He rails against black people and immigrants, recommends beating children out of being gay and told a female politician she was “too ugly to be raped”. As if that were not incendiary enough, he talks nostalgically of the years of dictatorship.
Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former army captain, knows how to shock, but he is also winning surprising support for his bid to become president.
So much so that this “Trump of the tropics”, as he is often called, has emerged as the unlikely election front-runner in the absence of the favourite: a former president currently barred from the race. Whether denouncing fake news or arguing for guns, Bolsonaro regularly seems to borrow from the playbook of American president Donald Trump.
Arriving on Thursday in