The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, responded with false news and distorted accusations of the political event of the last weekend: the victory of the left-wing alliance Alianza Histórico, led by Gustavo Petro, in the Colombian presidential elections. The Brazilian president spoke of Petro’s request to release political prisoners from the 2021 social protests and invented a supposed release of common prisoners in the event that Lula Da Silva wins in the October elections.
“Did you see the speech of the new president of Colombia? He said that he is going to release all the imprisoned boys, all of them. Lula here is going to release all the boys who killed someone for a cell phone to have a beer,” Bolsonaro falsified in a video sent to his followers through a Bolsonarista channel.
Petro’s request was addressed to the Attorney General’s Office to lift the arrests of young people who participated in the massive and historic protests against the policies of outgoing President Iván Duque. Demonstrations in which thousands of people were injured, murdered and disappeared at the hands of the security forces. As for the parallelism between the release of political prisoners and common prisoners, Bolsonaro invented a derisory measure that does not figure in Lula’s plans.
MIR and M-19
To try to give him some veracity for his far-right followers, the Brazilian president spoke of Petro as “an ex-guerrilla of the Revolutionary Left Movement” (MIR), when in fact that group was Chilean and the Colombian president-elect belonged to the M-19 of his country.
The climate of fear for the Bolsonarist electorate began to build on Monday, when the president sent a message asking himself: “Will Brazil be next?” He seemed to respond to a meme that circulated after Petro’s victory.
The meme showed the image of the signing of the Prosur alliance at the Palacio de la Moneda in Chile, in 2019, and put a red cross on each right-wing president who lost office in the last two years: the Argentine Mauricio Macri, the Ecuadorian Lenin Moreno, Chilean Sebastián Piñera and Colombian Iván Duque. Bolsonaro was the only acting president in the image.
In the same vein, on Sunday Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the President’s five sons, published a map of South America on social media calling countries like Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Colombia communist. “The responsibility of the Brazilian voter increases day by day. We have to do it not only for Brazil but for the entire region,” said Bolsonaro’s son.