrated collaborators “say that they went from allies to enemies in the blink of an eye with conspiracy explanations.” The change of ministers has been constant. In the midst of a pandemic, he changed his Minister of Health four times.
“During his 27 years as a federal deputy, Bolsonaro told that story (of the hunt for the guerrilla) in different ways,” explains Pires, a reporter and screenwriter. Version by version, his involvement grew. He gained prominence. First, that the raid caught him at school; then, that he witnessed the shooting; later, that he joined the soldiers in the search… Adds the journalist who, from then on, introduced conspiracy theories. She would say, without proof, that the guerrilla Lamarca was in the area financed by the mayor of Eldorado, father of Rubens Paiva, a deputy disappeared by the dictatorship. Decades later, Bolsonaro introduced former president Dilma Rousseff, who was a guerrilla, into her story to falsely implicate her in the disappearance of that parliamentarian. Pure Bolsonaro.
In 2016, in the tumultuous session in which the deputies had to vote on the impeachment of the leftist Rousseff, the extreme rightist dedicated his yes vote to a repressor who tortured her when she was detained. The gesture scared some Brazilians, but for many it was one more of the provocations and outbursts of congressman Bolsonaro. Like the photos of the dictators who ruled between 1964 and 1985 hanging in his office in Congress. They are still there: a Bolsonarista deputy inherited them.
For President Bolsonaro, this election is a duel between good and evil. He also appeals to the messianic discourse to explain his arrival at the presidency, a position for which he considers that he was appointed by God after surviving the stab wounds of a madman who almost killed him during the previous electoral campaign. He was a watershed. He shot his fame and removed him from the electoral debates.
During these four years at the top of power, he has denied those who predicted that he would moderate in office. The president Bolsonaro is quite similar to the candidate or deputy Bolsonaro. His absolute lack of empathy with the victims of the covid has cost him dearly, with comments such as “my name is Messias, but I don’t perform miracles” or his response of “and what do you say to me, I’m not an undertaker!”. That insensitivity and the delay in buying the vaccine, with the consequent avoidable loss of life, is one of the reasons most cited by voters who bet on him as the embodiment of change and will now opt for candidates of the so-called third way or even by Lula.
Although the pandemic posed a challenge of a caliber that his predecessors did not have to face, the truth is that the president’s administration is characterized more by his desire to destroy than by his determination to build. “Bolsonaro never had a political project, he was never a deputy with proposals for public policies,” emphasizes the journalist Pires. “His best-known statements of his are invariably aggressive against women, homosexuals, black people. Always focused on the annihilation of the different. His logic is that whoever disagrees with him is evil and must be destroyed. What does he want to put in its place? He doesn’t even know himself,” she says. To all this, the admirers of Bolsonaro call it “frankness”.
The captain, as he is known in the family, is the patriarch and leader of a political clan. He leads a compact group made up of his three eldest sons, strategically placed in different centers of power: Flávio, the firstborn, known as 01, is a senator; Rio de Janeiro councilman Carlos, 02, is the brain of the strategy in social networks and deputy Eduardo, 03, the link with the illiberal extreme right of the rest of the world, from Trump to the Spaniards of Vox or the Italian Giorgia Meloni.
For those who knew him – a minority, those who closely follow parliamentary politics – Bolsonaro was that irrelevant deputy, a laughingstock who in three decades had not approved a single law. He is remembered for having said in the 1990s that “the military regime had to have finished the job by killing some 30,000″ or telling a leftist deputy that she was “too ugly to be raped”.
Bolsonaro knew how to see his moment after Trump’s electoral victory in the United States. He cleverly capitalized on the weariness with corruption, violence and discontent with lifelong politicians, even if he was one of them. And his son Carlos, 02, devised a social media campaign that was extremely effective.
The patriarch took 10 points from the Workers’ Party candidate in the second round because he knew how to take advantage of the situation, in addition to forging alliances with evangelicals, police and soldiers. He was voted for by two out of three Brazilian men and seven out of ten Protestants. In the interior of Brazil, he was also enthusiastic about his speech prioritizing extractivist economic development, disregarding damage to the environment or indigenous communities. That gave him the support of the most thriving economic sector, the agricultural industry, while he pointed to NGOs, native peoples, environmentalists and other sectors as those guilty of hindering economic development that would benefit locals.
Four years later, if the forecasts of the polls come true, he will be the first president that Brazil has not reelected so far this century.
Impossible to understand Bolsonaro without keeping in mind that he was trained in the military academy during the lead years of the dictatorship and that he left the institution just when Brazil was returning to the path of democracy, in 1988. He was invited to return to civilian life after tell the magazine See his plans to plant a bomb to protest the low pay of soldiers. The author of the sound profile of Bolsonaro maintains that he “brings that coup army mentality to politics.” Her conclusion, after many months immersed in the nooks and crannies of the president’s life, is that he “was a bad soldier, a bad deputy and a bad president.”
The far-rightist and his followers insist that the polls again underestimate him as in 2018. They maintain that the media and the electoral authorities are in cahoots to throw him out and that Lula win. The proof, they say, is that it is enough to take a look at the crowds he gathers at his events —traditional families, motorcycle and gun enthusiasts— to be certain that the captain’s victory is within reach, first lap. The unknown is what will happen if the electoral authorities certify that the majority of Brazilians prefer their opponent.
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