Jair Bolsonaro said that "racism is rare in Brazil"

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said Tuesday in a TV interview that racism "is a rare thing" in your countrydespite the obvious examples of discrimination suffered daily by blacks.

The head of state tried to defend himself against his detractors, who pointed out racist, macho and homophobic explosions.

"This thing about racism in Brazil is something weird. They are always trying to place Black against white, homobadual versus heterobadual"he said in an interview broadcast Tuesday night on the channel TV Rede.

"It seems like I'm like this: homophobic, racist, fascist, xenophobic … but I won the elections. With a CV like that, I should not have been elected or advised. The population understood that she was shooting at an innocent"said the right-wing leader, deputy nearly 30 years after being captain of the land forces.

To try to prove that it's not racist, Bolsonaro told an episode of 1978 when, as a soldier, he saved a black colleague who fell into a lake during a workout.

"I went there and I saved it. Coincidentally, it was black"he said.

"If I were a racist person, when he would have fallen to the water, what would I have done?" Crossed arms"said the president, who also claims to have received an army medal for risking his life to save someone else.

The social inequality in Brazil is even more accentuated among the black population, according to official statistics, although there are certain policies such as quota law, which allowed many blacks to enter the university, space traditionally reserved for elites.

On average, Whites have higher wages and suffer less unemployment, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Even if 54% of Brazilians define themselves as Blacks or Métis, people with this skin color occupy barely 5% of managerial positions in companies and less than 25% of seats in the Chamber of Deputies.