Jair Bolsonaro's first moves live up to 'Brazil's Trump' label

The first targets of his executive orders were Brazil’s indigenous peoples and the LGBTQ community. Not stopping there, he then dismissed those civil servants who did not share his far-right ideology.

Quickly getting into his political stride he went on to confirm his intention of moving Brazil’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and made clear he was open to hosting a US military base on his nation’s soil.

Welcome to the new President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the man many have already dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics”.

The comparison with the US President is an entirely fair one, for Bolsonaro has long been a fan of his North American counterpart and even campaigned on the slogan of “Brazil before everything, and God above all”.

Think of it as Brazil’s version of “America First,” and you get some idea of the direction of political travel in which Bolsonaro is now embarking.

The political love-in with Trump is mutual, that much was evident from the US president’s Tweet as Bolsonaro was sworn in: “Congratulations to President @jairbolsonaro who just made a great inauguration speech. The U.S.A. is with you!”

As Bolsonaro takes the reins of Latin America’s largest and most populous nation, his rise to power is a now familiar tale of far-right leaders around the globe who have come to power by riding waves of anger at the establishment and promising to ditch the status quo.

But just what can Brazil and the international community expect from this former army captain turned president?

Some of the clues in answering this lie in Bolsonaro’s own background, others in his election campaign pledges that few doubt he will deliver on no matter how divisive or controversial that may prove to be.

“From the beginning, Bolsonaro emerged as a dictatorship nostalgic and a defender of the military. He was obsessed with attacking what he referred to as subversives from the left,” recalls Brazilian Congressman and historian Chico Alencar, who entered Rio de Janeiro’s city council in 1991 – the same year as Bolsonaro – and came to have a parallel trajectory in Congress, albeit on the left.

“His views were always very narrow, sectarian,” says Alencar. “He was seen as an eccentric figure, rude, authoritarian, always saying the same things.”

Those who know Bolsonaro well say that long before he entered Congress he had already nailed his political colours to the mast. The story goes that even as a 15-year-old while living in the forested rural Ribera Valley in the state of Sao Paulo, he acted as an informant for the Brazilian Army around the town of Eldorado as they tracked down Carlos Lamarca, one of the leaders of the leftist guerrilla groups who led the armed struggle against the country’s regime at the time.

“I knew everything in those woods and I passed on information to the soldiers about the places,” Bolsonaro is quoted as saying boastfully.

That crusade against the left took centre stage both during his presidential campaign and within hours of his inauguration last week, as his administration set about purging as many as 300 government officials perceived to be supportive of the previous left-wing and centrist governments.

According to Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, Onyx Lorenzoni, such measures were necessary in order to “clean the house”.

“It’s the only way to govern with our ideas, our concepts and to carry out what Brazil’s society decided in its majority,” Lorenzoni insisted, according to an interview he gave with the German daily newspaper Die Welt.

The vast majority of those dismissed were on temporary contracts and their removal, Lorenzoni said, was necessary to “do away with the socialist and communist ideas that during 30 years have led us to the chaos in which we live.”

It was telling that during his inauguration speech last week Bolsonaro stopped at one point, pulled out a Brazilian flag and wildly waved it, prompting roars from the crowd.

“Our flag will never be red,” Bolsonaro said, a reference to communism. “Our flag will only be red if blood is needed to keep it green and yellow.”

“Mito” (“Legend”), the crowd chanted in response.

Fear mongering and allegations of chaos under socialist or liberal rule is something Bolsonaro’s campaign made much of as he made his way into office.

Very early on he set about harnessing popular rage against the system, with his campaign offering an outsider’s scathing critique of Brazilian society.

What he promised was a corruption-busting, communist-combating conservative who would lead the country out of moral decay and its worst ever recession.

“I am in favour of a dictatorship … We will never resolve serious national problems with this irresponsible democracy,” Bolsonaro insisted during his campaign. But while Brazilians voted for him in enormous numbers, considerable fears remain about his style of leadership While there have been some small signs since taking office that he has moderated his divisive rhetoric and apparent disdain for democracy, he remains a blunt negotiator in a political system prizing cordiality.

His strategy of dealing with congressional caucuses rather than party leaders remains untested, and his anti-corruption stance faces scrutiny amid a probe into the finances of a family friend.

FROM the moment he stepped into office, however, he has left no one under any illusions of his intentions. Brazil’s indigenous communities were first in the political crosshairs of the former paratrooper and now president.

Bolsonaro, who has compared indigenous communities living in protected lands to animals in zoos, took immediate steps toward undermining the rights of Brazil’s tribal peoples.

In one group of measures the new president transferred responsibility for certifying indigenous territories as protected lands to the ministry of agriculture.

The ministry has traditionally championed the interests of industries that want greater access to protected lands.

