A “Trump of the tropics” who took power after a surprising digital campaign, fueled by an assassination attempt, “with a mission to explore the Amazon at any cost”.
This is how the President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro (PL), is described in the long-awaited documentary “The Boys from Brazil: Rise of the Bolsonaros”, by the British network BBC, which premieres next Monday. fair (5). The work will have three episodes of one hour, but a version with two hours in total was shown this Tuesday (30) in the United States by PBS, American public TV.
In the version broadcast to the public in the United States, the documentary is a kind of Brazil for beginners, recovering in a didactic and chronological way the important moments of the public life of the current president, and it works better for the foreign viewer than for the Brazilian – who accompanies the news has fresh in his memory the facts listed.
Despite the didactic concern, the film absolutely ignores the existence of former Minister of Justice Sergio Moro, without mentioning his name or even an image of the magistrate, despite listing the Lava Jato operation as one of the crucial factors in the rise of the president.
The work intersperses interviews with foreign correspondents in Brazil, Brazilian journalists, political allies and enemies, his son Flávio Bolsonaro and Steve Bannon, one of the main strategists of the North American far-right. All this amid the profusion of archival images available on social networks, platforms that took Bolsonaro to the top of power, maintains the documentary.
Chronological as a Wikipedia entry, the documentary takes up childhood in the municipality of Eldorado and the early years of the Army, in the period of the dictatorship in which, “if it weren’t for the military, maybe today Brazil would be a Cuba, a North Korea” , says Flávio to the film’s production, justifying his father’s devotion to the period of repression. The film retrieves Bolsonaro’s 1999 interview in which he states that “through your vote, you will not change anything in this country”.
After describing his marriage to his first wife, Rogéria, the birth of his three eldest children and the political turn when wage activism began in the barracks, the film portrays Bolsonaro’s entry into Congress and shows how the family’s politician defended his son. Carlos, then 17 years old, to run against his mother for a councilor seat in Rio, and thus take away his now ex-wife’s chances of being elected.
For the documentary, one of the turning points in Bolsonaro’s career is when he fights with PT deputy Maria do Rosário in the Green Hall of Congress in 2003, in which he curses the congresswoman and says “I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it”. That’s when he became most famous nationally, he says.
After the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) to the presidency, the film maintains that part of the electorate lacked a representative of the conservative camp and that Bolsonaro made himself known by opposing advances in minority rights, especially the LGBTQIA+ cause.
Another turning point is Lava Jato, in which the then deputy was not implicated and which, years later, would take the former president Lula to prison, taking him out of the 2018 electoral race and making room for him to reach the Palácio do Highland. With the focus on the 2018 campaign, there are some temporary inaccuracies, such as placing the start of TV advertising more than a year before the election — in fact, electoral advertising only started on the last day of August, 35 days before the first round.
The film especially highlights the importance of Carlos Bolsonaro in the creation of the digital strategy, and shows one of the most emblematic fake news of that campaign, that the opponent Fernando Haddad would be distributing bottles with a rubber penis to children in a campaign against homophobia.
“There was no way to compete with the right at that time in terms of social networks”, says in the film Camilla Azevedo, who worked on the digital campaign, when talking about the rapid production of memes behind the scenes.
If there are debates about the weight of the stab he took in Juiz de Fora (MG) to elect him, Pastor Silas Malafaia, one of his main allies, points out in the documentary: “That stab was a holy stab, I told him . Contributes to Bolsonaro, he became a victim.”
The film shows that Bolsonaro did not change his aggressive style after coming to power and reports the break with allies, such as the then leader of the government Joice Hasselmann (who describes the barrage of threats he was targeted) and the Minister of Health Henrique Mandetta (who parades resourcefulness in the English language when narrating Bolsonaro’s obsession with chloroquine).
The pandemic is one of the climaxes in the play, whose American edition seems to be sped up at the end to fit the BBC documentary into two and three hours. Joice states that she is “sure that he [Bolsonaro] went crazy” when remembering the images of the president offering chloroquine to the rheas at Palácio do Alvorada.
The film then shows the president’s authoritarian rise, with demonstrations of a coup character and questioning the country’s electoral system, and ends with a kind of message from Steve Bannon: “You were completely wrong about [o sucesso de] Trump, you were completely wrong about Bolsonaro. Put your prejudice aside, put the names you call them aside and look at the facts. We’re just getting started, it won’t stop.”
