The Bolsonaro Crime Family feat Caio Almendra (E287)
This week we’re heading to a Brazilian hospital — more specifically, the bedside of former President Jair Bolsonaro — to bring you an exploration of the disgraced, grotesque and criminal Bolsonaro family. We’ll be learning how the melted Brazilian right wing emerged from a post-80s yearning for military dictatorship. How the police, criminal right-wing militias and politicians formed an unholy alliance. And how, unfortunately, this corrupt and violent blob led to the brutal murder of a socialist city council woman and human rights activist in Rio de Janeiro. Along the way we’ll be talking about jewel smuggling, whale molesting, and a bouquet of failsons. Our guest writer for this very special episode is Caio Almendra, who’s an editor at The Intercept Brasil.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: http://www.patreon.com/QAA
Caio Almendra: https://x.com/caioalmendra / https://www.intercept.com.br/equipe/caio-almendra / https://caioalmendra.substack.com
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 287, The Bolsonaro Crime Family.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Caio Almendra, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Continuing the QAA Melted World Tour, this week we're heading to a Brazilian hospital to bring you an exploration of the disgraced, grotesque, and criminal Bolsonaro family.
We'll be learning how the cursed Brazilian right wing emerged from a post-80s yearning for military dictatorship.
dictatorship, how the police, criminal right-wing militias, and politicians formed an unholy
alliance, and how, unfortunately, this corrupt and violent blob led to the brutal murder of a
socialist city councilwoman and human rights activist in Rio de Janeiro. Along the way,
we'll be talking about jewel smuggling, whale molesting, and a bouquet of failed sons.
Our guest writer for this very special episode is Caio Almendra, who's an editor at The Intercept
Brazil. Caio, welcome to the podcast.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to be here.
Yeah, I'm really excited for this one because mostly everything I know about Bolsonaro comes from internet memes about him being in the hospital.
So it sounds like there's more depth to him than that though, so I'm excited to learn.
Yeah, it feels like his bowels, his stomach, his asshole, like nothing really works inside this guy.
It's like the end of Inner Space where the human body is just completely breaking down.
Absolutely.
For this episode, I will be playing Caillou Almendra.
Caillou, do you give me permission to perform your script?
Please, be my vice.
Well, I want to play Caillou as well.
Can I read some sections as well?
Absolutely not.
Please shut your little mouth.
Cala boca, seu bosta.
Yes.
This is my favorite part about doing international episodes, is insulting Jake and Travis in the language, and they don't understand anything.
Yeah, I don't understand shit, so it means nothing.
I'm not insulted, and I actually think you might have complimented me.
I did, yes, yes.
Seu Bosta is like a complimentary thing.
You told me I have a strong hairline.
Without further ado, Introdução.
Brazil, a country with 220 million people, recently had a far-right president who emerged from a mass movement, so there's no shortage of topics to discuss.
Actually, there's too much to discuss, so I had to narrow the focus to a single topic.
I chose the relationship between the Brazilian far-right, organized crime, and how this organized crime influences the internet lunatics you so often cover on the QAA podcast.
I made this choice for three reasons.
The first of which is that I was friends with Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro councilwoman who was assassinated by a neighbor and friend of Jair Bolsonaro after leaving a Women's Day event.
So that one is personal to me.
Damn, that's crazy, man.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's awful.
We'll get into it a little later in the episode, but first we have to properly mock the entire Bolsonaro family and have our fun period.
But yes, it will be followed by some pretty grim and, uh, yeah, some pretty grim stuff.
The second reason is that I hope this topic interests you so much, the QA pod audience, that I get invited back.
After all, it's a well-paid gig.
Yeah, I can confirm I paid Caio a decent brick of Deutsch braun.
What's that?
What does that mean?
Dois pra um is like, it literally means two for one, which was the era where you would buy really shitty weed and the slightly better weed was two reais per gram instead of one real for grang.
So it was like, um pra um was like the shittiest weed.
It literally had like cow shit in it.
And dois pra um is like, maybe you would get the absolute worst mids on earth compressed, but without the cow shit.
Okay.
All right.
Pretty good stuff.
Well, I gotta say, you know, you're not really hyping up South America's reputation for having excellent drugs.
They have excellent cocaine for very low price, but the weed gets compressed to oblivion and enhanced, let's say, with droppings.
And like most things in Brazil, the best shit is for exportation.
The worst shit is consuming the internet.
Gotcha.
And honestly, you can still buy what they call skunky, which is just basically buds in the California vein.
You just have to pay a ton of money.
You're paying 50 promos.
Yeah.
Sad.
It might not seem like much to you, but after the financial chaos of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brazilian currency is so devalued that $20 and a Red Lobster gift card are worth a fortune in Brazil.
Kind of like that scene from the movie Eurotrip.
A dollar and 83 cents American.
What are we gonna get with that?
Gotta love that exchange rate.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
Dinner is served.
Would the masters care for anything else?
I think we're good.
Thanks.
Oh!
A nickel!
You see this?
I quit.
I open my own hotel.
(classical music)
So, we got 27 cents left.
What is it doing this time?
That's such a Jake bit.
I love it.
Oh, a nickel!
Finally, I think all left-of-center people in the U.S.
should look at the police in Latin America as a cautionary tale of what could happen with the police in the U.S.
if it continues down its current path.
You should all be learning from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and so on.
Police corruption in Latin America is very romanticized in your movies and TV shows, making the U.S.
blind to how ordinary and close to home it can actually be, just as, you know, strongman authoritarian Latin American presidents were before Trump was elected.
I hope this helps.
I have these little comments about it because after Dobbs, I was watching a Chapel Trap House episode and they were talking, what will happen?
What will happen?
I said, well, the police will manage the abortion clinics, just like happened in Brazil and Mexico and Argentina and so on.
This is the path.
This is what's going to happen in the U.S.
if abortion is fully criminalized.
I believe that the United States can go one better and have the police give the abortions to.
Yeah, they will perform them at the station while you're in handcuffs.
[laughter]
O Gabinete do Ódio.
The Office of Hate.
One of the advantages of studying the politics of Brazil and the U.S.
at the same time is that you become a kind of seer.
And no, I didn't take sandworm adrenochrome, get blue eyes and start seeing the future.
The future, I can see it.
It's that both countries are in a strange situation.
What happens in one, happens in the other.
So if something happens in Brazil, it soon reaches the US, and vice versa.
The far-right disinformation network in Brazil didn't start with the arrival of a Brazilian Q. Initially, it had more similarities with the American right-wing's reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests.
It just so happens that it came many years earlier to Brazil.
Let me give you a brief summary of the recent history of the country.
Brazil emerged from a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1989.
The dictatorship was defeated by a labor strike movement in car factories in Sao Paulo, led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also known as Lula, who soon after created the Workers' Party, or PT.
The PT was an alliance of three distinct political groups.
The unions, organized by the CUT Federation, which stands for the Unified Workers Central.
