Born in Campinas on March 21, 1955, Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a descendant of Italian immigrants who arrived in Brazil after World War II.
Son of Percy Geraldo Bolsonaro and Olinda Bonturi Bolsonaro, he was the third child in a family of three sons and three daughters, attended the Brazilian Army Preparatory School and graduated from the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in 1977.
He subsequently served in the army for 17 years and rose to the rank of captain. Bolsonaro gained notoriety in 1986, when he wrote an article for the popular magazine Veja, where he criticized the military's pay system.
His political career began in 1988, after leaving the army, when he ran for the Rio de Janeiro City Council and won a seat in the city's legislature. In 1990, two years after being elected, he won the first of seven consecutive terms as federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro.
Since his first term, Bolsanaro repeatedly praised the era of military rule and called for its return. He also began to establish a reputation for openly defending deeply conservative positions on social issues, and was even labeled a misogynist, homophobe and racist by his critics.
In his political career he advocated lowering the age of criminal responsibility, the right to legitimate self-defense and the possession of a firearm for citizens without a criminal record, as well as Christian values. He is also the creator of a proposal to make the printed ballot mandatory in Brazil, for more reliable and auditable elections.
When Brazil's political culture and economy went into crisis in the second decade of the 21st century, at the beginning of Dilma Rousseff's second presidential term, the country experienced a recession that had begun in 2014 and that some specialists called the worst economic crisis since the beginning of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, the biggest political scandal in Brazil's history, the Petrobras scandal, was also unfolding, involving most of Brazil's leading politicians in corruption charges, including former President Lula Da Silva, who served a prison sentence.
Bolsonaro, candidate of the Social Liberal Party, mounted a campaign that sought to take advantage of this environment and presented himself as an insurgent-antisystem candidate, with little concern for political correctness, in the same vein as Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
Also known as the "Trump of the tropics," Bolsonaro won the support of the country's sizable evangelical Christian population with his staunch opposition to abortion and his defense of the traditional family, as well as law-and-order policies that appealed to Brazilians concerned about crime and violence.
In such a way, Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of the Republic in October 2018, with 55.13% of the Brazilian electorate, by the Brazil Above All, God Above All Coalition ?PSL/PRTB?
During his administration, a radical reform of the pension system was approved to increase the minimum retirement age for men and women from 56 and 53 to 65 and 62, respectively, since the pension plan accounted for about 40 percent of total federal spending.
It was also characterized by a quasi-official defense of deforestation in the Amazon region, in the face of concerns about illegal logging on protected lands and the burning of remaining trees to make way for cattle ranching and mining.
As for COVID-19, it repeatedly downplayed the severity of the disease, mocked the use of facemasks that provided the first line of defense against the spread of the virus, and blocked attempts to suspend non-essential economic sectors to contain the public health crisis.
With information from Encyclopedia Britannica.
This article was produced with the support of the organization Global Exchange in collaboration with Peninsula 360 Press.
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