“Land of queers”: Why is Jair Bolsonaro attacking homosexuals again in Brazil?

Five days before the vote of nearly 150 million Brazilians municipal elections this Sunday, President Jair Bolsonaro said that “Brazil must cease to be a queer country and face the open chest pandemic ”.

On the same day, Tuesday, speaking of American Democrat Joe Biden, he said that “only with diplomacy is not possible” and “when there is no more saliva, you have to use gunpowder“. The Democrat said Brazil could be punished in the commercial sphere for not protecting the Amazon. Bolsonaro did not like that Donald Trump was not re-elected and had not yet greeted Biden.

Former army captain used his verbal machine gun again as the judicial investigation against his eldest son, the senator, progresses Flávio Bolsonaro, for criminal organization, money laundering and embezzlement of events that occurred while he was a deputy of state in Rio de Janeiro. According to the investigation, Flávio (of the Republican Party) received part of the salary of the employees of his parliamentary cabinet.

The Bolsonaro family denies that the firstborn is corrupted. The fight against corruption has been one of the flags of the election of the president and of the governors and parliamentarians who support – or support – the ‘myth’, this is how his supporters keep calling him in the acts he does inside Brazil.

Bolsonaro made the “queer” comment when speaking of the coronavirus, despite the fact that Covid-19 has already killed 162,000 people in the country. Fifteen days earlier, during a trip to the state of Maranhão in northeastern Brazil, the president mocked those who consume the local soft drink Guarana Jesus, to have the color pink. “I will turn into boiolaBoiola, like queer, is synonymous with homosexual in vulgar language. In a country where the majority Of the 205 million people who claim to have a religion, the coincidence is that the drink was created in 1920 by a communist and atheist pharmacist named Jesus.

Almost 20 years ago in a temple in Buenos Aires, Bolsonaro’s ally and founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Edir Macedo, asked, gesturing, to a crowd and in front of the newspaper “ Jornal do Brasil ” as it was said in Spanish for those who were gay. The response from his supporters aloud was: “Bitch, fagot.

Between these years and today, the Church founded in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro has multiplied in Brazil and far beyond. Other neo-Pentecostal churches have proliferated across the country where evangelical communities, as in other Latin American countries, have become the path of hope for better days for many who feel hopeless.

The municipal

And in Brazil, faith – and also its use – walk with politics, which again emerges clearly during the elections this Sunday in the more than 5,000 municipalities of the national territory. There are several candidate evangelical pastors, former colonels and former police delegates in the litigation for a president in the chambers of councilors (vereadores) and in the prefectures. The countryside and the faith are also visible on the walls of the country.

In the journey of just over an hour between the spas of Sepetiba and Pedra de Guaratiba and Recreio dos Bandeirantes, near Barra da Tijuca, in the western area of ​​Rio, it is possible to count more than ten different churches. Some of them: quadrangular evangelical church; Guaratibana congregational church, family church, church reborn in Christ …

Sometimes some take up tiny spaces, as happened once with Universal. And on the walls of Brazilian cities and inland, phrases that confirm the religious diversity in Brazil are also still in force. “I’m running the Búzios – I’m planning your future – I’ll bring your love back in a week,” said one of them.

But over the past two decades, in the country that is still famous for having the largest number of Catholics in the world, evangelicals have grown in Brazilian politics. Not without causing controversy. Last August, federal police arrested Pastor Everaldo Dias Pereira, known as Pastor Everaldo. It was in the police operation for irregularities that also determined that the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Wilson Witzel (of the PSC party), was expelled from his post.

Rio, like other states, has not had much luck with governors. Former governor Sergio Cabral, imprisoned in maximum security prison, accumulates series of complaints which add to him over 200 years in prison.

Pastor Everaldo was Witzel’s political godfather – a name many could not pronounce when he, then an unknown judge, was elected as Bolsonaro’s ally. Everaldo was the one who baptized then-MP Jair Messias Bolsonaro in the waters of the Jordan River in Israel in 2016, two years before he was elected president. Today, officially, the three do not speak to each other. Bolsonaro left the pastor’s party and has no party.

The evangelical left

At the National Congress, the powerful evangelical bench It is distributed by various parties, including the Workers’ Party (PT) of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and this year a fragmentation of the left evangelical caucus was born.

The evangelical left She is an opponent of the president. But, there, Bolsonaro began to have the support, also decisive, of the so-called “ Centrão ” from this year – they are parliamentarians who have no presidential ambitions, who vote according to their political expediency , they are fundamental for the approval of the laws of the executive, and they are called “lower clergy”. They symbolize the old policy, far removed from the new policy promised by Bolsonaro in his campaign. Now the president is campaigning for his candidates in major cities across the country and is also considering the possibility of re-election in 2022.

In these municipal elections, Bolsonaro declared his support for the re-election of the current mayor (prefeito) of Rio de Janeiro, the evangelical pastor Marcelo Crivella, but also, just in case, he left his electorate free to vote in the former prefect Eduardo Paes.

Paes is leading the polls for the November 15 vote in the city that is the political birthplace of Bolsonaro. And the expectation, according to the Ibope Institute, is that he will be elected in the second round, on November 29.

But Bolsonaro is looking carefully for São Paulo, Brazil’s largest and richest state, led by his main political rival, João Doria (of the PSDB party), a potential candidate for the presidency. There, the prefect of San Pablo, Bruno Covas (PSDB), an opponent of Bolsonaro, leads the polls. Presidential candidate Celso Russomanno (who like Flávio Bolsonaro and Crivella is from the Republican Party, linked to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God) would be unlikely to win, according to polls. In the one produced by XP / Ipespe for the newspaper “Valor Economico”, Covas gained 8 points last week. And Russomano fell 7 in the same period.

It’s not an easy choice for the president’s allies, pollsters say. During these municipal elections, the number of security professionals (police and former soldiers) should continue to grow. According to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, this number tripled between the 2010 and 2018 elections. In addition, there are candidates linked to the militias (paramilitaries), as he said in a recent interview with Bugle former national security secretary Luiz Eduardo Soares. Before, he said, they put their candidates, now the candidates are themselves.

In an environment of politicizing the pandemic, further attacks by Bolsonaro on homosexuals (“ I don’t know why he’s always attacking us, ” friends from Rio and São Paulo say) and a presidential row, the artists have decided to actively participate in the campaign Sunday elections.

Caetano Veloso won the right in court to do a social media show (live) for candidates Guilherme Boulos (PSOL), from São Paulo, and Manuela D`Ávila (PC do B), from Porto Alegre. As Gilberto Gil’s music says, ‘you must walk in faith’. Or as Bolsonaro prefers, ‘God above all’ – phrase he said when Trump lost to Biden.

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