The intellectuals, who fled the country during the dictatorship and returned after being granted amnesty.
And the popular movements, from the left wing of the Catholic Church and Liberation Theology.
This is the country of Paolo Freire, after all.
So leftist Catholicism had the unique ability to educate and mobilize popular sectors, like landless peasants and homeless people.
Even so, it took decades for the PT to gain enough strength to elect its first president.
Lula went to the second round of the first presidential election, but a media elite, party, and entire establishment arrangement defeated him, not too differently from what happened with Bernie Sanders.
Our first president, Fernando Collor-Gimelo, was a radical neoliberal who privatized everything he could, was accused of corruption, and was eventually impeached in 1992.
He was replaced by Itamar Franco, who managed to stabilize inflation and get his finance minister, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, known as FHC, elected president.
FHC was one of those exiled left-wing intellectuals who returned under amnesty.
But he had shifted to a kind of progressive neoliberalism and founded the PSDB.
What does the PSDB stand for again?
I won't believe it.
Brazilian Social Democracy Party.
It's called Social Democracy, but it was the right-wing party of Brazil for two decades.
They're always doing this.
They're always doing this.
They're putting socialists in it, but it's not socialist at all.
Well, this is because there was, you know, the rise of actual interest in socialism over there.
This would be like if the Republican Party was like, damn, Americans love socialism, we gotta get that in our name, which would never fucking happen.
The Social Republic of America.
So much so that at the time, the then little-known congressman Jair Bolsonaro said that FHC should be executed, that the dictatorship's mistake was not killing people like him.
Thus, the duopoly that dominated Brazilian politics for 24 years was formed.
The right-wing candidate was from the PSDB, the left-wing candidate was from the PT.
And so it went for two PSDB presidencies, with Lula being second in the presidential race, and four PT presidencies, with a PSDB candidate finishing second in those.
Then, in 2016, Dilma Rousseffi, PT, was impeached, her vice president took over, and Lula was imprisoned in a police operation called Lava Jato, which stands for car wash.
Yeah.
We need to car wash these communists.
We need to wash them off our car.
That's such a police operation name, yeah.
I know.
It's funny because it became the police operation name, but the beginning of the operation was because a car wash, an actual car wash, was used to laundry car, like in Breaking Bad.
So they started investigating the car wash and then hit Petrobras.
Yeah, Petrobras, which is the big oil company over there.
So you're basically telling us that all American crime shows essentially originate from real events that took place in Brazil?
Either that or the other way around.
Brazil is a very good inspiration for good crime shows.
If people read a lot of history in Brazil, they could make really, really good shows.
All right, if you're listening, all you writers out there.
My favorite story about Brazilian politics is when a governor for Sao Paulo was running on the slogan, Eu roubo, mas eu faço, which literally stands for, I steal, but I do.
So like, yes, yes, I'm going to steal from you like everybody else, but I also do stuff.
That's a very, like, Melania Trump sort of slogan.
I steal, but I do.
But I do!
God, I mean, I feel like that's a universal kind of pitch to your boss, you know?
If you're working, you know, fast food, be like, do I sneak a couple of apple pies?
Yes, I do.
But am I on time for my shift every single day?
Yes, I am.
Exactly.
Basically, I steal but I get things done.
Which is the funniest fucking political slogan.
It was up on billboards.
Or you could be me and steal and not get things done like when I was a teenager working at the Abercrombie & Fitch Old Orchard Shopping Center retail store.
I think the Statue of Limitations has passed on that, so I can't really get in any trouble, but I stole hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise from that store.
Okay, I don't think you should admit to crimes to a still-existing corporation.
Who's listening?
Who from Abercrombie's listening to this show?
I'm so glad things have changed and you haven't been siphoning off our Patreon money every month and leaving Travis and I destitute.
No!
No, because I can't wear it!
I always go, what are these unexplained charges, Jake?
And it's like a Canada Goose jacket, Lamborghini.
No, it's like seven broken early access Steam games.
Somehow all costing $10,000.
Despite this avalanche of attacks on the PT, it didn't end up being the biggest loser of the following election.
In 2018, Bolsonaro took on the mantle of the right-wing candidacy and won the presidency, while the PT came in second place and the PSDB ended up fourth, with less than 5% of the votes.
And here, I want to explain briefly why, so you understand the origins of the Brazilian alt-right.
The issue of urban violence.
And here I'm going to hand it over to Jake who will be playing Caio for our next segment.
The year?
Lula was 2013, and the PT government had been in power for 10 years.
Its main opposition, the PSDB, was visibly weakening.
Lula left the presidency in 2010 with 80% popularity.
Their traditional conservative leadership had two choices, join Lula's government base or disappear.
Most chose to join Lula.
He created several small parties to house former enemies who realized the winds had changed.
Oh, that's kind of crazy.
Yeah, imagine that.
Keep your enemies close, eh?
Imagine the Republicans being like, well, I guess we'll join Bernie Sanders.
That's absolutely wild.
It doesn't feel like anything we're reading about this could ever happen in America because people are way too stubborn and stupid.
Yeah, this kind of duopoly that you have in the US, it's starting to happen with Bolsonaro and Lula now.
Before, it wasn't like that at all.
People would vote for a PT candidate in presidency and a PSDB candidate in government.
To other candidates and for Congress and so on.
It was really massive and chaotic.
But it was good because it means change was possible.
It was possible to look at the political landscape and this is shapeable.
This is movable.
Things can change, things can go on and so on.
This is, you know, my grandparents voted like this.
They, you know, one year they would vote for a Republican candidate and then four years later they would vote for the Democratic candidate.
I mean, they switched off like this pretty often.
What I'm hearing, Caio, is that the problem of polarization is also happening in Brazil and that you guys could solve it if only you would have civil and polite discourse with each other.
But not everything was rosy in Lula's government.
The Brazilian prison population exploded at the time, and police violence remained high.
Rio de Janeiro is the main focus of the favela movies film industry, which spectacularizes violence.
There, Lula's ally, Sergio Cabral, implemented a new policy.
The building of a military police headquarters inside each favela in the tourist area.
The dictatorship in the favelas ensured tranquility on the tourist beaches.
And, of course, the idea was to sell Brazil as the country of the future, host of the World Cup, and Rio de Janeiro as a modern city that had solved violence and, soon after, would host the Olympics.
It's so funny that it's like, in order to host the Olympics, we must solve violence.
It's like, don't worry guys, everything will be prepared for the Olympics.
But I guess around the world the Olympics is a lot more popular than it is in the United States.
It happens everywhere the Olympics goes.
Look at, or in the World Cup, look at what happened in South Africa.
First it's strongmen, police everywhere, mass arrests and so on, protests and so on.
And then peace, tranquil, one month events and it's over.
It's insane.
I mean, these these large events are essentially just the local government doing everything they can to expose the main jugular of the local population, especially the working class, so that all the corporate vampires can gather in one place and feed.
