Sipping his beer in a luncheonette in Eldorado, a sleepy town in Brazil’s São Paulo state, João Carmo da Silva recalled an incident nearly 50 years ago that could now help determine the course of national history.
In 1970, Carlos Lamarca, a prominent leftist guerrilla fighting the country’s former military dictatorship, shot at police at a petrol station across the road while fleeing an army manhunt.
“We were buying cigarettes and a Ford pulled up over there and it was Lamarca . . . then the gunfight started,” Mr da Silva said.
The clash, in which several people were injured, deeply affected one of Mr da Silva’s young friends, Jair Bolsonaro, now the leader of Brazil’s far-right movement and the frontrunner in presidential elections next month. Then a lanky teenager, Mr Bolsonaro heard rather than saw the shootout — he was reportedly at the municipal school just off the town square at the time. But the episode, which brought soldiers flooding into the hamlet, inspired his passion for the military and hatred for the left — convictions that have helped drive him to the top of politics.
“After that, he started to have a deep desire to join the army,” said Mr da Silva.
Until recently a political outcast for his yearning for Brazil’s military dictatorship, his shoot-first policy on crime and for disparaging gays, women and blacks, Mr Bolsonaro has ridden social media to become the first rightwing nationalist with a chance of leading Latin America’s largest country since the military left power in the mid-1980s.
The rise of the former army captain-turned-congressman, seen as a populist in the mould of US President Donald Trump and Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte, comes as Brazil emerges from its worst recession and its traditional political class reels from corruption investigations.
Jair Bolsonaro on . . .
Assault
“I would never rape you, because you don’t deserve it,” he said to leftist congresswoman, María do Rosario, in 2003.
Crime
“I’m going to give carte blanche to the police officers to kill,” he said at a gathering in a restaurant in Deerfield Beach, Florida, in 2017.
Women
“I have five children. There were four boys, the fifth I got weak and a girl came,” he said, according to a hate speech accusation filed by Brazil’s prosecutor-general in 2018.
Mr Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach this month while campaigning and is still recovering. But a Datafolha poll this week showed his popularity has risen to 26 per cent from 24 per cent, nearly twice as high as his nearest competitors, leftists Ciro Gomes and Fernando Haddad, in the two-round election.
“I spent 17 years in the Brazilian army. I know what hierarchy and discipline mean, without those we will never have order and progress,” Mr Bolsonaro told the Financial Times last year.
Yet there have long been questions surrounding the myths underlying Mr Bolsonaro’s carefully cultivated image as the disciplined, straight-talking soldier-politician. An examination of his past in Eldorado and his army record tell a very different story to the official campaign version.
Childhood in the rainforest
Surrounded by rainforest, Eldorado lies in São Paulo state’s banana heartland, the Vale do Ribeira.
Reinaldo de Melo, who lived next door to the Bolsonaros, recalls that he never had “problems” with the family. The young Jair liked playing volleyball and fishing with friends.
One of those fishing friends was Gilmar Alves. The pair sold their catches to pay for their studies, with Mr Bolsonaro eventually going to a military academy in Rio de Janeiro and Mr Alves studying agronomy in nearby Curitiba.
“He was very obstinate, very driven,” said Mr Alves.
They kept in touch over the years, but they fell out in 2015 when Mr Alves said Mr Bolsonaro slandered him by suddenly referring to him as gay and an atheist on a television talk show while discussing his pet topic: the alleged distribution of material on homosexuality in Brazil’s schools.
Mr Alves said he was not against homosexuality but was furious because the remarks were untrue. Mr Bolsonaro never retracted his comments, he added.
“He showed a side of his character that I did not recognise, which is that of a liar,” said Mr Alves. Mr Bolsonaro’s press secretary did not respond to a request for comment.
But beyond their personal differences, Mr Alves also disputes a claim by Mr Bolsonaro that has taken on near mythical status among his supporters. After the Lamarca firefight in 1970, Mr Bolsonaro said he helped soldiers track the guerrilla in the nearby jungle.
