Jair Bolsonaro

President of Brazil

• Born: March 21, 1955
• Place of Birth: Glicério, Brazil

Education: Agulhas Negras Military Academy

Background

Jair Bolsonaro was born in Glicério, in the coastal state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1955, to Olinda and Perci Geraldo Bolsonaro. He was the third of six children and grew up in Eldorado, a town of about fifteen thousand people in the southern Amazonian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. His father, hearing there was no dentist available in the town, set up an unlicensed practice, for which he was later prosecuted. Bolsonaro had a difficult relationship with his father, whom Bolsonaro recalled as having a drinking problem and being belligerent.

Bolsonaro grew up during the military dictatorship that seized power in 1964, a regime that is remembered by many for numerous human rights violations, including torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial killings. In 1970, a deserter turned guerilla fighter was pursued by army troops through Eldorado, and as they searched, Bolsonaro witnessed body searches, ransacked houses, and roadblocks, which impressed him.

In 1973, Bolsonaro joined the army cadet preparatory school, the Escola Preparatória de Cadetes do Exército, in Campinas before transferring to the Academia Militar das Agulhas Negras (Agulhas Negras Military Academy) in Resende, the most prestigious military academy in Brazil. He graduated in 1977.

Military Career

After graduating from the military academy, Bolsonaro served in the field artillery before joining the paratrooper infantry brigade. By the time Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, he had been promoted to captain, despite notes in his military record that criticized his “excessive ambition,” “aggressive treatment of his comrades,” and “immature” personality. Bolsonaro chafed at some elements of military life, particularly the pay. In 1986, he wrote an unauthorized opinion piece in the magazine Veja, denouncing poor military pay and defending his fellow soldiers against reports that many were leaving because they had been dismissed for wrongdoing. He blamed attrition on financial concerns and demanded that the public pay attention. Bolsonaro was given fifteen days’ detention for insubordination.

A year later, he was again under investigation by the army, this time for threatening to drop flash grenades into army barracks to protest the low pay of army officers. A published interview in Veja, complete with hand-drawn plans of the planned attack, was enough to have him dismissed by the Military Justification Council. He was acquitted in June 1988, however, and reinstated as a reserve officer.

Political Career

Bolsonaro’s bold defense of military pay gained him significant publicity. After his acquittal in 1988, his newfound notoriety helped to win him a seat as a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro as a member of the Christian Democratic Party. Two years later he became a congressional representative for Rio de Janeiro in the Chamber of Deputies, a position he held for seven consecutive terms with various parties, until 2018. During his years as a congressman, Bolsonaro gained a reputation for strong conservatism and praise for the former authoritarian regime, as well as inflammatory statements about women, LGBT people, Indigenous people, and the Quilombo communities, descendants of fugitive enslaved people. In 1999, he stated that he would like to abolish the congress and stage a coup. That same year, he was suspended after saying that he wished the military had assassinated then president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In a 2003 altercation with fellow deputy Maria do Rosário, Bolsonaro told her that she was not worth raping and then repeated the assertion in 2014 interviews; this sparked criminal suits, the former resulting in a conviction and unpaid damages and the latter being dismissed on free-speech grounds.

Though these comments brought Bolsonaro a measure of notoriety and some support from the far-right fringe, he was considered an ineffectual and marginal figure in Brazilian politics. He passed only two bills into law in his nearly three decades in the legislature, out of over 170. Bolsonaro’s political fortunes began to change, however, when Brazil’s economy slid into recession around 2014, amid the largest corruption scandal in the nation’s history. Many of the nation’s mainstream left-leaning politicians, including then president Dilma Rousseff, were caught up in the scandal, and the crime rate in Brazil was skyrocketing. Against that backdrop, Bolsonaro’s right-wing, militaristic message began to resonate with some. Supporters included antiabortion advocates, military members, and those disaffected with the Workers’ Party.