So true.
And they are so incredibly corrupt.
So much money goes to politicians and contracting firms and so on.
Anyways, never talk bad about the World Cup again, Caio.
I love it.
I know Brazil's been performing like shit, but... There is this John Oliver segment that I love.
It's about FIFA.
It's like a religion.
It builds big monuments.
It's lovely.
We are very invested in it.
And it's very corrupt and insane and so on.
Yeah, and during the building of the monuments, slavery is temporarily legal.
Yeah, exactly.
I lived in a dormitory that was built solely for the purpose of housing Olympic athletes in the 80s in Los Angeles, and by the time, you know, that we were moved in there as students, it was crumbling to the ground.
I mean, it represented everything that was decaying beneath, you know, the sort of kind of veneer of wealth and, yeah, just sort of... Wow.
I didn't realize that they made jacking off onto a ThinkPad an Olympic event.
It's called Gooning.
However, to implement all of this, the police had to kill a lot of people.
Comparing Brazilian and U.S.
violence statistics might help illustrate this for you.
In Brazil, there are practically no areas like the suburbs with close to zero cases of homicide.
State capitals and large cities have numbers ranging from Chicago to Baltimore.
It's wild.
Yeah.
Then, as Lula's government came to an end, something strange started happening.
It started as a small incident but quickly escalated and dominated the entire country and Brazilian social media.
The office of hate.
When a black minor died in a police operation, which was relatively common, Photos of quote similar looking children or who didn't look like them at all holding rifles were spread on the internet with phrases like quote the left will say it was an innocent child but here she is working for traffickers and the police killed this seed of evil and the human rights defenders are feeling sorry and similar things.
A machine of defamation against victims of police violence exploded in Brazil.
For me there's little doubt where this came from.
Straight from the offices of opposition deputies to Lula, the PSDB began to accept far-right politicians, former police officers and military personnel, and operated these troll caves from within their offices.
Then came the case of Maria Eduarda, a girl killed in 2017 at just 13 years old.
The day after her death, numerous photos of girls who didn't look like her flooded the internet, holding rifles, snorting cocaine, dancing.
The family had to bury their daughter beneath this rain of lies.
I mean, I can't imagine.
First of all, how soulless you'd have to be like, well, that was too bad.
Time to fire up the smear campaign against a 13-year-old dead girl.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, this is the, like, uh, they-were-no-angel shit that they do in the United States after the cops kill a black kid.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, which would be irrelevant, which would be irrelevant, uh, you know, even if it was true, but here they're just, it's irrelevant.
It's like, well, this is, this looks bad for us.
Here's how, here's how we justify.
We make up lies about what a criminal drug user they were.
Anyone trying to figure out the origins of this disinformation started stumbling upon groups of judges, prosecutors, and members of the ruling class.
These were the very people who were supposed to ensure justice for those killed by the police.
Instead, they were the first to spread lies about the victims.
Yeah, and that's true.
Most of those... Cabinete do Ódio, the Office of Hate was judges, desembarcadores, that's the second tier of the judiciary, and so on.
And the prosecutors and most of the Cabinete do Ódio were people from the judiciary and so on.
It's insane.
Wow.
Do you think they were just trying to protect their own squad?
To see this ruling judicial class go so hard against smearing these victims just feels like, I don't know, feels like overkill.
Yeah, but it is.
Around the same time, Brazil saw the entrance of militias into electoral politics.
Here, we need to pause to explain what militias are.
What are Militias?
Militias are not militias, but they claim to be.
They pretend to be communities self-organizing to combat drug traffickers, but nothing could be more false.
Even the name Militia is propaganda, part of an advertising campaign the group created to brand itself.
One of the most famous Militias in Rio de Janeiro had the audacity to call itself the quote Justice League, and its leaders gave themselves nicknames like Batman, The easiest way to explain milicias is to say that they're a type of organized crime with similarities to the mafia.
Mostly, milicias are formed by former police officers and firefighters.
They dominate specific territories, with the discourse that they provide protection to the entire neighborhood against drug traffickers and robbers.
In exchange for these quote-unquote protection services, they charge fees from residents and businesses.
Yes, it's fundamentally a protection racket, but imagine Tony Soprano was actually the guy from The Shield or Bad Lieutenant.
So cool.
The formation of Militias did not go unnoticed.
In 2008, a parliamentary commission on the Militias, the CPI das Militias, was established, and after months of work by a left-wing state congressman, Marcelo Freixo from PSOL, roughly equivalent to the DSA in the US, and human rights activists, hundreds of Militia members were arrested.
A romanticized version of this story is told in the movie Elite Squad 2.
One of the state congressman's aides was Marielle Franco.
But the CPI didn't completely solve the problem.
Over time, militias recovered their former strength and grew larger than ever.
In Rio, famously, militias killed a judge and threatened several authorities with death, including Marcelo Freixo.
On the matter of the judge's assassination, Flavio Bolsonaro, Jair's son and state congressman, said, quote, Her death is tragic, but considering the way she mistreated prosecuted police officers, of course she had a lot of enemies.
Militias in Rio elect a significant number of state and federal congresspeople, and city council members as well, and they dominate a decent part of the police.
It's common to say that Brazil has the BBB caucus, a double entendre joke with Big Brother Brazil, the country's most successful reality show, but in this case it stands for Bovines, Bullets, and Bibles.
The Bullet Caucus is formed by police officers, military personnel, and the like.
All this is not so different from the NRA Caucus, except for its form of financing.
Brazil has many problems, but a bloated military budget, forever wars, and giga-military contractors are not among them.
There is an arms industry, especially Taurus gun manufacturers, but nothing as wealthy as the NRA.
So how does the Bullet Caucus survive?
Well, it also directly defends the interests of police corruption, and it receives money and structures from militias.
This created a vicious cycle.
The stronger the militias, the greater the population's feeling of insecurity, which in turn made them vote for the far right, which increased police budgets, invested in more rifles and personnel, weaponry then diverted to organized crime, and personnel vacancies were filled by corrupt future militia members.
Because of the social justification that militias prevent the entry of traffickers, there's a normalization of their actions.
Many militia members become deputies.
They don't elect deputies committed to the militia.
Militia leaders become deputies.
Congressman Soprano.
I like that.
Gotta bring him back.
He be awesome in Congress.
I miss him.
Ugh, he would be awesome.
I know.
Bolsonaro, of course, is the king of the Bullet Caucus.
He has no direct involvement with the milicia, but it's worth exploring the origins of their relationship.
So, without further ado, enter the Bolsonaro clan.
Jair and his failsons.
A brief history of Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro was an army captain who was dishonorably discharged during Brazil's redemocratization in the 1980s.
While Brazil was passing a new constitution, granting amnesty to its political prisoners, and starting to dismantle dictatorial institutions like censorship, singing the national anthem every morning in schools, and especially stupid ministers, there was an upsurge in political conflicts.