“I participated, in a very discreet way, because I was 15-years-old, in the hunt for Lamarca,” Mr Bolsonaro told congress in 2012.
Mr Alves, whose late father, a local police officer, exchanged fire with the Lamarca gang at the petrol station, lambasts the story as “rubbish”.
“I totally know nothing about that and I would have known,” Mr Alves said.
Mr da Silva, another fishing friend of Mr Bolsonaro, also dismissed the claim, saying the politician was just a boy at the time.
Army career
Mr Bolsonaro left the Vale in the mid-1970s for military school. Examining officers praised him for showing “leadership aptitude”, “military spirit” and “physical stamina”.
But contrary to his political narrative as the perfect soldier, several incidents marred his career.
Between 1986 and 1987, he landed in trouble for publishing an opinion piece in Veja magazine complaining about soldiers’ wages without seeking authorisation from his superiors.
He was jailed for two weeks, “the only disciplinary punishment in my military life”, he said. Then, the plot thickened. He was charged with being an important source for a story published by Veja in which he allegedly revealed a plan to explode bombs in a military facility.
The objective, according to charges detailed in court documents from the Superior Military Tribunal obtained by the Financial Times, was to “show dissatisfaction with military salaries and the behaviour of the top military brass”. He was accused of “irregular conduct” and of being unfit to be an officer.
A former superior officer giving testimony on Mr Bolsonaro’s character in the trial noted his “aggressive treatment” of his subordinate officers, and “the lack of logic, rationality and balance in the presentation of his arguments”.
In his written defence, Mr Bolsonaro called the accusations “unjust” and said his honour was being “unfairly vilified”. In June 1988, he was acquitted, owing to, among other things, conflicting evidence regarding sketches of the bomb plan, which he was alleged to have drawn for Veja.
Months later, he left the army and entered politics as a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro. In 1990, he joined congress, where he was completing his seventh four-year mandate before he stood for the presidency this year.
Ernesto Geisel, the general who presided over Brazil’s dictatorship from 1974 to 1979 — in a compendium of interviews published in 1997 by the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) academic institution — called Mr Bolsonaro a “bad military man”.
Prediction comes true
One of the judges in Mr Bolsonaro’s military trial wrote: “He presents attributes that could [one day] make him a leader for many.”
For years, he lurked on Brazil’s political fringes, occasionally making headlines with his outbursts, such as when he told a leftist congresswoman that she did not “deserve” to be raped. In 28 years, he passed only two pieces of legislation.
But in this year’s election, the judge’s assessment has struck a chord with many Brazilians who have embraced a candidate who they think can change a rotten system.
His supporters appear willing to ignore his many contradictions, such as how he once praised the leftist Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and voted for Brazil’s leftwing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002.
Mr Bolsonaro now claims to be an economic liberal despite saying former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso should face a firing squad for privatising state companies. Last year, he pledged “total” support for the constitution, but he wants to nearly double the number of supreme court judges, which would enable him to install his own people. Mr Bolsonaro and General Antonio Hamilton Mourão, his running mate, have spoken of invoking military force in times of “chaos”, and both admire the late Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who tortured prisoners during Brazil’s dictatorship.
“Heroes kill,” General Mourão said in a recent TV interview.
Diverse supporters
Despite the contradictions and controversies, Mr Bolsonaro attracts voters from across society. Some see him as a protest vote, others support his evangelical tendencies, while another group hopes he will introduce liberal economic policies à la Chile’s Augusto Pinochet under his new economic adviser, the Chicago-trained Paulo Guedes.
“There is a vast group who are voting for Bolsonaro for so many different reasons,” said Guilherme Casarões, a professor at the FGV. The average Bolsonaro voter was not necessarily fascist, he said.
Mr da Silva, his former childhood friend, summed it up. Mr Bolsonaro was Brazil’s version of Mr Trump, a social media Pied Piper gathering diverse disgruntled followers from across the web.
“He was born with nothing,” said Mr da Silva. “Yet the internet has taken him to a level he did not ever imagine he might reach.”
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