RUTHFULLY YOURS

Brazil’s Crime

It is not the jaw-dropping murder rate or endemic corruption which marks every aspect of public life and office in the South America nation, for they are but symptoms of the greater affliction: decade upon decade of left-wing government. Reformer Jair Bolsonaro aims to change that.

I had the chance to meet Mr Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading presidential candidate, about two decades ago. He is now on the verge of a significant victory in a run-off to be held on October 28. Back in those days, Bolsonaro was a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro and I was starting my professional career as a legal academic. His wife, one of my law students, invited me to join them for lunch at the City Council. I spoke with Bolsonaro for about 30 minutes and my interaction with him was rather pleasant and insightful. He clearly demonstrated love for his family and for the country. The brief conversation was enough to convince me that he was a different politician — completely different from the usual Brazilian politician normally inclined to embrace a leftist view of the world.

Bolsonaro has always been labelled ‘far right’ by the Brazilian media. This is a label usually given to anyone who opposes such things as the radical feminist lobby and/or the LGBTQI agenda. Bolsonaro apparently is very ‘far right’ because he also sees a few positive aspects in the military regime that ruled over the country from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Above all, he is called a ‘fascist’ because he wishes to fight crime and to introduce policies that can somehow address the breakdown of law and order in Brazil. Above all, Bolsonaro is deeply hated by those who reject his correlation between the rampant levels of criminality and the disorder caused by the incapacity of successive let-wing governments to protect the people from dangerous criminals.