Pro-democracy advocates organized large marches, music festivals, and university occupations.
Opponents of democratic reform, the military in particular, planted bombs and accused the left of terrorism.
Yeah, they planted bombs, and then they said that the communists were to blame.
So by the way, this is basically the strategy of tension.
This is a Gladio.
Yeah.
This is Operation Gladio 101.
Yeah.
Domestic Gladio.
Great.
Since no one investigated, it became a narrative dispute over terrorism.
On April 30th, 1981, a terrorist attack on a large music festival that had been organized by pro-democracy advocates celebrating International Workers' Day had a little plot twist, because this time, the bomb exploded in the laps of the military personnel who were carrying out the attack, right after they parked their car.
Sergeant Rosario died instantly.
Captain Machado, Yeah, their names were Rosary and Axe, survived.
He left the car carrying his own entrails and was attended to at a hospital.
The group also threw a bomb at the power station of the concert venue.
During their escape, the bomb tosser shouted, You haven't seen anything.
The worst will be inside.
The bomb that blew up Axe and Rosary had been intended for the packed concert interior.
It would have killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people.
Twenty-five years later, CIA files on the case were unsealed and proved that the plan was known of by the Brazilian presidential cabinet.
And, Caio, we were discussing this, but I guess Reagan later learned of this and just kept it also a secret?
Yeah, Reagan learned in 82 or 84 and never told anyone about it.
He just sit on the information, didn't talk to the press, didn't say to Brazil, nothing.
He just, OK, they did that, nothing to see here.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it wasn't his interest to have another military dictatorship in Brazil, so… Three years later, Brazil had its first civilian president in 20 years.
The military was on the ropes.
The country was in a deep economic crisis and experiencing hyperinflation.
Some of the military's salaries and privileges were cut.
So, Jair Bolsonaro, then a military captain, wrote an open letter to a major magazine complaining about their salaries.
The following year, he was discharged for quote-unquote indiscipline.
He had been planning to plant bombs in barracks and a dam to convince the military to mobilize against redemocratization.
Some of his accomplices denounced him, and he ended up being arrested for insubordination and dismissed.
This is even crazier.
Like, when the strategy of tension gets to the point where someone inside the military is going to bomb the military to get the military to become more right-wing.
That is, uh, just amazing.
Oh, because the military was on its knees, so it was advancing redemocratization.
They accepted that the military is over, so democracy will arrive soon.
If we manage and control it, and they did, Brazil supposed to have a democracy in '80,
then '84, then we only have a few election in '89.
So they tried to manage and then postpone the first election and so on.
And they only did it because they know that the Soviet Union was over in '89.
So that was the main plot about it.
And the hardliners like Bolsonaro planned to bomb the KG, so the military would stop
advancing redemocratization.
That was the insane part.
The military bombing itself to explain its own existence and continued control.
Yeah, exactly this.
Awesome.
And that's how his political career began.
Right after the case, he was elected city councilman of Rio de Janeiro with the platform of returning to the good old military times.
Soon, he became a congressman in Brasilia, where he stayed for 28 years.
In 1995, Jair Bolsonaro was mugged and had his motorcycle and gun stolen.
To the press, he said, After filing a police report, Bolsonaro mobilized 50 police officers to look for the robbers.
A drug trafficker from a local favela heard about the incident and ordered the robbers to return the stolen items.
The trafficker feared the case would lead to a military occupation of the favela.
The actual return of the stolen goods was made by a captain of Rio's equivalent to SWAT, named Ronnie Lessa.
Remember that name.
Okay, let's get to the sons.
Bolsonaro famously calls them zero-um, zero-dois, zero-treis, zero-quatro, which is zero-one, zero-two, zero-three, and zero-four.
Military jargon for troop ranks.
Ai, ai, ai.
Conheça os Bolsonaros.
Meet the Fail Sons.
Carlos Bolsonaro has three kids from his first marriage, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, aka Carlos, Flavio, and Eduardo.
His first wife's name is Rogeria Nantes Nunes Braga.
Two years after being elected City Councilman, he was elected Federal Deputy.
With his seat vacant, he supported her election as City Councilwoman in 1992 and 1996.
Okay, so his seat was vacated and then he was like, my wife will fill in these seats.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
In 1997, upset because she participated in city council votes without asking him how she should vote, Jair divorced her.
There are rumors she had been cheating on him since the 80s.
In the 2000s, she ran for re-election.
Annoyed, Bolsonaro took a Freudian step.
He convinced his son, Carlos Bolsonaro, to run against his own mother.
Oh, this is fucked up.
That's awesome.
Oh, these boys, these boys need therapy.
Yes, he convinced his son to steal his mother's elected position.
To make things worse, the boy was only 17, and yes, he won, destroying his mother's political career.
Awesome.
So, so the public was like, yes, yes, we trust this 17-year-old boy over, over this adult woman.
Yep.
Great, that bodes well.
Carlos is the family's, quote, internet genius.
Uh-oh.
Not good.
Even worse.
They found a way.
They found a way!
They found a way to connect to the government.
It's known that he managed his father's social media for many years, and despite still being a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro, he actively participated in the palace intrigues of the then president.
Well, for reference, Rio is 1183 miles away from Brasilia, roughly New York to Baton Rouge.
Despite running a very homophobic social media campaign, Carlos is rumored to be gay, posting thirst traps on social media and having a weird relationship with his cousin.
Okay.
Over time, the family stopped denying the rumors.
Flavio Bolsonaro, 01.
Three years later, in 2003, it was the turn of the oldest brother, Flavio Bolsonaro, to enter politics.
Apparently, Flavio Bolsonaro, who was of legal age during Carlos's first election, refused to run against his mother, claiming he had to focus on college.
He was elected state deputy.
In Brazil, it's the states, not municipalities, that manage the police.
So it was Flavio who legislated on police activities.
Throughout his career, Flavio got involved with Milicias in two different ways.
In his paramilitary activities, he honored them and gave medals and accommodations to various known Milicia members.
The second way Flavio Bolsonaro got involved with Milicias is through his primary role in the family.
Flavio Bolsonaro is the clan's treasurer, the Moneybag Man.
He has a chocolate shop with strange financial movements.
For instance, it sold more chocolate in July one year than on Easter.
But above all, he got rich buying and selling real estate, always in cash.
The main source of this money is not traditional corruption, where a businessman pays deputies to pass a bill, but what we call Rashadzhinia.
Basically, he hires ghost employees and keeps most of their salaries.
Wait, explain this to me a little bit.
So basically you hire someone like a friend's son or wife and they never show up for work and you collect most of the money you supposedly pay for them.
Okay.
For such a scheme to work, you need to ensure no employee reports anything to the police.
And the way Flavio decided to do this was by hiring a militia man to be the salary collector.
Okay, so he hires law enforcement to be the guy who's collecting the salaries.
