BRAZIL GOES BACKWARDS
The election of Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s new president has emboldened homophobes and inspired a campaign of violence against the LGBT community. Things are likely to get worse.
The election of Jair Bolsonaro has emboldened homophobes and inspired a campaign of violence against the LGBT community.
ONE OF the most shocking moments of Brazil’s 2018 presidential election was footage of a huge mob of people in a subway station chanting, “Bolsonaro will kill faggots!” This was also chanted by football fans in stadiums across Brazil, with videos finding their way onto social media.
That same month, a transgender woman was bashed by a group of men with a metal pole north of Rio de Janeiro. One of her attackers yelled, “I hope Bolsonaro wins to kill this piece of trash.”
Brazilian LGBT rights group Groupo Gay da Bahia (GGB) responded by warning politicians against using sexual minorities as “scapegoats and bargaining chips” during the election.
“We are faced with this extremely tense and worrying current situation, suffering this growing, terrifying and destructive disrespect that destroys the bonds of friendship in communities and breaks the social contract that should guide the rules of coexistence,” GGB’s Marcelo Cerqueira said.
Jair Bolsonaro did, indeed, win the election and is now president. So, who is this man who inspires such hope in the minds of the hateful?
One of Brazil’s most outspoken political homophobes, in 2002 Bolsonaro told a newspaper, “If I see two men kissing in the street, I will beat them… If your child starts to become like that, a little gay, you take a whip and you change their behaviour.”
In a 2011 interview with Playboy, Bolsonaro said he would be “incapable of loving a gay son” and that if his son was gay it would be better for him “to die in an accident”. He added that if a gay couple moved in next door it would lower the value of his house.
The same year, Bolsonaro linked homosexuality and paedophilia in an interview with Jornal de Noticias, claiming “many of the children who are adopted by gay couples will be abused by these couples” and that LGBT murder victims were just killed by their partners, saying, “most homosexuals are murdered by their respective pimps at hours when good citizens are already asleep”.
Bolsonaro told one of America’s most highprofile gay actors, Ellen Page that he blamed the increase in homosexuality on women’s participation in the workforce. “Over time, due to liberal habits, drugs, with women also working, the number of homosexuals has really increased,” he said.
It’s not just his views on gay people that are odious. He also wants to open large parts of the Amazon rain forest to clearing, in the face of warnings on climate change, and he has already stripped the agency charged with protecting Brazil’s indigenous tribes of its powers and placed them with the Ministry Of Human Rights, which is led by an evangelical pastor.
Some have dubbed him “Trump on steroids”
The violence against minorities has increased dramatically since he was elected… I do not want to say more… I want to take care of myself and keep myself alive.
because of the way he highjacked an existing political party in order to gain Brazil’s highest office and through his manipulation of voter anger at the political establishment. Others have compared him to Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duturte for his strong-man persona, for loosening Brazil’s gun laws and encouraging vigilantism in a country that already has one of the world’s highest murder rates, where 62,000 people are killed each year.
But some fear he could be far worse, potentially returning Brazil into a military dictatorship – something Bolsonaro knows a thing or to about, having served in the army during that regime.
Bolsonaro was ten years old when the Brazilian military launched a coup against President Joao Goulart of the leftist Brazilian Labour Party in 1965 with the backing of the US Government. The military initially pledged to hold elections but, two years later, enacted a harsh new constitution that stifled free speech, censored the media and cracked down on political activism.
The regime would go on to kill over 400 people they deemed dissidents over the course of the next 21 years, with countless others tortured, jailed or fleeing the country.
In this atmosphere, Bolsonaro decided he wanted a career in the military and went straight into the Brazilian army after high school, graduating from the academy in 1977 as an artillery officer before becoming a paratrooper and eventually rising to the rank of captain.
Two years later the regime passed an Amnesty Law absolving its members of all crimes and began a pathway back towards democracy. In 1982, Brazil had its first free election in two decades, and three years later a president was chosen by the people.
Bolsonaro first came to public attention a year later when he appeared in the media complaining about the low wages of military personnel and claimed that soldiers were being unfairly fired because of cuts to the military budget. This made him a hero for some on the political hard right in Brazil.
In 1989 he entered politics and won a seat on the Rio de Janeiro city council for the Christian Democratic Party. Then in 1990, he was elected to the Brazilian National Congress, serving seven consecutive terms as a representative for a range of centre-right parties before joining, and taking over, Brazil’s Social Liberal Party at the beginning of 2018 in just a matter of months.
Originally an obscure progressive party that had only ever won a handful of seats, Bolsonaro quickly converted its ideology to one of nationalism, anti-socialism and social conservatism, and became the party’s candidate for the presidency. But it wasn’t just right-wing populism that won Bolsonaro the presidency. It was also massive corruption in the Brazilian political establishment and a scandal that brought down his opponents.
In the years after the dictatorship, Brazilians elected centre-right governments, but that all changed in 2002 when Lula da Silva’s Workers Party was swept into power and he became the first leftist president of Brazil since the coup of 1965. Da Silva quickly became one of the most popular political figures in Latin America and Brazil’s most popular leader while in office, winning re-election in 2006 before handing his party’s leadership to his former chief-ofstaff Dilma Rousseff, who became Brazil’s first female president in 2010.
However, two years earlier, the authorities had begun a probe into what would become the largest corruption scandal in the history of Latin America, which resulted in Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016.
Her successor, Michel Temer did not fare much better. He, too, is accused of corruption, as are nine of his ministers and 71 other Brazilian lawmakers across the political spectrum who were caught up in what became known as Operation Car Wash. Da Silva had planned to make another bid for the presidency in 2018 but he was arrested as part of the same corruption probe and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
As a result of the scandal, support for both the government and the establishment opposition parties collapsed. With Da Silva out of the race, Bolsonaro became the front-runner for the presidency.
Throughout his life, Bolsonaro has been one of Brazil’s most prominent apologists for the past military regime, which is why many fear he could become a dictator himself. In fact, during a television interview in the 1990s he said that if he ever became president, he would shut down Brazil’s National Congress and stage a military coup. For now, he seems content to remain president through the democratic process.
Responding to Bolsonaro’s election, Amnesty International Americas director Erika GuevaraRosas made her fears known.
“The president-elect has campaigned with an openly anti-human-rights agenda and frequently made discriminatory statements about different groups of society,” GuevaraRosas said. “His election as Brazil’s president could pose a huge risk to indigenous peoples… traditional rural communities, LGBTI people, black youth, women, activists and civil society organisations, if his rhetoric is transformed into public policy.”
Brazil’s only openly gay congressman, Jean Wyllys has fled the country after receiving death threats since the election, despite being elected for a third time.
DNA tried to contact Wyllys but we understand that he is in hiding and is no longer speaking to the media, but before he left, Wyllys told a Brazilian newspaper about his decision to flee.
“It was not [Bolsonaro’s] election itself. It was the violence that increased after the election,” he told Folha de S Paulo.
Wyllys’ fears are not unfounded. His friend, Marielle Franco, an openly bisexual Rio de Janeiro council woman was assassinated in March last year. Wyllys himself was already living under police escort in Brazil.
In January this year, police arrested Ronald Paulo Alves Pereira and issued a warrant for Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, as suspects in Franco’s assassination. Both men received honours from Bolsonaro’s son Flavio in the early 2000s.
Wyllys also shared his fears about what a Jair Bolsonaro presidency will look like. “I have no positive expectations about this government,” he said. “The level of violence against minorities has increased dramatically since [Bolsonaro] was elected. But, frankly, I do not want to say more about it because I… want to take care of myself and keep myself alive.”