In the run-up to the 2018 presidential election, Bolsonaro launched a populist campaign, relying heavily on social media, and support for his candidacy began to build. On September 6, 2018, during a campaign event, Bolsonaro was stabbed in the abdomen, an event that curtailed his campaigning activities but kept him in the public eye as he recovered. When frontrunner and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, then imprisoned for money laundering and corruption, was barred from the campaign in early September 2018, Bolsonaro took a commanding lead. In an October 28 runoff, he soundly defeated Lula da Silva’s successor as the Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad, by a ten-point margin. He took office as the thirty-eighth president of Brazil on January 1, 2019.

Soon after taking office, Bolsonaro reduced protections for Indigenous peoples, such as halting land demarcation and placing Indigenous affairs under the agriculture ministry. He also facilitated agricultural and mineral development, sought to loosen restrictions on gun ownership, and authorized major infrastructure projects in the Amazon rainforest. In 2019, Bolsonaro's plans to form a new political party backfired when he failed to gather enough signatures as stipulated by Brazilian electoral courts. (Bolsonaro later joined the Liberal Party in 2021.)

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020, Bolsonaro notably downplayed the severity of the potentially deadly respiratory infection; undermined state and federal public health interventions, fearing economic repercussions; and spread misinformation and tried to block public access to health data. His actions led both to protests and calls for impeachment as well as to support from far-right nationalists. His eventual support for additional cash transfers improved his declining approval ratings. However, Bolsonaro's handling of the pandemic remained largely unpopular, causing many citizens to stage protests throughout the summer of 2021.

Bolsonaro was the subject of a government investigation in August 2021 after he asserted that the electronic voting system in Brazil is fraudulent and that many of Brazil's past elections had been fixed. Then, in October of that year, the Federal Senate approved a briefing that urged for the filing of criminal charges against Bolsonaro for the way in which he and his government handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bolsonaro announced his intention to seek reelection in 2022. Facing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round of the 2022 presidential election in October of that year, Bolsonaro received 43 percent of the vote to Lula's 48 percent. Despite Bolsonaro's allusions to Lula's success in the election being fraudulent, a run-off election between Bolsonaro and Lula was held on October 30, in which Bolsonaro was narrowly defeated by Lula.

In January 2023, Bolsonaro's supporters attacked various Brazilian government buildings, attempting to carry out a coup d'état to return Bolsonaro to power. Bolsonaro subsequently condemned the attacks and denied responsibility for the attempted coup. In June 2023, Bolsonaro was barred from running for public office until 2030 following a conviction for abuse of power.

In 2024, Bolsonaro expressed his hope that former US President Trump would win the 2024 presidential election at a rally of conservative supporters. The former Brazilian president attended the rally to support his party's candidates in municipal elections. Those attending the rally chanted their support of Bolsonaro and his conservative values, which include a ban on abortion and pro-gun legislation.

Impact

Bolsonaro’s election signaled the end of over a decade of leftist leadership in Brazil, and his promises to bring sweeping changes to numerous aspects of the nation’s social, legal, and political systems had many hailing him as a fresh voice and nearly as many deeply fearful of the consequences of his rhetoric in action. Under Bolsonaro's administration, deforestation in the Amazon rose sharply and enforcement of environmental policies declined. Further, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to millions of Brazilians contracting the disease.

Personal Life

Bolsonaro lives in the Palácio da Alvorada, the official presidential residence in the capital, Brasília. He is married to Michelle Bolsonaro, with whom he has a daughter, Laura. He also has four sons—Flávio, Carlos, Eduardo, and Jair Renan—from prior marriages to Rogéria Nantes Bolsonaro and Ana Cristina Valle. Several of his children are also politicians, and he appointed his son Eduardo to be ambassador to the US. During his first eighteen months in office, Bolsonaro was hospitalized several times and tested positive for COVID-19 in July 2020, from which he soon recovered.

Bibliography

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