Brazil: Bolsonaro Campaign to Ask Election Overseers to Block Leftist Cannibalism Ad

The campaign of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will formally take action at the nation’s top court, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), reports confirmed on Friday after election opponent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva resurfaced video that appeared to show Bolsonaro approving of cannibalism.

Bolsonaro’s campaign denied that the president approved of the consumption of human flesh and claimed that the Lula campaign had taken the comments in question, made in 2016 when Bolsonaro was still a member of the National Congress, out of context.

The cannibalism scandal, prompted by the Lula campaign using its scheduled television advertising time to air the old Bolsonaro comments, comes less than a week after Lula was forced to disavow alleged support from satanic sorcerers and publicly clarify that he had never engaged in negotiations with Satan.

Brazilians will go to the polls to choose their president on October 30. The first round of voting occurred last weekend, resulting in Lula defeating all other candidates, but with 48 percent of the vote. If no candidate in the election receives over 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates move on to a runoff vote without the others. Bolsonaro came in second place only about five percentage points below Lula, outperforming some mainstream polls by as many as ten points.

Bolsonaro has campaigned and governed as a hardline conservative. Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2011, is a radical socialist; his tenure was defined by the consolidation of a national government corruption scheme known as “Operation Car Wash,” in which the private contractors vastly overcharged the government to complete public works projects, then used the remaining money to bribe politicians. Lula himself was sentenced to over two decades in prison in 2017 for buying a luxury beachfront property with his bribes; the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), the nation’s highest court, overturned the conviction to allow him to run for president again last year.

The Bolsonaro remarks in question aired on Thursday as part of the official designated advertising time for the Lula campaign. They were taken from an over-hour-long interview Bolsonaro gave the New York Times in 2016. The full interview is still available on Bolsonaro’s official YouTube page.

Bolsonaro appears to be discussing his time in the Brazilian military, where he obtained the rank of captain. He describes a tour of Haiti, where he lamented poverty driving women to prostitution.

“Haiti … I saw women offering themselves for sex, I’m sorry, with no hygiene whatsoever!” he tells the interviewer.

In a separate part of the interview, he describes working at the Surucucu, Roraima state, military base in the Amazon Rainforest and claims he was once invited to an indigenous cannibalism ceremony.

“The Indian died and they were cooking him. They cook the Indian; that’s their culture,” he claimed. “They cook him for two or three days and they eat him with banana. I wanted to go see the Indian be cooked and a guy said, ‘if you go, you have to eat.’ So from there, I said, I eat!”

“Nobody wanted to go because they had to eat the Indian, [and] they didn’t want me to go alone, so I didn’t go,” he concludes.

Bolsonaro’s campaign will appeal to the TSE, the nation’s election overseeing body, to censor the Lula television advertising including the comments, campaign coordinator Fábio Faria said on Friday because the comments were “taken out of context” and “fake news.”

“Fake news” has largely been a preoccupation of the left in Brazil. The STF, packed with Lula and other leftist president appointees, has launched a crusade against what it claims to be “fake news” that has included ordering violent police raids on ordinary citizens for posting pro-Bolsonaro content on social media. It has not taken any similar large-scale actions against left-wing individuals condemning Bolsonaro or supporting Lula.

“It is desperation, the PT [Workers’ Party, Lula’s party] is using fake news, phrases out of context,” the left-wing newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo quoted Faria as saying. “The websites yesterday already said that, they cut a piece out. The president was talking about that in the jungle, one goes through hard times. There are people, who, through the law of survival, end up eating human meat, indigenous meat, animal meat, whatever.”

“The desperation hit,” he said about the Lula campaign. “Our opinion is that this campaigning will be negative for the PT. We will take them to the TSE so that they place the material in context.”

The bizarre controversy follows a week in which social media was flooded with allegations that Lula enjoyed the support of Satanists.

That controversy appeared to stem from a video posted by a self-proclaimed Satanist on TikTok, the Chinese social media application, claiming to support Lula. The first video followed the publication of other bizarre videos appearing to show images of sorcerers placing photos of Lula in a pentagram and using incantations to bring about his election.

“Lula believes in God and is Christian. Lula does not have a pact and has never had a conversation with the devil,” a social media account run by the Lula campaign clarified on Tuesday. The Lula campaign has also similarly appealed to the TSE to remove the content associating Lula with satanism.

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