The ex-soldiers gunning for a Brazilian ‘coup’
On a scorching afternoon in the sleepy countryside town of Sorocaba, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, Adriano Costa e Silva steps out of his latest election campaign meeting with his gun strapped firmly to his waist.
In tow of the serving army major and candidate for state governor are a rabble of activists of Brazil’s burgeoning far-right, all of whom sport crew cuts and are dressed neatly.
After a short meeting – in which it was briefly suggested an opposition candidate from the Left should be “pumped full of lead” – one of the organisers asks the major if he would pose with his service weapon, and the candidate happily obliges.
“Everybody do the Bolsonaro guns!” cries one of the activists, most of whom are in their 20s.
They are referring to the campaign salute of Jair Bolsonaro, 63, the populist far-right presidential candidate leading in the polls, despite spending a large part of the campaign in a hospital bed after being stabbed at a campaign rally in September.
Bolsonato is a staunch advocate for extending the right to bear arms to all Brazilians, and the “guns up” gesture has become one of the most recognisable symbols of this former army captain’s controversy-scarred campaign. It has stirred uneasy nostalgia for Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship and encouraged a record number of military and ex-military personnel to run for office.
Having been kept at arm’s length since the return to democracy in 1985, the armed forces are now taking off their uniforms and donning their suits – triggering fears from moderates of a “coup” in the world’s ninth-largest economy.
In total, 82 members of the armed forces are running for election tomorrow, in comparison to 58 in 2014. The number of retired members of the military has gone from 127, four years ago, to 214 today.
Jair Bolsonaro himself served in the army for 17 years before going into politics in 1988. Since 1991, he has served as a congressman for the state of Rio de Janeiro, winning re-election six times.
He has never been far from controversy and has been subject to criminal accusations of inciting sexism, homophobia and racism, some of which resulted in convictions.
In 2015, he told Maria do Rosário, a congresswoman, he wouldn’t rape her because she didn’t deserve it, before repeatedly calling her “very ugly”.
At the end of last year, Mr Bolsonaro faced racism charges for remarking that black Brazilians from quilombos, countryside settlements initially founded by freed slaves, “aren’t even good for procreating”.
Last week Stephen Fry, who interviewed Mr Bolsonaro in 2013 for a documentary about homophobia, released a video urging Brazilians to think twice about voting for a man who had given him “one of the most chilling confrontations I’ve ever had with a human being”.
But for many, the most worrying aspect of Mr Bolsonaro’s popularity is his proximity to the army – a delicate subject in a country still emerging from the shadow of the military dictatorship which ruled between 1964 and 1985.
The National Truth Commission of 2014 documented 191 killings and 210 disappearances at the hands of the military regime, and suggested that the actual number is much higher.
Many Bolsonaro supporters deny this – and Major Costa e Silva is among
them. “There was no coup in 1964, I see it as a counter-revolution, which created a democratic military government,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
The major is also sceptical with regards to the practice of torture during the dictatorship. “I have yet to see concrete proof that any torture took place. Could it have happened? Sure. We were at war.”
Mr Bolsonaro takes a similar stance. In 2016, during the impeachment vote of former president Dilma Rousseff, the far-right candidate paid tribute to convicted torturer Carlos Brilhante Ustra, who he later referred to as “a Brazilian hero”.
Ustra was the head of military intelligence and repression centre DOI-CODI, where Ms Rousseff was detained and tortured in 1970.
Major Costa e Silva, like many others, attributes the popularity of military candidates to growing mistrust at a time when Brazil is jailing politicians – including the feted former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva – over one of the world’s largest corporate corruption probes.
US and Brazilian authorities last week fined Brazil’s oil giant Petrobras more than $853million (£652million) for paying bribes to politicians and political parties. “Once the major corruption scandals surfaced, such as Operation Car Wash, people stopped believing in politicians and looked to the army as their salvation”, Major Costa e Silva explained.
On the streets of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, the mood is tense ahead of what feels to many the most crucial election in a generation.
“Everything is so polarised”, says Tereza, 44, a cleaner in the city centre, adding that she plans on spoiling her ballot. “You can’t discuss politics without people offending one another; ‘Bolsonaro this, Lula that’. It’s so tiring.”
Forty-year-old shop owner Rodrigo, however, will be backing Mr Bolsonaro. “Brazil can’t handle another four years of the Workers’ Party in government”, he says. “We need someone to re-establish law and order in this country.”