August 06, 2019

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro: "I am just like this”

topic:	Humans
located:	Brazil
editor:	Ellen Nemitz

"I am like this, it is not a strategy”, said the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro after several polemic statements in the past few days. Bolsonaro never tried to hide his obscure side: he is sexist, xenophobic and racist. But recently he is becoming more and more clueless.

Bolsonaro has said, for instance, that there is no hunger in Brazil: “Some people may eat badly. But there is no hunger”, he said – a few hours later, he softened his own declaration by adding that “a small amount may be” hungry. However, according to the Brazilian Geographic and Statistics Institute, there were more than 50 million people living with less than 5.5 dollars a day by 2017. This means that a quarter of the population was below the poverty line.

The Brazilian president is also being considered an environmental threat. He has put in doubt official data released by Space Research National Institute about deforestation in Amazon Forest and fired the director of the institute. The illegal cut of trees has increased more than 100 percent in a year – even world leaders like Angela Merkel have questioned him and the international press has covered the problem, including FairPlanet. The environment is threatened as well by mineral extraction, which Bolsonaro wants to legalise. According to Greenpeace, mining can destroy forests, rivers, soil and largely affect biodiversity. 

The polemic statements have continued. Jair Bolsonaro has suggested that the law against slavery and similar conditions must be “adapted”. Instead of strict laws, though, the Global Slavery Index estimates that, by 2018, 369 thousand people were living under this kind of conditions in Brazil. Between 2003 and 2018, more than 40 thousand workers were rescued, according to the Minister of Labour. In regards to labour, the president has defended that everyone can be benefited by it, including kids: “By working at age 9 or 10 at the farm, I was not harmed”. He denied that he is aiming to decriminalise child labour, only because it would be “massacred”. 

Finally, Bolsonaro showed no limits when he said to the president of Brazil’s Lawyers Order, Felipe Santa Cruz, after a disagreement, “If he wants to know how his father disappeared, I tell him”, mentioning his father's arrest and murder during the dictatorship in the 70s. Later he accused Fernando de Santa Cruz of being part of a “terrorist group”. Nevertheless, the Truth Committee – which is, for Bolsonaro, "bullshit" – has pointed that Santa Cruz was killed in a “non-natural and violent way by the State”, (a few days after, four members of the Truth Committee were changed “because now the president is Bolsonaro”, as he said to journalists). The statements are being considered a crime of encouraging torture and Bolsonaro was convened to respond officially.

Some of his actions are putting him in trouble, even among important political allies and his advisors fear for negative effects. But the real negative effects are being noticed by the population: the president does not respect anyone, does not respect international agreements and is deeply committed to withdrawing social rights and to the dismantling of the welfare state.

Image: Bolsonaro with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House, Washington, D.C., 19 March 2019, flickr