Following the first-round victory of Jair Bolsonaro, far-right leader, reports from Brazil describe numerous attacks on the LGBT community.
Intimidation, insults, assaults, even murders. In Brazil, the first-round victory in the presidential elections of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate, is already producing its first consequences. The ones paying the price are the gay community of the Latin American nation. A journalist from the French daily Le Monde reported a long series of alarming signs: cowardly acts by people who, evidently, feel somehow protected by the fact that the next president will in all likelihood be a homophobe.
Bolsonaro closed the first round with 46 per cent of the vote. And with an enormous gap over the runner-up, the former Education minister under Lula and Dilma Rousseff, Fernando Haddad. It is therefore very hard to imagine a reversal of the balance of power in the run-off.
Thus, the French newspaper reports that in Rio, writings of this kind are appearing in girls' school toilets: "Sapatas vao morrer. Kkkk". That is: "Death to lesbians. Ha ha ha". In São Paulo, after the announcement of the election results, some people drove through the city's streets shouting: "Disgusting lesbians, daughters of b… Now they'll make you get treatment". In Curitiba, a gay hairdresser was beaten to death. When the death was announced, the main suspect reportedly shouted: "Long live Bolsonaro".
The president of Bahia's LGBT advocacy organisation "Grupo Gay", Marcelo Cerqueira, showed the journalist a video of teenagers chanting over a rap beat: "Bolsonaro is coming, I'm sending you a message. Run, run, you f…! Bolsonaro is coming, the wave is coming. Run, run, you lesbian!" "It is extremely shocking. A panic syndrome is sweeping through gay people. Some no longer dare leave their homes. We have never experienced a situation like this," Cerqueira explained.
A widespread fear, directly stoked by Bolsonaro, who in an interview with Playboy magazine in 2011 stated: "I would rather my son died in an accident than see him with a man with a moustache." Brazil, for its part, is already the scene of a dramatic situation. In 2017 alone, there were as many as 445 murders committed against the LGBT community in Brazil.
Last March, Marielle Franco was murdered, a 38-year-old Brazilian woman. A member of the Partido Socialismo e Libertade (Psol), she was a city councillor in her home city. For years she had fought for the rights of Black women and gay people. During a demonstration in Rio de Janeiro, a man wearing a T-shirt bearing Bolsonaro's face tore down the plaque commemorating her, shouting to the crowd: "We're done with all this s… Now there's Bolsonaro!"
"The presidential candidate," commented Ana Lucia Pastore Schritzmeyer, professor of anthropology at the University of São Paulo, "allows himself to put forward homophobic and racist ideas without anyone silencing him. It is obvious that citizens feel legitimised. It is terribly unsettling — it is the symptom of a democracy that is limping along."
