Bolsonaro wants to change Brazil’s stance in global landscape

After spending over an hour visiting presidential front-runner Jair Bolsonaro, politician and lawyer Gustavo Bebbiano said that, if Bolsonaro is elected, Brazil’s stance on the international stage will change “drastically.” Bebbiano, head of Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL), is being eyed as the candidate’s future justice minister, and argued that, unlike Europe, the Latin American left is “backward and based on Bolivarian ideology.”

“We plan to rid Brazil of this evil by following the legal paths of democracy,” he declared.

 Jair Bolsonaro - Tania Rêgo/Agência Brasil

Asked about the situation facing Venezuela, Bebbiano said that the sovereignty of countries must be respected. However, he said, if the PSL wins the elections, political pressure would be exerted, with “calls and demands for human rights, which must reach the population—people who are being persecuted and silenced by death penalty. That’s where human rights have to work, that’s where the UN and the OAS have to speak out,” Bebbiano said.

A regular at Bolsonaro’s house, he said that the human rights policy devised in his party’s campaign will have a branch dedicated to helping those “suffering under the hand of dictatorships that were financed and have been supported to this day by criminal organizations, like the PT [Workers’ Party, founded by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva].”

Bebbiano went on to say that the current regime in Venezuela is “admired” by the PT, which also praises the 50-year-long dictatorship in Cuba, which has led thousands of people to risk their lives swimming to the US, “to escape from Fidel Castro, a retarded scoundrel. This kind of dictatorship is applauded by the Brazilian intellectual elite, part of the press, and by Mr. [Fernando] Haddad [Bosonaro’s challenger in the presidential race] and the Workers’ Party.”