Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and a hopeful presidential contender in a few months, fired his marketing chief last week. He has been maneuvering for days to desperately obtain a photograph that, he believes, could pull him out of the crisis that has shaken his campaign.
© Mateus Bonomi (REUTERS)
Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Brazil’s relationship with the United States has swung up and down like a roller coaster. It has been improving slowly and only through intense Brazilian diplomacy, but at any moment it can deteriorate rapidly again with a new blow from Washington. “We cannot accept the way the United States has treated Brazil this week,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared on Wednesday at a cabinet meeting in Brasília. Lula was referring to the Trump administration’s threat to impose new tariffs days after the U.S. designated two Brazilian criminal gangs as terrorist organizations. The left-wing president has again wrapped himself in the national flag and accused the Bolsonaros — former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and his son, the senator Flávio Bolsonaro — of being traitors to the homeland for encouraging Trump’s interference.
© Andre Borges (EFE)
One of them, Marcos, refuses to wear clothes or shoes. He also cannot tolerate being touched or interacting with others. He is unable to speak. Such are the consequences of decades of neglect and inhuman treatment at an asylum where he was sent at age 10, the most infamous one in Brazil’s history. On Monday the Hospital-Colônia de Barbacena, where some 60,000 Brazilians died of hunger, cold and diarrhea up through the 1980s, closed its doors for good, and with it the cruellest chapter in Brazilian psychiatry. The last surviving patients — 14 elderly, ill people with no families and severe aftereffects, including Marcos — have been given a new home: a house in the rural area of Barbacena, still known as the city of the madmen.
© Luis Alfredo (Ayuntamiento de Barbacena)
U.S. President Donald Trump gave a boost on Tuesday to the presidential bid of Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, by receiving him in the Oval Office, 19 days after meeting there with Brazil’s president, former union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Barring a surprise, Lula and Bolsonaro’s son are expected to face each other at the ballot box in October. Flávio Bolsonaro’s team hopes the photo with Trump will help him overcome a popularity crisis and consolidate his candidacy.
© @FlavioBolsonaro (EFE)
Login