Opinion – Marcelo Leite: President candidate practices political cannibalism

Few books have marked as much as the first read about the Yanomami, “The Circle of Fire”, by Jacques Lizot (1988). In particular, his account of the “reahu” funeral ceremony, in which some of the ashes of valuable deceased people are eaten with banana porridge by relatives and allies.

A parallel with the Catholic sacrament of communion immediately comes to mind, in which the faithful receive the host, the body of Christ transmuted into bread. The same principle: to internalize, symbolically, the best of the disappeared.

It was with disgust that the reahu was seen rising from the grave by the mouth of the current president of the Republic, Jair Messias Bolsonaro (don’t get lost by the middle name). In 2016, the then congressman told Simon Romero of the New York Times that he had already had the opportunity and willingness to eat people — here, in a literal sense.

He said that the temptation would have occurred in the community of Surucucu (RR). “An Indian died and they are cooking. They cook the Indians, it’s their culture. They cook for two, three days and eat with bananas”, says the captain in the video recorded by his son Carlos and released by the termites themselves. I would eat no problem.

The Janonism surrounding the campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva resurrected the passage to preach the cannibal smear on Bolsonaro. A reincarnation of the specter João Santana, Dilma Rousseff’s marketer who in 2014 crucified Marina Silva and a “banker”, who would take food from the children’s plates (and was not able to repeat the spell in 2022 with the failed Ciro Gomes).

Bolsonaro was telling a fib. He may have gone to Surucucu, pass, but the Yanomami would never invite or accept a stranger, much less a military man given to despising them, to participate in such an important ceremony.

By using the video as ammunition, PT members believed that they would give the candidate change in the same currency used by him. In fact, they helped to drive another nail into the dignity of the Yanomami, by indirectly giving their status as cannibals, as if they ate the very flesh of relatives and warriors to feed themselves.

It is Bolsonaro who lives by biting the reputation of others, nourishing with his lowliness the worst instincts and emotions of those who vote for him. It was like that with quilombolas, which he equally hates and dehumanizes, when referring to weight in arrobas.

This was the case with the residents of Complexo do Alemão, who generalized as bandits and members of a criminal faction. That’s because Lula was there and was well received, bringing together more people than the extreme right has been able to.

It was like that with the Venezuelan girls who put on makeup on a Saturday afternoon in the Federal District. In a perversion worthy of Damares Alves, he concluded that they were exploited as prostitutes because they were impoverished by the Chavista dictatorship.

The Janonists missed the point again, pasting him the pedophile label. This is when the real scandal lies in the assumption that dressing up is something for call girls, whatever the age of Venezuelan women.

There are videos in circulation of at least three occasions in which Bolsonaro tells the story, all with content that leaves no room for doubt. With the bad press, the candidate once again tried to escape responsibility by apologizing without apologizing, saying that his words were taken out of context.

They weren’t. The defamation scenes are there for those who want to see and draw their conclusions. The censorship imposed by the TSE on the candidate’s actual words is not only legally incomprehensible, but also ineffective in practice.

The biggest problem is that half of Brazil believes in Bolsonaro’s version, even if absurd. Or, who knows, precisely because it is absurd. “Credo quia absurdum”, the carola would say, thinking of repeating Saint Augustine.

And they still call the Yanomami savages. Who is the cannibal in this story?