Bolsonaro’s three sons from his first marriage, who are in their mid-thirties, are a central part of his political team. He calls them Zero One, Zero Two, and Zero Three. Flávio, the eldest, won a seat in the Senate last year. Carlos, who helped run his father’s campaign, is an alderman in the Rio city council. Eduardo, the youngest, is possibly the most extreme of the brothers. In the impeachment proceedings against Rousseff, he stood behind his father, mouthing along with his words as he cast his vote in the name of her torturer. A former federal policeman, Eduardo recently joined Steve Bannon’s far-right organization, the Movement, as its Latin America representative. (Bolsonaro also has a fourth son, Renan, a law student, from his second marriage, and a young daughter, Laura, with his current wife.)
Bolsonaro’s administration is heavily stocked with military leaders; eight of the twenty-two cabinet positions are filled by ex-generals. His ideas are informed by Olavo de Carvalho, a philosopher and a former astrologer who has attracted a following with eccentric interpretations of works by Machiavelli, Descartes, and others. Carvalho, seventy-one, lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he identifies with American “redneck” culture by hunting bears, smoking cigarettes, and drinking. Two current cabinet ministers were appointed on his recommendation: the education minister, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, a conservative theologian; and the foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo. Both subscribe to Carvalho’s notions that “cultural Marxism” has contaminated Western society and that climate change is a Marxist plot. Carvalho lends a patina of intellectualism to Bolsonaro’s proposals; recently Carvalho told an interviewer that Brazil’s problem with violent crime might have been averted if the military regime had killed the right twenty thousand people.
Much of Bolsonaro’s political support comes from agribusiness, the arms industry, and the religious right, a nexus of power referred to as the Three “B”s—beef, bullets, and Bibles. In Brasília, I met with Alberto Fraga, one of his oldest friends and a close political ally, who headed the “bullet bloc” in congress for two decades, until a recent conviction on bribery charges. (Fraga is appealing the decision.) In office, Bolsonaro had moved quickly to loosen gun laws, and Fraga, who was a police officer for twenty-eight years, was pleased that more people would be able to own weapons. (It was also good for business; the stock value of Taurus, Brazil’s largest gun manufacturer, has doubled since Bolsonaro secured his party’s nomination.) “Guns don’t increase crime,” Fraga said. “Public policies do.” He had forty-eight guns himself, he told me, shrugging: “I like them.”
Bolsonaro posits authoritarian violence as the way to solve Brazil’s crime problem. In one television interview, he said that officers who kill dozens of troublemakers “need to be decorated, not prosecuted.” His allies, like Trump’s, at least feign exasperation at their leader’s rhetorical excesses. Fraga told me, “I think that’s just him talking. We need to get him to control that.” But these sorts of views are common among his loyalists. The newly elected governor of Rio de Janeiro state recently initiated a “shoot to kill” policy against armed criminals and recommended that police helicopters patrolling the favelas carry snipers to “slaughter” anyone openly carrying a weapon. In February, police officers in the Fallet-Fogueteiro favela killed thirteen young men, most of whom were reportedly executed after they had surrendered.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/jair-bolsonaros-southern-strategy
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