Most of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil and 20% of it has been lost to deforestation since the 1970s – an area bigger than France. The forest is being cut down to make way for activities like cattle ranching, soy bean farming, mining, hydropower dams and new highways.

While deforestation fell dramatically between 2004 and 2012, in recent years it has been increasing, and the powerful agricultural lobby in the Brazilian congress is pushing for more development of the forest. It was this lobby that endorsed Bolsonaro during his election campaign.

The president’s move sparked outcry from indigenous leaders, who say it threatens their reserves, which make up about 13% of Brazilian territory.

“There will be an increase in deforestation and violence against indigenous people,” said Dinaman Tuxa, the executive co-ordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous People of Brazil (Apib). “Indigenous people are defenders and protectors of the environment.”

During his election campaign, Bolsonaro hit out at environmental groups, saying he wanted to put an “end to all activism in Brazil”. Already he appears to be acting on that very warning.

“If we take his proposals as a candidate, it doesn’t look good for environmental and indigenous rights or for campaigning organisations,” Tica Minami, campaign co-ordinator for Greenpeace Brazil’s Amazon campaign, was quoted as saying last week.

“We’re also concerned about the shrinking democratic space in Brazil,” she added.

In a separate but related development, Bolsonaro’s incoming health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, suggested last week that there would be spending cuts on health care for indigenous people.

“We have figures for the general public that are much below what is spent on health care for the indigenous,” he said, without providing details, adding to the anger and concern of activists among the tribal communities.

Observatorio do Clima, a network of 45 Brazilian civil society groups, criticised Bolsonaro’s executive orders, calling them “only the first step on meeting his campaign promises of dismantling environmental governance, stripping indigenous peoples of their rights and opening up indigenous lands for business”.

Brazil is already the world’s deadliest country in sheer numbers for indigenous, land and environmental activists, with a record 57 killings in 2017 according to NGO Global Witness.

But there are other areas too where we can expect to see Bolsonaro shake things up and unleash controversy.

Another one of his orders removes LGBTQ concerns from the Human Rights Ministry’s agenda, the same Human Rights Ministry that’s now led by Damares Alves, an evangelical pastor who claims that “the Brazilian family is being threatened” by diversity initiatives.

“Girls will be princesses and boys will be princes,” Alves said last Wednesday, following the president’s inauguration speech and issuing of executive orders.

“Under Bolsonaro’s administration, there will be no more ideological indoctrination of children and teenagers in Brazil,” she added.

Here again the orders have been sharply criticised by local activists and human rights groups in Brazil, where, despite having legalised same-sex marriage in 2013 and playing host to the world’s largest Pride parade, anti-LGBTQ violence took at least 387 people’s lives in 2017.

Activists point to the fact that for now there are no signs there will be any other government infrastructure to handle LGBT issues.

Few past Brazilian presidents have revelled in making enemies quite the way Bolsanaro has, and for the moment that shows little sign of slowing down.

Until recently, his detractors were almost as numerous as his adorers. And yet many ordinary Brazilians are clearly optimistic as he takes office.

According to one pollster, Ibope, three quarters polled say the new government is on the right course. And although the Brazilian economy is recovering slowly from its worst-ever recession in 2014-16, a poll by Datafolha found that the share of Brazilians who are optimistic about the economy has jumped from 23% in August last year to 65% in December.

As the new president gets an even firmer grip on the country, some of those who voted against Bolsonaro are waiting for an unwieldy Congress to give him a hard time, or for cracks to open in his Cabinet. Others have grudgingly decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, or have resigned themselves to the fear that this “new” Brazil will for them be something odious.

As Andres Schipani, the Latin America correspondent for the Financial Times, pointed out the other day, if Bolsonaro proves to be more like Hungary’s nationalist prime minister Viktor Orban than Chile’s free-market president Sebastian Pinera, things could get tricky in Brazil. For now, though, Bolsonaro is enjoying a brief political honeymoon.

“Bolsonaro needs some quick successes to get off on the right foot with the public and the political elites,” observed Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank. Failure to do so, Hufbauer contends, would likely reduce Bolsonaro’s honeymoon period to six months.

The new president remains a contentious figure and to many a repulsive politician and individual. This, after all, is a man who has said he was “proud to be homophobic” and that he’d rather see a son die in an accident than appear with a “moustached” partner. A man who said he wouldn’t hire a woman for the same salary as a man since they get pregnant.

A politician who described “quilombolas”, as descendants of African former slaves are known, as people who “did nothing” and were too fat “even to breed”, criticising how much they cost the government in welfare programmes. Yes, there are indeed many similarities with his North American counterpart.

On New Year’s Day as Bolsonaro ascended the white marble ramp that leads to the Planalto, the presidential palace in Brasília, the thousands of Brazilians who had gathered chanted “The captain has arrived”. How long he stays in favour, however, will be well worth keeping an eye on.