Bolsonaro’s terrifying legacy in ten sentences: “I would never rape her, deputy, she doesn’t deserve it”

The result of the general elections in Brazil has been much tighter than expected by the polls, which gave Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a six-point lead. However, the old and violent rhetoric of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro , with his defense of the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades with kidnappings, torture and murders of opponents, has been penetrating Brazilians for years, to the point that they do not not only gave him the presidency, but has now left him just a few votes away from repeating the legislature. In a strongly divided Brazil, the old leader of the South American left won the presidency this Sunday in the most disputed vote in the 37 years of democracy, with 51% of the support compared to 49% for Bolsonaro. And that the rightist maintained the advantage for two hours after the opening of the electronic ballot boxes, but when reaching 67% of the votes counted, the ‘sorpasso’ took place. The still president leaves a terrifying legacy as far as public statements are concerned. He has them of all kinds: racists, homophobes, sexists and even deniers, in the midst of a Covid pandemic that has left a whopping 688,000 dead and 35 million infected in Brazil. A year ago, the Brazilian writer Walter Barretto Jr. collected them in the book ‘Bolsonaro and his followers: 1560 phrases’. “My idea is that the citizen who buys it reads a few of these ‘pearls’ to his friends and family so that they see the mistake they made when voting for him and prevent them from repeating it,” the author explained to ‘XL Semanal’ . Related News standard No Lula wins the presidency of Brazil after a tense election day Verónica Goyzueta With more than 99% counted, she obtains 50.8%, beating Bolsonaro by two million votes, a smaller margin than expected by the polls Y is that there are not a few pearls that good old Jair has left since he announced his intention to run for the first time in the general elections of October 2018. Some of the most controversial examples were: —«I am not going to fight nor discriminate against homosexuals, but if I see two men kissing in the street I will hit them. – «Some say that I am giving a bad example with the Coronavirus. Idiot, I already had it! I already have antibodies, why get vaccinated again? And another thing to be very clear: Pfizer makes it very clear in the contract: ‘We are not responsible for any collateral effects, if you turn into an alligator it’s your problem, dammit […], if you become a superman, if a woman grows a beard or some man starts to speak fine, I have nothing to do with it’. Or what is worse, they are going to intervene in the immune system of the people. Where is our freedom? —«Those people are perhaps more dissatisfied now than if they had never had a benefit because they have taken away a subsidy that they thought was theirs. […]. If you give subsidies to the poorest, they end up having more children.” —«You have a homosexual face that you can’t handle [a un periodista]». “When I was a single congressman, I spent my allowances on fucking.” “If it were up to the Workers’ Party [de Lula da Silva], pedophilia would soon cease to be a crime. —“Everyone has to die someday”, in reference to Covid. —«As long as the State does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, I am in favor of extermination». —About an indigenous leader of the Brazilian Congress: «Let him go eat grass to maintain his origins». —To an opposition deputy: “I would never rape you, you don’t deserve it.” Bolsonaro, immediately after you cast your vote in the elections in Brazil EFE The dictatorship However, the comments that raised the most blisters among the majority of the Brazilian population were those in which this former captain of the extreme right Army seemed to legitimize or show his sympathies for the 1964 coup that gave way to two decades of military dictatorship. At first he assured that “it is a lie that it was a dictatorship”, although in 2016 he had already declared, when he was a federal deputy, without any shame, that “the error of the dictatorship was to torture and not kill its adversaries”. Bolsonaro went further two years ago, when the Brazilian Prosecutor’s Office repudiated his attempt to “commemorate” the 1964 military uprising and reminded him that “celebrating a coup was incompatible with the rule of law.” The Federal Public Ministry (MPF), through the Citizen’s Rights Ombudsman, also stressed in a statement that the uprising “supposed, without any possibility of doubt or historical revisionism, a violent and anti-democratic rupture of the constitutional order.” The Prosecutor’s Office also highlighted that the riot of 1964 “gave rise to a regime of restriction of fundamental rights and of violent and systematic repression of political dissidence.” He also recalled that the support of a President of the Republic for the dictatorship can be a “crime of responsibility”, as established in article 85 of the Constitution. Until the last day, Bolsonaro has continued determined to whitewash the history of what happened almost sixty years ago, calling it a “revolution” or “counterrevolution”, instead of a “coup d’état”, despite having already received for his outbursts three court convictions and 30 requests for disqualification. MORE INFORMATION This was the coup in Brazil that Bolsonaro yearns for: “His mistake was to torture and not kill” Lula, after winning the elections in Brazil: “I was almost buried alive in this country, I consider this moment as a resurrection” .. and Bolsonaro went to bed Few historians now doubt that when General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco took office as president on April 15, 1964, one of the darkest stages in Brazilian history began , which in the 1970s saw the repressive apparatus harden with kidnappings, private prisons, torture, murders and concealment of corpses. According to the book ‘Right to memory and truth’, later published by the Lula da Silva government, 475 people died or disappeared for political reasons, although numerous associations defend that there were many more.