Give killer police medals – Tropical Trump
One of the leading contenders in the forthcoming presidential elections in Brazil has said that police officers who shoot criminals dead should be decorated with medals.
Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes caricatured as a Tropical Trump – although he rejects the analogy – was outlining his views on crime prevention during an interview on the country’s most-watched nightly news programme.
‘‘If he [a police officer] kills 10, 15 or 20 with 10 or 30 bullets each, he needs to get a medal, and not be prosecuted,’’ he said, to the visible unease of the Globo TV news anchor.
‘‘We can’t let policemen keep dying at the hands of those guys,’’ he added.
The far-Right candidate, a former reserve army captain, is second in the polls, behind Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Left-wing former president.
But Lula da Silva is in jail for a corruption conviction and is expected to be barred from standing. The first round will be held on October 7.
Crime is soaring in Brazil, with a record 63,880 murders in the country last year.
Bolsonaro’s comments drew praise on his social media sites, where he has the largest following of all the 12 candidates. ‘‘Patriot’’, said one commentator. ‘‘In the times in which we are living it makes sense’’, said another.
The candidate’s critics have pointed out that Brazil has such a high murder rate partly because of the high number of killings by police.
The Brazilian Forum of Public Security reported this month that, on average, 14 people a day were killed by the police last year, a 20 per cent rise on 2016.
The congressman has a history of making controversial comments, often timed for maximum impact. He frequently expresses nostalgia for what he describes as the ‘‘authority and discipline’’ of Brazil’s 1964-85 period of military rule. During impeachment proceedings against the Left-wing President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, he announced that he was casting his vote in ‘‘honour’’ of the army colonel who presided over her torture in the 1970s.
He recently called for a radical tightening of border controls after an influx of destitute Venezuelans escaping their collapsing economy.
Bolsonaro’s supporters point out that amid the corruption scandals that have touched most politicians, including more than half of the sitting congress, no charges have ever been made against their candidate.
On Thursday one of his main rivals, Geraldo Alckmin, a CentreRight former governor of Sao Paulo state, released a campaign video – a near-copy of a British campaign from 2008 – to challenge the idea that guns might solve Brazil’s problems.
Also standing is the Left-wing Fernando Haddad, a former mayor of Sao Paulo, and a close ally of Lula da Silva who could pick up his supporters.
The prospect helped to contribute to a slump of the Brazilian currency this week, with investors nervous of the chance of a return to power of the Workers’ Party. Times