Not even, these are like paramilitary endorsed crime units.
So this is like, what's the television show equivalent?
This is like the least functional member of the A-team?
In this case, Fabricio Jose Carlos Chiqueiros, who was a lieutenant in the Rio de Janeiro Military Police.
As a police officer, he was involved in at least 10 shootouts with fatalities.
Oh no!
Yeah, he's just going on the spree.
He's just killing people.
And in at least one of them, there were clear signs of execution.
Oh God.
During that specific operation, he invaded a favela with four other military police officers, including one Adriano da Nobrega.
Remember that name.
Adriano's mother and wife were ghost employees of Flavio Bolsonaro.
And as I said, all this oiled the machine of real estate purchases.
Altogether, the Bolsonaro family bought 51 properties.
Always with cash.
Eduardo Bolsonaro is the youngest of the three sons from Bolsonaro's first marriage.
In total, Jair has five children from three marriages, and of all three of them, he took the longest to enter politics.
Before running for office, Eduardo Bolsonaro did an exchange program in the U.S., quote, work experience, where he flipped burgers and learned excellent English.
Why he didn't have an exchange?
He didn't listen to him.
When he receives... This... Where this... This... This... It's... It's the... Him trying to speak English?
Damn!
And joining us, Eduardo Bolsonaro.
A Brazilian congressman re-elected in October.
And he is also son of Brazil's president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro.
Congressman, great to have you with us and congratulations to you, to your father, the people of Brazil.
It's been a tough four years for your country, a proud and prosperous country that has now faced almost every kind of political corruption and economic deterioration.
A huge number of challenges for your father to lead the nation against.
Good evening, Louie, and everybody.
Thanks about the space.
Yeah, we have a real challenge ahead, like, but someone have to do that.
We have to clean it up.
A lot of mess and a lot of corrupt.
And that's also why my father just named it as the next Justice Minister of Brazil, the judge, Sergio Moro, who is in the head of the car wash operation.
After studying law, Eduardo passed a civil service exam and became a federal police clerk.
He moved to Sao Paulo, and from there, he ran for federal congressman in 2014.
He is the Klan's quote, international representative and ideological guardian.
He's good friends with Steve Bannon, having met the disgraced executive chairman of Breitbart several times.
He also met Donald Trump a few times, and even was a Fox News guest on both Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson's show.
I can't imagine what his meeting with Trump was like.
Just two guys shouting gibberish at one another.
Neither understands the other one.
It's just sound waves meeting in the middle of two men and hugging.
Henan Bolsonaro, 04.
And then we have Jair Henan Bolsonaro, son of Jair's second marriage.
As a teenager, Henan tried being a gaming YouTuber.
Oh, should have stuck with that.
During one of his live streams, Henan was asked if it was true that his dad used to have sex with chickens growing up on a farm.
Henan answered, ask him or ask the chicken.
That's a funny response.
I think he might have had a future as a YouTuber.
That's a very quick comeback.
Lock him in a room with Mr. Beast.
Pay him, you know, $500,000.
Can you last with the chickens 100 days in the room?
The U.S.
had so much luck with Jorge Santos in porting Brazilian politicians.
He was the best!
What about J.E.
Hernández?
He was the most entertaining thing that we got from the right in a while.
We need more Brazilians.
Especially if they're, like, inveterate conmen, like, pretending to be somebody else.
So Hanon was 19 when his father took office as president.
He quickly became his operator, selling access to the office in exchange for favors and investments in his companies.
All shell companies, some linked to gaming and the market of YouTube influencers.
Yeah, that's awesome.
He's like DMing the community manager of Apex Legends.
He's getting Jade Bolsonaro to insert an ad for Raid Shadow Legends into his speeches.
They even wrote to us recently.
We got a request to be Raid Shadow Legends guys?
Yes, I didn't pass it on to you because I knew you would say yes.
Why?
Why?
I just want to know.
I just want to know so we can make funnies about it.
No, we can't make any funnies, and we will never mention it again.
We receive no such email.
We can't mention, yeah.
No mention.
I mean, if you want, you can also just read our podcast emails and start taking care of that.
Mmm, I don't think so.
If you want, you can live in an extra room in my house and become my secretary.
I don't think so.
If you want, you can pleasure me.
I don't think so.
Hated by his three older brothers, his businesses seem to not involve the regular family businesses.
Yeah, he's the gamer.
They're like, fuck that.
He's like, I got my own side hustle, pops.
Fraquejada.
Finally, we have Jair's daughter.
She is the daughter of Bolsonaro's third and current wife, the devout evangelical rumored to be an ex-escort and presidential candidate hopeful, Michelle Bolsonaro.
The kid always seems grumpy when next to her father.
Jair once said, quote, I had four kids.
On the fifth one, I was feeling a bit weak, so a daughter was born.
That's so cool.
Great guy.
Instead of like zero one zero two, he's calling her minus zero.
Terrible.
Negative one.
It's that Godzilla prequel, but for people.
But she's a child, and worse, Bolsonaro's daughter.
So I won't say anything bad about her.
The murder of Marielle Franco.
In 2016, Marielle Franco was elected City Councilwoman of Rio de Janeiro, the fifth most voted for in the entire city.
Marielle was a black bisexual woman from the Maré favela.
At 11, she worked with her parents as a street vendor.
She was a funky dancer from 14 to 17 years old.
Then, she worked as an educator in a daycare center.
She took a community college prep course, studied sociology on a scholarship at the Catholic University, the best private university in Rio.
And she got a master's degree in public administration.
Her research was precisely about the policy of creating a police headquarters on top of each favela in tourist areas.
After the death of a friend in a confrontation between police and traffickers, she began her human rights activism.
She was Marcelo Freixo's parliamentary aide during the CPI das Militias, but did not participate in that part of the mandate's daily work.
Marielle was popular enough to help elect David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's then-partner, also from PSOL at the time.
Her campaign enchanted many people, especially human rights defenders and the left.
During her parliamentary term, she co-existed with Councilman Carlos Bolsonaro and with several Militia members.
At least a third of Rio's city council members had some connection to the Militia.
Marielle tried to bring the tradition of human rights activism to her work, fighting police violence and militias to the city council, just as Freixo did in the Rio State Legislative Assembly.
Here, two activities stood out, hearing witnesses about police violence from the Olaria Battalion, the city's most violent militia, and fighting land appropriation schemes.
Many favelas are built in areas that are not legally regularized.
They may be public lands, forgotten inheritance remnants, etc.
Legalizing a favela can mean giving property rights to the residents, ensuring an essential right, or it can be a unique opportunity to remove the favela and gentrify the neighborhood.
Even so, Mariela's mandate was not particularly bothersome to the milicia.
After all, she was one of the five PSOL council members, another two were from PT, and all voted relatively the same.
The CPI das Milícias had also fallen into relative oblivion.
And despite being a serious problem, no one saw the milícias as a direct affront to authorities, unlike before, when they had killed that judge.
