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By Vincent Bevins
Vincent Bevins was the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times from 2011 to 2016. In the years that followed, he covered the rise of Bolsonarism for the New York Review of Books. For this article, he made several trips to Brazil over the past 11 months.
As president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro was known as the Trump of the tropics, an attitude that Bolsonaro’s family circle has actively cultivated. From the moment he was elected in 2018, he celebrated America loudly and transparently; in his first year in office, he even saluted the American flag; However, he reserved his utmost and intense loyalty for an American. When he met President Trump at the United Nations in 2019, he told her, “I love you. “
Before coming to power, Bolsonaro was an anti-democratic ideologue and former military man with a decades-long political career; Trump was a true real estate developer and media personality. But in the six years that Bolsonaro has been in the news in Latin America’s largest country, he has given journalists a long list of reasons to equate the two men. Both praised authoritarian leaders, past and present, and liked to present themselves as definers of law and order while acting as if the regulations did not apply to them. Both formed an alliance with devotees at the end of their careers and recruited their sons to help them advance their respective agfinishas. Both have taken to Twitter to attack their enemies, troll mainstream media outlets, and annoy their followers. And any of them retreated to Florida when the going got tough.
For decades, the Brazilian right looked toward the United States, and when Donald Trump began to regulate political discourse, it took note. “We learned to have the courage to speak,” says Damares Alves, an evangelical pastor who was Bolsonaro’s Minister of Human, Family and Women’s Rights. “We began to be more incisive about the abortion factor. We learned that we can be more direct in the factor of arming the population. “We learned that we can adopt a more powerful stance against the left-wing action that is taking place on our continent. ”
As president, Bolsonaro seemed keen to import the MAGA motion to Brazil as much as possible. So when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to protest a “stolen” election, many Brazilians feared that Bolsonaro supporters would try something similar. This is precisely what happened. On January 1, 2023, when Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of the leftist Workers’ Party, took office, Bolsonaro skipped the rite and took refuge in the suburbs of Orlando, in the home of a combined citizen . martial arts fighter. For weeks, Bolsonaro supporters had camped in the country, under banners calling for “intervention. ” Echoing January 6, they chose January 8 to occupy and attack government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, even though the transition had already taken position and the buildings were largely empty. Military police arrested more than 1,000 people and Lula temporarily regained control of the country.
Bolsonaro, like Trump, now faces a series of criminal charges for attempting to obstruct democratic elections. Trump was found guilty in one case, but only Bolsonaro was declared ineligible for the presidency. In June 2023, Brazil’s electoral tribunal ruled that his attacks on the electoral formula prevented him from running for political office until 2030. Now he faces many other lawsuits. In February of this year, the government confiscated his passport after arresting several former aides accused of plotting a coup, forcing him to flee again to Florida. Bolsonaro took refuge for two nights in the Hungary embassy in Brasilia, perhaps hoping to take advantage of his appointments with Prime Minister Viktor Orban (one of the many friends he has with Trump) to make the leak necessary.
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