Jair Bolsonaro: Self-Portrait of a Fascist

Since he emerged as a presidential candidate with options for victory, Jair Messias Bolsonaro has been the target of the most diverse descriptions: xenophobic, racist, misogynist and fascist, among others.

They were not new adjectives to refer to the controversial former army captain turned federal deputy in 1991, but they were more emphatic and full of well-founded fears.

This time, the term fascist will not be used as an adjective, nor as a resource to identify the features of the Brazilian political process that put him in the presidency and that later has kept him in it. At a historical level, the political-social reality of the South American country is not comparable to that which in Italy and Germany generated, during the 1920s, Fascism and Nazism.

The term will be used as a noun that portrays "body and soul" to the character who prevailed, as an ultra-right populist candidate, in the political-electoral plot of the South American nation, nothing more and nothing less than unabashedly proclaiming primitive ideas of violence, hatred, intolerance, extreme militarism, authoritarianism and extreme personalism, in the best style of the historical leaders of fascism.

With an impulsive personality, mediocre culture and questionable talent, Bolsonaro cannot be questioned for these two defining personality traits: he stubbornly defends his retrograde ideas and is verifiably stubborn when it comes to carrying them to practice. This is how he is demonstrating it as president of the most populous and extensive nation in Latin America.

For Bolsonaro, as for the political figure he looks up to, Donald Trump, the rules of politics are imposed by them, and it doesn’t matter, what others may think!

Faced with this reality, the most appropriate and credible thing is for him to present himself, to speak and make explicit his true and harmful psychological and political nature.

In 1993, in the midst of the efforts of the Brazilian democratic sectors to free the country from the consequences of a military dictatorship of more than 20 years, these were his words before the Federal Chamber: «Yes, I’m in favor of a dictatorship! We will never solve the serious national problems with this irresponsible democracy!”

Six years later, on May 23, 1999, he said: “Through your vote you are not going to change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing. It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here, and doing the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000, starting with FHC (former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso), not leaving out, no, killing! If some innocents are going to die, all good; everything that is war kills innocents» (the precarious syntax is a portrait of their cultural level).

In the same intervention, he added: «There’s not the slightest doubt (that he would close Congress). He would stage a coup-de-etat the same day! It doesn’t work! And I’m certain that at least 90% of the population was going to have a party, they would applaud, because it doesn't work. Congress today is useless… it only votes what the president wants. If he is the person who decides, who tripudia (equivalent to stepping on the head of the adversary) on top of Congress, he now gives the coup, now straight to the dictatorship».

On February 11^th, 2016, he bluntly expressed his peculiar "democratic sense": "Majority is one thing, minority is another... the minority has to shut up, bend to the majority, it's over...".

His vision of democratic "tolerance" made it lapidary explicit when he warned the militants of the Workers' Party —the well-known PTists— on September 1^st, 2017: "We are going to shoot all the petralha (derogatory of PT) from Acre…since they like Venezuela so much, that group should go there».

About Hitler, one of his idols along with Augusto Pinochet and Trump, he once expressed: «What you have to understand is the following: war is war. He was a great strategist."

For today's evangelical Bolsonaro, the waters of the River Jordan with which Pastor Everaldo Dias baptized him in May 2016 did nothing to appease his primitive instincts: the millions of deaths caused by Nazism seem to be irrelevant data for him, the same with the disappeared and murdered by Pinochet and the Condor Plan, which the Chilean dictator promoted with the approval of Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, and the inevitable advice of the CIA.

About torture, he usually speaks as if it were a natural instrument to obtain information. In May 1999 he expressed: «Pau-de-arará works (alludes to one of the favorite tortures of the military dictatorship). I am in favor of torture, you know about that. And the people favors it also».

Racist ideas are recurring in his public expressions. On March 28^th, 2011, addressing the singer Preta Gil, he told her: «I’m not going to discuss promiscuity with anyone. I do not run that risk (of my son falling in love with a black woman) and my children were very well educated and did not live in an environment such as yours, unfortunately.

On April 3^rd, 2017 he expressed nonchalantly: «... I visited a quilombola community. The thinnest Afro-descendant there weighed seven arrobas. They don't do anything; I don't think they are even useful to procreate."

Machismo combines it with derogatory allusions to women. Two expressions confirm it. The first, to the Zero Hora newspaper, from Rio Grande do Sul, in December 2014. The second, when intervening in the Hebraica Club, in April 2017: «I am a liberal. If I want to employ you in my company earning 2,000 reais a month, and Doña María earning 1.5 thousand reais; if Doña María doesn't want to earn that, she must seek another job. I am the boss”; «... I went with my three children, the other went too, it was all four of them. There are five children, but the fifth time he gave me a weakness. There were four men, the fifth time I was careless and a woman came”. No comments on this.

The retrograde ideas of the Brazilian president are plentiful. Those exposed so far are a tiny sample, but educational example. From them, draw your own conclusions.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff