Attended his rally in Rio De Janeiro today. I’ve finally seen some street blocking myself. The people were covered in yellow and green, often shirts with the Brazilian flag on it. They were totally covering and blocking Avenida Pres. Vargas perhaps the biggest grand boulevard into town in front of Centro do Brasil the major train station. For the first time I saw a crowd that really looked bigger than the Lula crowd. It was impressive and up to this point the Bolsonaristas had not had such a visible impact in the city, but this time it was VERY visible if not overwhelming. I got into arguments yesterday on the forum because I had not seen the bolsonaro Visibility in the city. Now it’s obvious. The streets all around that part of town were covered in green in yellow.

I asked around the crowd to find someone I could interview in English. Many families, people looked festive but also troubled. Fireworks went off in the air every five minutes which reminded the nervous system of machine gun fire. One gentleman talked for thirty minutes with me and he said that he wasn’t so much for Bolsonaro as he was against Lula. He said that Lula was the biggest criminal in Brazil. I asked him about the legal exoneration and he said it was a technicality, that there were many other judges that wanted to sentence him longer. He also wanted seven of the Supreme Court judges to be prosecuted, he saw them as incredibly corrupt. His economic impression from bolsonaro was that everything had improved and inflation has stayed relatively low ( I’ve heard Lula fans criticize bolsonaro for the inflation). He offered the metaphor that he felt like the Brazilian economy was like an airplane taxiing down the runway and that it was just about to lift off, and now it was being intercepted. He felt a great pain that someone he saw as a huge crook and danger to Brazil had a chance to come back. That Brazil was the last economy standing in S America. He also said that the two big scandals were the paying of bribes to the legislature to pass the projects of the left (Mensalão) and the scandal with petrobras the national oil company ( Petrolão ). He reported that he thought he thought Lula was now a billionaire and Lula’s son, who used to feed the alligators at the zoo also somehow turned out to be a Billionaire. He said that the only other countries that had as bad a voting system as Brazil was Bangladesh and Sri Lanka: that the votes were done on electronic machines with no paper trail. I saw these machines with my own eyes on vote day.
I still need to verify some of this stuff , but it’s one of the first bolsonaro supporters I’ve been able to talk to in the country.

The crowd was absolutely massive