Bolsonaro says he's fighting corruption. So why is he surrounded by scandal?

There is a towering paradox at the heart of Brazilian politics: the country’s farright president, Jair Bolsonaro, was elected on an anti-corruption platform – music to the ears of a population that has been victimised for decades by systemic corruption.

But the “anti-corruption” president and his family are now subsumed by multiple corruption scandals suggesting serious criminality.

All three of Bolsonaro’s politically active sons, along with his wife Michelle, have been implicated in corruption scandals. But the most serious and menacing scandal features Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flávio, who is a federal senator.

At the end of 2018, the media reported that one of Flávio’s aides, the former military police officer Fabrício Queiroz, had for years been depositing sums of money into Flávio’s personal bank account. The Intercept (cofounded by my husband Glenn Greenwald) subsequently published secret chats showing that Brazilian prosecutors agreed that there was “no doubt” that the deposits were part of a common racket in which lawmakers employ “ghost” employees who do no work and kick back part of their salaries.

But this scandal transformed into something far darker and more grave: Queiroz, investigators have said, has ties to the violent and dangerous paramilitary gangs which now rule much of Rio de Janeiro.

Worse, for more than a decade, Flávio employed both the wife and the mother of Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, the alleged leader of Rio’s most powerful and violent paramilitary gang – the same gang investigators have concluded carried out the brutal assassination in 2018 of Rio de Janeiro’s black, LGBT, favela-raised city councilwoman Marielle Franco. (Franco, a close friend of my family, served alongside me in the city council as a member of my party, the leftwing socialist PSOL, until she was murdered.) Flávio defended himself by claiming that the hiring had been “at the indication of former aide Fabricio Queiroz”.

That the president’s eldest son allegedly has such close ties to this paramilitary gang was terrifying but not entirely surprising. These “militias”, as they are known in Brazil, are largely composed of former and current members of the military police and military.

Bolsonaro, a former army officer, has a history of praising these militias as well-intentioned vigilante groups dedicated to fighting crime. All three of his politician-sons – including his youngest political son, Eduardo, a former member of the federal police – have also praised these militias. Along with an anti-corruption persona and a demonisation campaign against LGBT people, Bolsonaro has made pledges to unleash the police and military to kill more suspected criminals central to his political platform.

Still, the fact that Bolsonaro’s son – a member of the most powerful political dynasty in Brazil – would be employing family members of this particular Rio militia shocked the nation. And those ties were even more disturbing when it became clear that Queiroz, the aide that Flávio claimed was responsible for hiring the family members of that militia, is linked to Bolsonaro and his wife, too.

One of the unexplained deposits made by Queiroz includes one made to the personal bank account of Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle. And photos revealed that Queiroz, aside from being Flávio’s close aide for a full decade, seemed to enjoy a close friendship with Bolsonaro himself.

Worse still, a photo surfaced in March showing Bolsonaro grinning and draping his arm around one of the former police officers who is suspected of murdering Marielle Franco. That same week, Brazil learned that Bolsonaro’s youngest son, Renan, had dated the daughter of the other police officer arrested for Marielle’s murder.

As the investigation into Flávio unfolded, the police attempted to interrogate Queiroz about how he could