Jair Bolsonaro: tropical Trump who hankers for days of dictatorship.

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The far-right Brazilian presidential candidate injured in a knife attack is an ex-paratrooper known for lashing out at women, black, gay and indigenous people and foreigners.

The Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro campaigns at the Mercadao de Madureira in Rio de Janeiro last month. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images
▼ Jair Bolsonaro, who has been seriously injured in a knife attack while campaigning to become  Bra zil's next presidentis a polarising figure in an unpredictable election campaign.
He has praised Pinochet, expressed support for torturers and called for political opponents to be shot, earning him the labelof “the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the democratic world”.
But rising violent crime, anger over repeated corruption scandals and an efficient social media operation have helped him gain support, and he is now second in the polls after former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who has been barred from running  because of a criminal conviction for  corruption.
“To his supporters Bolsonaro represents law and order and that’s a very compelling message in a country with 60,000 homicides a year and the  biggest corruption scandal ever  detected anywhere,” Brian Winter, the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, told the Guardian earlier  this year.
Despite being a congressman since 1991, Bolsonaro – a former paratrooper – is running as an outsider ready to upend the establishment.
He paints himself as a tropical Trump: a pro-gun, anti-establishment crusader set on draining the swamp into which Brazil’s futuristic capitalhas sunk.
“Donald Trump got elected saying that crime in the inner cities was out of control, that the economy was a disaster and that the entire political class was corrupt … All three of those things are indisputably true in Brazil,” said Winter.
On the stump – and broadcasting to his 5 million Facebook followers – he lambasts not slimeballs and bad hombres, butvagabundos(losers),canalhas(creeps) andbandidos(crooks).
He accuses critics of peddling fake news, vows to be tough on crime and repeatedly bashes China.
But he is widely loathed by political opponents for his inflammatory attacks on women, black people, gay  people, foreigners and indigenous communities, for which he was fined and even faced charges of inciting  hate speech.
In 2015 he was ordered to pay compensation to a fellow member of congress for saying that she wasn't "worth raping”.
Bolsonaro speaks nostalgically about the country’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship and has promised to fill his government with current and former military leaders. His vice-presidential running mate is a retired general.
Earlier this week, Bolsonaro said during a campaign event that he would like to shoot corrupt members of Lula's Workers’ party.
During the 2016 impeachment proceedings in congress against Lula's successor, Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro  dedicated his vote in favour of her  suspension to a notorious  dictatorship-era torturer. Rousseff was a member of the armed resistance to military rule and was herself tortured.
On Thursday, Rousseff, provoked some anger when she suggested that Bolsonaro’s extremist views could have provoked the attack.
“When you plant hate, you harvest thunderstorms,” she said in an interview with the Folha de S Paulo newspaper.

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