So, it was a tremendous surprise when on March 14th, 2018, Marielle was assassinated.
She was leaving an International Women's Day event at Casa das Pretas, House of Black Women, when a car pulled up next to her, and a man fired 13 shots.
Three hit her in the head, one in her neck, and three more hit the driver.
Mariella's press aide, who was also in the car, was not hit.
The crime was very well executed.
The precision of the shots was considered excellent for an attack on someone in a car.
The shooter used a fake sleeve to pretend to be a black man.
The murder happened in a location where traffic control cameras had been turned off a few days before.
The ammunition was registered to the federal police, but it was from a batch that went missing at a post office.
This continued the vicious cycle.
More ammunition for the police is more ammunition diverted to organized crime.
The car used in the crime was dismantled, the hitmen didn't carry cell phones, they wore gloves, and there were no fingerprints.
Nothing.
The murder weapon, an HK MP5 submachine gun, was used by special forces.
The day after the murder, while there were marches demanding a serious and quick investigation, a wave of fake news hit Telegram, WhatsApp, and Facebook groups.
A photo of a woman who didn't look like Marielle at all, sitting on the lap of someone who didn't look like trafficker Marcinho Vepe, circulated, claiming Marielle was Marcinho Vepe's girlfriend and was killed in a dispute between rival traffickers.
The office of hate went in overdrive.
To this day, with the crime fully clarified, these made-up versions of what happened remain extremely prevalent among Bolsonaro supporters.
The most bizarre versions involve her having a child with Marcinho Vipe at 16 and being killed over a drug purchase debt.
Over the following years, the Homicide Division made all sorts of silly mistakes.
A milicia councilman accused another milicia councilman of being the person who ordered the hit, to divert investigations from himself.
Some of these mistakes fed directly into Bolsonaro's lie networks.
For a while, for example, the police investigated whether another peaceful candidate, a 65-year-old university professor, killed Marielle to take her city council seat.
Even so, the hitmen were arrested in 2019.
And finally, in May of this year, 2024, the people who ordered the hit were arrested.
Here is the full story.
The complete story of Marielle's death.
Marielle's hitmen were Elcio de Queiroz, who drove the car, and Ronnie Lessa.
Remember Ronnie?
The one who recovered Bolsonaro's motorcycle from traffickers as a favor?
Would you be surprised to know that Ronnie Lessa was Bolsonaro's neighbor, and that Elcio Queiroz was his personal friend, taking several pictures with him and posting them on Facebook and everything?
Both worked for a hit squad called The Crime Office.
Yes, not very subtle.
The head of the crime office was Adriano Danobriga.
Adriano was killed by police in 2020 while on the run.
The death was strange, and many suspect it was a cover-up.
Adriano Danobriga's ex-wife and mother were ghost employees of Flavio Bolsonaro, in the scheme we mentioned earlier that enriched the family and generated so many cash real estate purchases.
Adriano da Nobrega also received a Legislative Medal of Honor, requested by Flavio Bolsonaro.
Questioned about the photos of Jair with the hitmen of a political opponent, Jair claimed that Ronnie's daughter had dated Jair Renan.
Today it's known that Jair Renan is gay, had relationships with an aide inside his company.
But more relevantly, questioned about this relationship, Jair Renan said he didn't remember anything because, quote, he had dated all the girls in the condominium.
In response, a humorous podcast made the funky 0-4 is transant.
Roughly, 0-4 is a ladies' man, but literally translated to 0-4 fucks a lot.
Brazil, a country of contrasts where a horrible assassination leads to a very funny funk satire song.
On the day of the assassination, the two hitmen left the condominium where Lessa and Bolsonaro lived before traveling to where they killed Marielle.
Then they spent the rest of the day in a bar to try to create alibis before Ronnie returned to the condominium, again, the one where Bolsonaro lived.
But there's no perfect crime with only a client and hitmen.
You also need a logistics guy, a Kevin Spacey in 21, a clock king from Batman, a brain for the pinkies.
In this case, the person they picked was Rivaldo Barboza, who took over as head of the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police, roughly the detective squad, on March 8th, 2018, International Women's Day, and six days before Marielle's assassination.
He was the one who told the hitmen which traffic cameras in the city were out of order and broken.
According to the federal police, he meticulously planned the assassination.
And once he became head of the civil police, well, remember the useless investigations?
Rivaldo was one of several police officers involved with the militia and therefore was actively diverting them.
Rivaldo took over as head of the civil police on March 13th, one day before Marielli's assassination.
The Civil Police Intelligence Service and the Internal Affairs Office warned that Rivaldo was involved with the militia and should not be appointed to the position, but these reports were ignored.
The person who signed his promotion was General Walter Braga Netto.
Questioned about Marielli's assassination in January 2019, the general commented the following
about the execution. "We, the federal military, did all the investigative work. We didn't want
to become the center of attention in all this. I could have announced who we thought it was
that killed Marielli Franco, but he never announced who it was." About the reason for
this, he said, "It was a bad evaluation on the murderer's part of Marielli Franco's influence.
They evaluated badly."
They did.
The investigation that led to the Brazan brothers' arrest confirmed that there was a huge overreaction to Marielle's actual power and influence to fight the milicias.
The Brazans were just paranoid about Pissol's actions in the CPI das Milicias, when several of their milicia colleagues were arrested.
So, Braganetto knew who ordered Marielli's assassination and why, but never revealed it publicly, even when the press announced that the investigation was following up on outlandish leads.
In 2022, this Braganetto was the vice-presidential candidate on Jair Bolsonaro's ticket.
After five years in prison, the shooter Elsio made a deal with the prosecution and snitched
on the people who ordered the hit, Councilman Chiquinho Brazão and his brother Domingos
Brazão, former state congressman and current budget judge of the state of Rio.
Along with them, Rivaldo Barbosa, the head of the civil police of Rio de Janeiro, responsible
for the Marielle case investigation, were arrested.
I think America should take a cue from Brazilian politics.
It would be so...
Things are already bad enough.
Why not go as far as having Adam Schiff put a hit out on Mitch McConnell?
This would be like him taking a hit out on Lauren Boebert.
That would make things—I mean, things already feel bad.
Why not go to that next step?
I don't want anybody to get hurt, but I do want people to get caught in these plots.
Okay.
I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to take hits out on each other, but I also want to say that the reason we don't take hits out on each other here in America is because, even in the imaginary of the Americans, these people have no power to make any— I mean, obviously they had like overestimated what Marielle could do, but she at least tried to put in place what she promised her voters.
She was mainly talking to population, to the population that live in the militia areas that move on, don't buy houses here.
This is a bad place to live.
We need to take care of the militias, avoid every deal with a militia man.
If they're trying to sell you an apartment in a building, don't buy it, and so on.
She was trying to divert people from buying buildings on militia-controlled areas.
That was the main problem, that the militias got insane about it.
