Bolsonaro paramilitary ties in spotlight after photo with murder suspect
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is facing growing calls to explain his family’s alleged links to the heavily armed and notoriously violent paramilitary gangs that control large swaths of Rio de Janeiro.
Questions over possible connections between the Bolsonaros and Rio’s so-called “militias” were swirling even before the former army captain took office in January – so much so that revellers at this year’s carnival penned a song satirising the president’s supposed criminal ties.
But those concerns intensified this week when a photograph emerged in which a grinning Jair Bolsonaro appears with his arm around one of the two men arrested on Tuesday for the 2018 assassination of the Rio councillor Marielle Franco.
Police also confirmed that one of Bolsonaro’s sons had dated the daughter of the other murder suspect, Ronnie Lessa, and that Lessa lived in the same beachside compound where Brazil’s president lived until moving to the capital following his election last year.
“These relations between paramilitaries and the president of the republic must be explained,” demanded Humberto Costa, a Worker’s party senator from north-east Brazil.
Bolsonaro has played down the image’s significance, claiming he has taken thousands of such photographs with police officials.
“I don’t remember this bloke,” Bolsonaro said on Wednesday when questioned about the alleged hitman who lived across the street.
Brazil’s president also tried to justify previous statements of support he has made for such vigilante groups which emerged in the early 2000s and were seen by some as a lesser evil to Rio’s drug gangs.
“Back then people applauded [them],” Bolsonaro told Brazilian reporters.
Brazilian press reports paint Lessa as a cold-blooded killer who lost his leg in a 2009 bomb attack and made a fortune as a member of a group of contract killers called the “Escritório do Crime” (The Crime Bureau).
Bolsonaro’s former neighbour is also suspected of gunrunning. Police reportedly found 117 M-16 assault rifles at one Rio address linked to Lessa when they raided it this week.
The president’s politician son, Eduardo Bolsonaro – recently appointed the South American representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right group The Movement – said efforts to associate his family with Franco’s murder and Rio’s mafia were absurd and revolting. “If I take a photograph with a cop, does it make me responsible for everything he does?” he asked.
Brazilian prosecutors say they believe the photograph – reportedly taken in 2011, before Lessa was expelled from the police force – was “a coincidence”.
Fernanda Mena, a columnist for Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo who has covered the case, said it was indeed possible the photograph meant nothing: “Bolsonaro doesn’t know everybody who stands next to him to take a photo or a selfie.
“But what isn’t random are the other questions that involve the Marielle case and, at the same time, involve the president’s family,” Mena added.
She pointed to recent reports that the wife and mother of another former special forces police officer suspected of leading the Crime Bureau had worked for another of the president’s politician sons, Flávio Bolsonaro.
“I think it’s possible that the photograph reveals something that perhaps it doesn’t directly show, but which lies behind it. And this demands a super rigorous and urgent investigation,” Mena said.
Juliano Medeiros, the president of Brazil’s leftwing Socialism and Liberty party (PSOL) – to which Marielle Franco belonged – said Bolsonaro had failed to adequately explain any relationship with Rio’s paramilitary gangs.
Medeiros admitted it was too soon to make any categorical link between the Bolsonaro family and Franco’s killers and said doing so would be “frivolous”.
But there was “ample evidence” that left the family’s ties to paramilitaries “beyond doubt”, he claimed, pointing to the president’s well-documented public defence of death squads and militias.
“It is disgusting … to even consider the hypothesis that Brazil is governed … by a family with ties to this kind of criminal organisation. Just the hypothesis is alarming and creates a situation of utter uncertainty with regards to Brazil’s future,” Medeiros added.
“If there is the slightest hint of a link between the Bolsonaro family and Marielle’s murder we believe this could create an institutional crisis of cataclysmic proportions in Brazil.”
Guilherme Boulos, who stood against Bolsonaro for the PSOL in last year’s presidential race, called the connection between the Bolsonaros and the militias “uncomfortable and scandalous”. “Something smells fishy,” he tweeted.
Interrogation of Bolsonaro’s alleged paramilitary ties has also come from the Brazilian right.
“The president of the republic might want to demonstrate a little more caution,” the conservative Estado de São Paulo said in an editorial, criticising Bolsonaro’s attack this week on a Brazilian journalist who specialised in covering Rio’s paramilitaries.
“It must be explained, for example, how a retired policeman such as Ronnie Lessa … was able to own a comfy home in a middle-upper-class condo … the same condo where President Jair Bolsonaro also has a home – when he earned just 8,000 reais a month,” the newspaper added.
Whatever the truth about the connection between Brazil’s president and Marielle Franco’s killers, Gilberto Dimenstein, a prominent Brazilian journalist, said major reputational damage had already been done.
“This photo proves absolutely nothing. I repeat: nothing,” Dimenstein wrote. But “hundreds of millions of eyeballs will see this photo” and worry Brazil’s commander-in-chief might be in league with crime. “It is the worst photo in Jair Bolsonaro’s life.”