Brazil leans toward unsparing vision of far-right Bolsonaro

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The far-right former army captain who looks likely to become Brazil's next president promised nothing short of a complete overhaul of Latin America's largest nation, vowing Monday to combat the evils of corruption by gutting government ministries and privatizing state companies. He also pledged to promote traditional values that would roll back the rights of gays and other minorities.

With his pledge of "Brazil above all," Jair Bolsonaro has catapulted from the fringes of Congress, where he served as a member of marginal parties for 27 years, to a stone's throw from the presidency. A rabble rouser who has reminisced fondly about dictatorship and promised an all-out war on drugs and crime, he just missed outright victory in Sunday's vote and will face former Sao Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers' Party in an Oct. 28 runoff.

Bolsonaro only needs a few more points to secure victory, and Haddad's supporters vowed Monday to launch a tough fight to make up ground after their candidate finished a distant second.

The election was a seismic shift for this nation of more than 200 million people, where the left has won the past four elections but deep divisions have opened in the wake of a massive corruption scandal and the 2016 impeachment of then-President Dilma Rousseff. Brazil's move fits into a global trend among voters — in the United States and Europe, among other places — who are choosing anti-establishment and often far-right or populist candidates who target minorities and promise a return to "traditional values."

"The evils and damages of corruption hurt the people in many ways. It's they who don't have a bed in the hospital, who don't have security in the streets or money in their pockets," Bolsonaro tweeted Monday. "A corrupt government encourages crime in all spheres."

His solution?

"Reduce the number of ministries, get rid of and privatize state companies, fight fraud in (a popular social welfare program for low-income families) ... decentralize power giving more economic force to the states and municipalities," he said on Twitter, one of his favorite forms of communicating.

Bolsonaro's Social and Liberal Party was a tiny, fringe group until the candidate began surging in the polls through his use of social media and carefully orchestrated rallies. Bolsonaro has often praised Donald Trump, and his campaign took many pages from the U.S. president's playbook, from his echoing of Trump's "America First" slogan, to bashing the mainstream media to using the candidate's adult children as proxies.

Bolsonaro's party took a whopping 52 seats in the lower house of Congress — up from just one in the last election — giving it 10 percent of that house and making it the secondlargest party after the Workers' Party, with 56.

If elected, Bolsonaro has promised a total overhaul of Brazil's government. The proposals that have attracted the most attention — and criticism — focus on how he would slash rising crime rates. Brazil has long been the world leader in homicides, with a record 63,880 people slain last year, according the Brazilian Public Security Forum, an independent think tank.

To this thorny problem, Bolsonaro has proposed simple solutions: Give police more freedom to shoot first and give ordinary people freer access to guns. Critics have expressed concern that police violence, already a major contributor to the high homicide rate, will only worsen if police are given carte blanche.

"Bolsonaro is very good at picking a one-sentence summary of the issue and a one-sentence solution to the issue and then one name to resolve it," said Matthew Taylor, an associate professor of Latin American politics at American University.

While Brazilians say that deteriorating security is one of their major concerns, crime — and efforts to crack down on it — have become almost a metaphor in Bolsonaro's campaign. He has painted a Brazil not only at war with criminals but, in many ways, with itself.

Bolsonaro often uses crime as a lens through which to sketch out a broad indictment of the left: What he calls its coddling policies toward the poor, marginalized and criminal and its push to protect the rights of minorities at what he says is the expense of the majority.