It was like, you know, this woman is telling the world that we are dangerous, that we are,
we will put them on risk and so on.
Bolsonaro no corner.
Bolsonaro cornered.
The Brazão family commands one of the city's most powerful militias.
Rivaldo commands a legalized milicia, a security consultancy that subtly extorts clients, especially construction companies.
Flavio Bolsonaro profits from real estate speculation in the same region.
All are friends, but it's unlikely that the Bolsonaros knew beforehand that Marielle would be assassinated.
However, when popular pressure for the arrest of the men who had ordered the hit became too strong, Bolsonaro helped interfere.
During his government, he made several changes to the Federal Police Superintendent of Rio de Janeiro to divert some investigations away from his son.
These changes also interfered in the crime investigation of Marielle's death.
The Federal Police considers it unlikely that Bolsonaro had prior knowledge of the crime.
Even so, such close proximity to some of the most important characters in this story, from the shooters, to the people who ordered the hit, to the accessories after the fact, left Bolsonaro cornered.
He has avoided saying anything about the murders.
The Office of Hate, Brazil's hoax machine, focused on showing pictures of Brazão with Lula and Dilma.
Remember how Lula was so popular even conservatives supported him, in order to get votes and stay in office?
Yes, the Brazão brothers are among them, but they were from the Bullet Caucus, and Bolsonaro was this caucus's king.
And this adds to other recent cases in the judiciary.
Like his counterpart Donald Trump, Bolsonaro currently faces several lawsuits.
Corruption, receiving jewels from the Saudi prince amid negotiations to sell an oil refinery to the Saudis, negligence during COVID, using public funds for electoral activities, and a certain crime against nature that we'll get into in a moment.
The diplomatic incident that left Bolsonaro ineligible.
Bolsonaro was president from 2019 to 2022, losing the re-election to Lula.
During the electoral campaign, polls pointed to Lula's victory.
Bolsonaro planned a military coup and tried to execute it on January 6th, which I understand was covered in this podcast, in an episode with my friend Benjamin Fogel.
Yeah, that was fun.
Wild!
January 6th is the day!
According to a recent report that interviewed U.S.
diplomats and officials, the U.S.
State Department warned that a coup would not be tolerated by the United States.
The U.S.
has historical relations and numerous cooperation agreements, arms sales, etc.
with the Brazilian armed forces.
But this did not deter Bolsonaro from the coup plan.
His tactic, therefore, was to try to plant the seed of a judicial coup, Bush vs. Gore style.
He could not be accused of committing a coup if he managed to convince everyone that the true coup plotter was Lula.
So Jair Bolsonaro decided to deal with the international pressure against his coup plans by proving that it was Lula, a man who less than three months earlier was in prison for crimes he was unjustly accused of.
This man, Lula, would, in Bolsonaro's theory, have the power in the judiciary to create an electoral coup.
Bolsonaro implicated our electronic voting system, which has been working for 30 years and is considered reliable by the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian population.
So, he summoned foreign ambassadors from all over the world to the Palazzo d'Alvarada, claiming it would be an official activity.
There, the ambassadors were subjected to a poorly disguised campaign rally, where Bolsonaro attacked Lula, two Supreme Court justices, and the president of the Superior Electoral Court, followed by a tedious and false explanation about the integrity of electronic voting machines.
Ambassadors present leaked to the press that, quote, It was the most insane meeting they've ever been to in their lives.
That's awesome.
He just fucking, he's like, okay, we have a official government business.
Everybody gather around.
And he just does like a Trump speech.
Yeah, he's cheating.
The story convinced no one.
Bolsonaro lost and disappeared for two months.
Nice.
No official event, no succession work, nothing.
News was leaking continuously during this period.
Bolsonaro met several times with the top military leadership, but they refused to help him do his coup.
The international pressure was too great.
This quote-unquote diplomatic event did not escape the judiciary's eyes.
It's not every day you insult a Supreme Court justice while committing the crime of using official resources, the palace, for private matters, the electoral dispute.
It is notable here that the only reason he wasn't able to just pull off a coup is because the U.S.
said no this time.
For the first time in their lives, they're like, you know what, maybe this one is not a good coup.
We actually think the economy will probably be better under Lula.
That's it.
Thank God.
The market has spoken.
Plus, we got our own problems right now.
We got our own problems.
We can't deal with your coup.
We can't support your coup.
We've got, like, way too many things going on at home.
The market has spoken, and they thought a coup would be unprofitable at this time.
See, but this really, I think, shows me why Bolsonaro is not a perfect analog for Trump because there's no way Trump would voluntarily be out of the public eye for two months.
Yes, that's true.
He's been out of the public eye for 10 days now.
Although I would love to see Trump just begging military leaders like, please, please, can we do a coup?
Come on, you're going to love it.
It's going to be great, like old times, like in the 80s, baby.
A trial on this case in the electoral court ended with a conviction, rendering Bolsonaro ineligible for any elections in Brazil for eight years.
Yes, he is a convicted felon like Trump, but unlike Trump, he is out of the presidential race.
Wow.
Good job, Brazil.
Mm-hmm.
That's a win there.
Back to 2022.
The elections took place in October and Bolsonaro spent November trying to convince the military to stage a coup without success.
Cornered, all that was left was to flee.
But for that, he needed his go-bag.
The Saudi Jewels scandal comprises the following mafia comedy.
In October 2021, Bolsonaro made a trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
He had a complete entourage with him, including the Minister of Mines and Energy, Marshal Bento Albuquerque.
Wait, his last name is Albuquerque?
How do you say that in Portuguese?
Albuquerque.
It's a really common name in Brazil, in fact.
Albuquerque.
I love that about Brazil, how, like, a bunch of people are called, like, Washington and, like, Lincoln.
So cool.
This is the ministry responsible for everything oil-related.
The scandal started when two airport customs officers, two heroes of the land, searched the backpacks of a minister's aide, found a wooden horse sculpture, and inside it found a set of luxury jewels, including a necklace, ring, watch, and diamond earrings, valued at around 16.5 million reais, the equivalent of 5 million dollars.
They were seized by the IRS at Guadalupe airport.
The goods had not been declared.
The jewels were received from the Saudi royal family as a gift.
The official justification for these gifts is that they were a demonstration of goodwill and reinforcement of diplomatic relations between the countries.
But anyways, Brazil has a state oil company, Petrobras, which Bolsonaro was trying to privatize, selling off refineries, etc.
And the Saudis were one of the most interested in the acquisition of these.
The jewels were seized and remained in the possession of the Federal Revenue.
And for months, Bolsonaro and Bento Albuquerque tried to recover the jewels, which, I repeat, they had hidden inside a wooden horse statue.
They wrote several letters, orders, and requests asking for the return of the jewels.
Besides the first set, a second set of jewels, including a watch, pen, cufflinks, ring, and rosary, were imported irregularly and personally delivered to Bolsonaro at the Palacio da Alvorada in November 2022.
