In the Brazilian army, Jair Messias Bolsonaro was nicknamed “cavalão”, which in Portuguese means big horse and also big one. His deputy office was decorated, according to his biographer Clòvis Saint-Clair, with framed portraits of those who ended up being five of his predecessors as Head of State, Generals Castello Banco, Costa e Silva, Médici, Geisel and Figueirido, the five chiefs of the military dictatorship that Brazil endured between 1964 and 1985 and of which the current president is a declared admirer.
As a deputy, in 1999, when asked in a television interview if he would close Congress if he were president of the Republic, he replied that “there is not the slightest doubt.” When he was reprimanded in the Lower House, he insisted that “he would close Congress, because it doesn’t work. He is in tow of the Executive, he only votes what he wants. He is not independent”. 23 years ago nobody thought that this former captain born in 1955 in Glicério, São Paulo, could reach the head of state. He was a common deputy, a member of the “lower clergy” in the parlance of Brasilia. In almost three decades of obscure parliamentary work, he only drew attention for his brutal verbal excesses defending, for example, the execution of the then president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Several times attempts were made to annul his mandate, but his immunity protected him.
When in 2019, in the heat of the “Lavajato” scandal, Bolsonaro achieved the feat of assuming the presidential sash nor did he try, as far as is known, to close Congress. He also had the flexibility, or the inconsistency, to do, often with great difficulty, what he had demonized in the past, when for example he entered into the marketing of pacts with the corrupt parties of the so-called “Centrão”, the great center. Or when in December of last year he fell far behind in the polls and launched the Auxílio Brasil program, which doubles pay for the poorest people in his rival Lula da Silva’s Bolsa Família, a program he had opposed. A few days ago he even recovered a speech of his from 2002 explaining that he had voted for “companion” Lula in the second round of the presidential elections.
Despite his bravado and his turns of up to 360 degrees, which in politics are not exactly his heritage either, there are some permanent master lines in the trajectory of the former captain since on January 1, 1989 he debuted as a councilor in Rio de Janeiro for the PDC, the first of the eleven acronyms in which he has militated. A good part of this merry-go-round was the product of mergers of political forces and in Brazil the changes of jackets are so normalized that, instead of transfugism, they are technically called “party migrations”. His ideology is of the extreme right, ultraconservative, in defense of political authoritarianism, the traditional family, the Christian religion, the use of weapons, the heavy hand of the police and the free market, with misogynistic, homophobic and racist positions, although he rejects these labels. In the final stretch of the campaign, trained by his advisors, with his offspring at the helm, he has made an effort to bury his fearsome image to try to appear as a folksy president, with the reduction of violent deaths and economic improvement as achievements to to exhibit. These days he is not listened to, for example, that he prefers his son to die than to be homosexual.
His style is barracks. Nothing evidences it better than the nicknames of his three sons who are dedicated to politics. Flávio, senator, is Zero Uno, following a nomenclature typical of the military. Carlos, a councilor from Rio, had to be Zero Two. And Eduardo, a federal deputy who in 2018 bears the nickname of Zero Tres. There is a whole Bolsonaro clan that comes from afar. The first of the three sentimental partners of the president, and mother of the three “Zeros”, Rogéria Nantes, took over from her husband in the town hall in 1993. Several relatives and her next two companions, Ana Cristina and Michelle, worked as advisers to her or her children.
In 2000, after the sentimental breakup of 1997 and accusing his ex-wife Rogéria Nantes of breaching the agreement according to which he told her what to vote for, Bolsonaro launched the candidacy for councilor of his son Carlos, who was elected with three times as many suffrages of his mother, who was left out. “Zero Dos” is now in charge of what is known as the “cabinet of hate”, whose existence was confirmed by the Federal Police. With several presidential advisers and directing the so-called “digital militias”, he carries out a very effective dirty campaign on WhatsApp and other social networks.
Rogéria Nantes reappeared in the president’s biography in 2016, when she declared in his favor in the trial for the lawsuit filed by the PT deputy, María do Rosário, to whom Bolsonaro told “I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it.” Although he always argued that he did not take into account that she had previously accused him of promoting violence, including her sexual abuse, he was sentenced to compensate her. Other sexist statements, such as being sympathetic to the salary gap, have contributed to the fact that the female vote constitutes one of the far-right’s biggest problems, since Lula leads him by a dozen points, with a technical tie between the men.
In the campaign style of the Cabinet of Hate, the imprint of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s strategist, is perceived. The president of Brazil can be seen as a tropical version of the former US president, due to his extremist ideology, his often savage statements, his chaotic style and his denialist position on the pandemic, a “little flu” according to Bolsonaro. He rejected the use of a mask, combated social distancing and confinement, opted for chloroquine as an early remedy against the criteria of scientists and, above all, delayed vaccination for several months, with a whole political-administrative soap opera, in which weighed their attacks on China. As Brazil is the second country with the most deaths from Covid, almost 700,000, therein lies the great weak flank of Bolsonaro.
In what Bolsonaro is nothing like Trump is in family origin and profession. His father was a dentist without the required qualifications who worked in various locations in the interior of São. He began his military training in 1972. In 1986, when he was a paratrooper captain stationed in Rio, outraged like many of his colleagues at low wages in times of runaway inflation, he published an article in “Veja”, the leading political weekly. He cost him fifteen days of arrest.
In 1987 “Veja” revealed that a group of officers was preparing the “dead end” operation, with small bombs in military installations to protest salaries. After the cascade of denials, the following week the magazine published some sketches of the actions, which were attributed to Bolsonaro. He managed not to be condemned by discrepancies between the graphological experts on the authorship of the schemes. A few months later he left the Armed Forces to enter politics, the path that eventually led him to the presidency, where he has had more than a third of military ministers. He has never been seen since the dictatorship.
