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Sure Sunday night, the ultra-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the second round of the Brazilian presidential election. With 55 percent of the vote, Bolsonaro, a former army paratrooper who has been at the congress for nearly thirty years, easily defeated his rival, Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of São Paulo, at ten percentage points . In his acceptance speech that he uttered, as is customary, from his home via Facebook Live, Bolsonaro promised to "pacify and unify the country" and, later, in a gesture addressed to his followers of Brazil's booming evangelical community, bowed his head in prayer with a Protestant priest, who wore a Bolonaro t-shirt.
Bolsonaro's victory, though not surprising after his strong lead in the first round of voting on Oct. 7, marks a radical change in a country ruled by the left for the past fifteen or so years – and highlights the dramatic right-wing trend underway in Latin American politics. Just six years ago, much of the hemisphere was led by a fraternity of like-minded center-left leaders, including Hugo Chávez, in Venezuela; Cristina Kirchner, Argentina; and in Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of the Workers Party, or PT. Today, Chávez is dead, replaced by the unfortunate Nicolás Maduro, and Venezuela is collapsing economically and socially. the former president Kirchner is the subject of a lawsuit for corruption; and Lula is in prison after being found guilty of corruption.
The recent electoral victory of former Mexican politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will take office on 1 December, one month before the inauguration of Bolsonaro, is an exception to the current trend. Just as Bolsonaro was elected as a result of the widely perceived failure of the Brazilian political left – and by successfully imitating part of the path taken by Trump – López Obrador won in Mexico because he was considered as the antidote of a political system plagued and become subordinated to the intimidation and whims of Trump.
Overall, Bolsonaro's imminent rise to the Brazilian presidency has added Brazil to the growing ranks of authoritarian populist nations that openly adhere to bigoted, misogynist, homophobic and anti-immigrant views, as well as violence as a means of solve problems. Bolsonaro, a far-right extremist who has spent years insulting women, blacks, gays and leftists in Brazil, while praising the use of torture and calling for the reinstatement of the military regime, now represents the new mainstream.
For Brazil, this is a radical change from Donald Trump's rise to power in the US, with a few key differences: Trump insulted women; Bolsonaro publicly abused a female lawmaker by pushing her away and telling her that she was "too ugly to deserve rape." Trump hissed that he was approving police officers using brutal tactics; Bolsonaro has openly pleaded for a flawless policy on Brazil's "criminal" problem, in the same deadly manner as Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, saying recently, "These kinds of people can not be treated as if they were normal human beings, OK? We can not let the police continue to die at the hands of these guys. If he kills ten, fifteen or twenty, with ten or thirty bullets each, he must get a medal and not be sued. "
After the results, Trump called Bolsonaro to congratulate him. On Monday morning, he tweeted: "We had a very good conversation with the newly elected Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, who won his race with a substantial margin. We agreed that Brazil and the United States would work closely together in the areas of trade, the military and all the rest! Excellent call, I wish him my congratulations! Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini expressed his joy by tweeting "The friendship between our people and our governments will be even stronger", while Marine Le Pen, from France, also wished Bolsonaro "Good luck . " Last week, Steve Bannon called Bolsonaro a "Brazilian Patriot, and I think of a great leader for his country at this historic moment."
To recall Trumpish's nationalism, Bolsonaro promised to keep China away from Brazil's energy and infrastructure sector and to withdraw from Brazil's multilateral commitments, such as the regional trade bloc known as Mercosur. He excoriated the United Nations as "a place for the communists to gather" and threatened the withdrawal of Brazil. Bolsonaro promises to also align Brazil on Trump on foreign policy. He promised to move the Brazilian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, close a Palestinian office in Brasilia and seek a regime change in Venezuela, his neighbor.
The value of the Brazilian currency and the Brazilian stock exchange both increased with the rise of Bolsonaro, stimulated, at least in part, by its promises to lift environmental controls and to open up parts of the country. countries, including Amazon protected areas and indigenous reserves -For the development of large-scale mining and agribusiness interests. Reflecting the excitement of Big Money, the work of Rupert Murdoch the Wall Street newspaper recently honored Bolsonaro in an editorial titled "Brazilian Swamp Drainer", with an opening phrase that chuckles at the "global progressives who have an anxiety attack" after its imminent victory. The editorial goes on to say that "Mr. Bolsonaro, who spent 27 years in Congress, is better understood as a conservative populist who promises to make Brazil a great country for the first time. "
Perhaps the personality to which Bolsonaro resembles most is Roberto D'Aubuisson, a deceased and former Salvadoran politician Commander of the Guard who, in collusion with security forces and conservative landowners, led death squads who captured and killed thousands of suspected leftists in a terror campaign aimed at "Cleanse the homeland". Romero, who was recently canonized by Pope Francis.)
Since the early eighties, when a large part of Latin America was under the yoke of anti-communist dictators who formed a cabal to kill and disappear the left of the hemisphere, a politician emerged with a speech so vicious. Indeed, from 1964 to 1985, Brazil was part of this cabal led by a military dictatorship that claimed the lives of several hundred citizens while inflicting torture and imprisonment on thousands of others. Former President Dilma Rousseff was herself a young guerrilla during this period. She was captured, tortured and imprisoned by the military. When voting for his dismissal, in 2016, during a procedure organized by his conservative rivals, Bolsonaro, then a member of Congress, voted in the name of the military officer who commanded the unit responsible for the ill-treatment of Rousseff.
Since the restoration of democracy, however, Brazil, unlike its neighbors, has refrained from holding anyone for human rights violations committed at the time. As a result, few Brazilians still alive have much memory, even opinion, about the dictatorship that Bolsonaro exercised in his career of nostalgic applause. His choice of Vice President, Hamilton Mourão, a former army general, is an unrepentant man well known for his words justifying military intervention in Brazil's politics, so necessary to save Brazil from "l & rsquo; # 39; anarchy ".
Bolsonaro himself has promised retaliation to his political opponents, vowing that he would see Lula "rot" in jail and that he would eventually put Haddad behind bars. He also pledged to prosecute the Landless Workers' Movement, Movimento Sem Terra, for land reform, which he called "terrorists".
In a speech last week, Bolsonaro called the Brazilian leftists "red proscribed" and said they had to leave the country or go to jail. "These red outlaws will be banned from our homeland," he said. "It will be an unprecedented clean up in the history of Brazil." Later, speaking of his followers, he said: "We are the majority, we are the true Brazil, and with this Brazilian people we will create a new nation."