In December 2022, in the last days of Bolsonaro's terms, there were new attempts to release the jewels, including the use of a Brazilian Air Force plane.
Wait, what?
What do you mean?
They were going to, like, go?
They landed the plane in Guarulhos Airport, and they tried to have an aide sneak it from the IRS at Guarulhos Airport and put it on the plane to flee back to Brasília.
Wow.
Wow.
They really wanted those jewels.
These actions involved government officials, including the aide-de-camp of the presidency, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Sigi, Bolsonaro's trusted man.
According to anonymous sources in the palace, Bolsonaro was paranoid about the possibility of being arrested, and therefore wanted to gather money to flee.
In December 2022, Bolsonaro left the country and spent months in the United States.
He was not present in the country for Lula's inauguration, as would have been customary.
As the investigations unfolded, several people involved in the case were arrested.
Among them, standout Bolsonaro aides like Lt.
Col.
Mauro Sigi were detained under suspicion of involvement in the scheme.
Mauro Sigi's father is retired Brazilian Army General Mauro Cesar Lourena Sigi.
He was a classmate of Jair Bolsonaro at the Military Academy of Agulhas Negras, Brazil's West Point.
Mauro Sigi Sr.
almost got arrested after advertising a luxury watch given as a gift to Bolsonaro.
He was discovered because his face appeared in the reflection of the glass protecting the watch.
So... He's trying to pawn the watch off and you can see his face?
On the front of it!
Fuck, man.
Yeah, this is smart.
And good.
With his father at risk of being imprisoned and detained, Mauro C.G.
Jr.
decided to make a deal with the prosecution.
Under Brazilian law, the agreement will only be fully published when corroborated with other evidence.
And we are still waiting for that.
Epilogue.
Bolsonaro returned to Brazil in 2023 and has remained largely out of sight.
Recently, he held a rally.
As you may well know, since it's now a meme, he visited the hospital a bunch of times.
Bolsonaro has been slowly replaced as the far-right leader by Tarcísio, also an ex-military man as well as the current Sao Paulo governor and a close ally to Jair Bolsonaro.
Jair keeps claiming that he's being persecuted.
Indeed, he faces many lawsuits.
Most of them, however, seem fairly reasonable.
Lately, and notably, he was found guilty of the crime of admoistasson de cet açu, which translates directly to molestation of a whale.
So...
We won't even clarify this.
There's obviously like a Travis feud to be done on this, but let it just be stated for the record that Jair Bolsonaro molested a whale.
Breaking News!
Jair Bolsonaro has just been indicted on the case of the Saudi Jewels, among with 11 of his staff, aides, and cabinet members, two of them generals and one of them an admiral.
The charges include collusion, corruption, and money laundering.
We now go to Eduardo Bolsonaro.
Jair Bolsonaro is a common person.
He doesn't need those resources.
He's just fine without his regular watch, but I've used the opportunity of my appearance on CNN Brazil Yeah, this isn't actually a QAA interview.
It was for CNN Brazil, which, by the way, is a staunch Bolsonarista network.
Did you know that, folks, by the way?
Yeah?
That CNN Brazil is, like, far-right rag?
That's cool.
Awesome.
Anyways, back to the interview.
I would like to use this opportunity of my appearance on CNN Brazil and your international reach to make an appeal to Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
Please, MBS, call those gifts back.
That is so cool.
It's like, yeah, the main problem with these jewels that we hid inside a statuette of a fucking horse is that they were given to us in the first place.
Please, could you could you take them back?
In fact, we'll send a plane to Guadalupe right now.
We promise it'll reach Saudi Arabia afterwards.
It's very polite.
I will not give the gifts back unless you request it formally.
So, he blamed MBS.
He also called the federal police a layer of crooks.
You know, the same federal police that his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, was working at before being elected to Congress.
Well, of course, now that they're coming after him, they're crooked.
Yeah, exactly.
There was probably a time where Trump would have said the FBI was good, and then everything changed.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah.
Wow, what a story, Caio.
What a beautiful country you have.
What a lush, tropical ecosystem.
I mean, I feel like there are, you know, you mentioned some warnings, I think, for the United States about just the, just how extensive, you know, the network of corruption and abuse of power and coverups can get.
But there's one element of this, this story, which is at least a little inspiring, which is that Bolsonaro had his sort of his life and career unravel at some point.
I'm kind of still waiting for that for Trump.
I thought it would happen after, you know, after like January 6th.
It's like, oh, it's all downhill from here.
We don't have to worry about him.
But somehow he's still able to be competitive despite everything.
Yeah, Brazilian politics actually gets the storm that Americans online, you know, think is happening.
There actually is, you know, all of these kind of, like you said, it comes out of a TV show almost.
That's what we're missing here.
We talk about waiting for the TV show moments to happen and then we're disappointed by them because they're not quite as exciting.
Also, Trump didn't really come from a military dictatorship.
I think that's a big difference is that he's actually an effete New York upperclassman.
You know, the American version has to come from showbiz and gossip.
That's right.
That's our military.
That's our military!
Caio, thank you so much once again for writing this episode.
I'm sure this isn't the last we hear from you and South America, nor even Brazil.
Where can people find you and your work?
Well, you can read me at caioalmendra.substack.com, at Caio Almendra in Twitter, and at The Intercept Brazil.
We're going to put links to all of that in the episode description.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month.
You'll get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and all of our mini series.
For everything else, we've got a website, QAAPodcast.com.
We have autocued content based on your preferences.
We're now outside of the country in a political environment that resembles ours in so many ways, except there's less free speech.
There is more police involvement in politics.
Brazil is what America will be very soon if we don't slow this down.
We're here at the Presidential Palace because, as we told you a minute ago, we just sat down with the President of Brazil, President Bolsonaro, ahead of an election.
The parallels between politics in Brazil and politics in the United States are striking to an American.
The parallels between politics in Brazil and politics in the United States are striking to an American.
You are opposed by a coalition of billionaires, college professors, and CNN.
Tell us what the opposition wants.
What will Brazil look like if your opponent wins?
My election itself was almost a miracle.
I had nothing going for me.
I was just an isolated member of Congress.
I was known as a lower segment of the National Congress in Brazil.
I connected my campaign anchored only with a biblical passage, John 8, 32.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
The media never gave me any visibility or space.
Much to the contrary, they attacked me all the time throughout the campaign.
If the left-wing does come back to power, in my view, they'll never leave power, and this country will follow the same path as Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Colombia.
Brazil will become one more wagon on that train.
The losers will be the Brazilian population, and also the left-wing itself.
The left-wing voters will lose as a result.
All of South America will be colored red, if you understand me.
And in my view, the United States will become virtually an isolated country in the world.
Amazing interview.
And guess what?
This will shock you.
Bolsonaro bears no resemblance whatsoever to the descriptions of Bolsonaro you have read in the New York Times.
