Brazil's colour contradiction in presidential race

Afro-Brazilians have been among the supporters at Jair Bolsonaro s rallies leading up to Monday s runoff.Photo / Bloomberg

Brazil is a majority nonwhite country, a multicultural mix of ethnicities. So many people here are stunned by an apparent contradiction: How could a man like Jair Bolsonaro be this close to winning the presidency?

The far-right former army captain once said his sons would never fall in love with a black woman, and in 2015, he dubbed African refugees coming to Brazil "the scum of the earth".

The left has sought to portray him as an open racist - a charge the blunt-talking Bolsonaro denies.

But this is what has perhaps shocked his opponents the most. Now polling in the lead by 18 percentage points, the 63-year-old will enter Monday's presidential runoff with a surprising group of backers: People of colour.

In Latin America's largest nation, Bolsonaro is now the top candidate among black and mixed-race voters, according to a major polling agency, Ibope. He is supported by 47 per cent of that voter pool, compared to 41 per cent for Fernando Haddad, his opponent from the left-wing Workers' Party, or PT.

Other polls that break out figures on Afro-Brazilians separately from that group suggest they are supporting Bolsonaro in far lower numbers than mixed-race voters. Yet overall, people of colour could push Bolsonaro over the top.

"Brazil is ignoring some of its characteristics," said Alexandre Bandeira, a political strategist in Brasilia. "It is a nation of largely mixed-race, lower-middle-class people. But people are putting aside their personal identities in search of political renovation."

While Bolsonaro has at times used incendiary language in reference to race, critics also charge him with a more subtle form of discrimination - promoting policies they say unfairly target people of colour.

He has proposed, for instance, combating crime by sending heavily armed security forces into largely black and mixed-race slums, providing more protection for police officers who kill on the job, and stripping indigenous communities of their land rights to speed up development.

Afro-Brazilians have been among the supporters at Jair Bolsonaro s rallies leading up to Monday s runoff.Photo / Bloomberg

He has lashed out at a quota system enacted by previous governments that guarantees places for black and indigenous Brazilians at universities. "I would not board a plane piloted by a quota beneficiary, or be operated on by a quota doctor," he said.

This month, Twitter was flooded with posts about Bolsonaro tagged #MySecretRacist, which attempted to expose subtle racism in Brazil.

"He says a good thug is a dead thug. He's bringing death to the slums," said Elsa Santos, 48, an expert on black history from the outskirts of Sao Paulo who attended an anti-Bolsonaro rally this month.

The strongest voter bloc for Bolsonaro - who resoundingly won a first-round vote this month but fell short of the number needed to avoid a runoff - is still white men. And this country of 210 million is now more polarised than at any point in its modern history, especially after a spate of attacks and incidents of harassment against women, gays and black people allegedly committed by Bolsonaro supporters in recent weeks.

Yet backers of Bolsonaro include the likes of Achiles Guimaraes. An Afro-Brazilian and 40-year-old motorcycle delivery man, he heads a neighbourhood association in Rocinha, Rio's largest slum - which Bolsonaro once suggested should be "machine-gunned" to kill off gang members. Guimaraes is Afro-Brazilian, like about 8 per cent of Brazilians. Mixed-race people make up about 47 per cent of the population, according to the 2016 census.

Guimaraes voted left-wing in past elections - but this year, he ran out and bought a Bolsonaro T-shirt. He laughs off the charges of racism against his candidate, saying: "We can't agree on everything." He's far more disgusted by Brazil's traditional political class. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - the leftist Guimaraes once voted for and who led Brazil for eight years - is now in jail, serving a 12-year sentence for corruption. His successor was impeached. Her successor - the current President - was recently indicted on corruption and money-laundering charges, which he denies. One-third of the lower house of Congress is under criminal investigation.

At the same time, Brazil has slipped into an unprecedented cycle of violence. As gang wars rage, Brazil suffered a record 63,880 homicides last year - almost twice the number in the United States and Europe combined.

Young black males are nine times as likely to be murdered in Brazil as their white counterparts - a statistic Guimaraes knows a lot about. His brother and his uncle were both gunned down in Rio slums.

"Today, motorcycle delivery men run from thieves trying to steal their merchandise and motorcycles, and from the corrupt police asking for bribes," he said. "Bolsonaro was a military man; he will demand more from authorities, including the police."

Fernando Haddad is trailing Jair Bolsonaro in the polls.

Yet Brazil already has one of the deadliest police forces in the world, responsible for more than 5000 deaths last year, according to government figures. Experts warn that Bolsonaro's tough-on-crime platform, which includes proposals to arm ordinary citizens, could make life worse for many people of colour.

"There is no basis of evidence to suggest that what he proposes will work," said Ilona Szabo, director of the Igarape Institute, a thinktank in Rio that focuses on security issues. "Things will get worse. The police will kill more. There will be more extrajudicial killings, especially of people in the slums and of blacks."

Once hailed as a unique "racial democracy", a multicultural nation where people did not view one another through the lens of race, Brazil is now confronting rifts that many here would prefer to ignore.

Photos recently circulated on social media, for instance, showing a bathroom door at a university in southern Sao Paulo spray-painted with the message: "Blacks will die. Here, we're for Bolsonaro."

After the first round of the elections, a flurry of people took to social media to attack Brazil's predominantly black northeast, where Haddad won a majority of votes.

Bolsonaro's campaign did not respond to a request for comment. In recent months, he has courted the black vote and has sought to celebrate Brazil's diversity. After media reports in Brazil said that David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had spoken highly of Bolsonaro, the Brazilian candidate rejected any such ally.

"I refuse any kind of support coming from supremacist groups," Bolsonaro tweeted. "To exploit this to try to influence an election in Brazil is an enormous stupidity! It's not knowing the Brazilian people, who are mixed race."

Within the black community, Bolsonaro's candidacy has pitted his supporters against his opponents. On the night of the first round of the election, a 63-year-old black master of capoeira, a form of martial arts that originated in Africa and is popular in Brazil, was stabbed 12 times by a black Bolsonaro supporter in northern Brazil after he declared he had voted for Haddad.

Carla Jesus, a 34-year-old Afro-Brazilian teacher and lesbian activist, criticised blacks supporting Bolsonaro.

"Just because slavery is over does not mean our minds are free," she said.

She said she is preparing for the dawn of a dark chapter in Brazil should Bolsonaro sail to victory.

"People are looking at us differently now with the campaign," she said. "They aren't shy about saying blacks and lesbians need to die. I'm feeling more than fear. I'm panicking about him winning."Washington Post