“The salary is low.” That was the gist of a column a young army captain wrote for Veja magazine, published in its edition of September 3, 1986. Jair Bolsonaro, still on active duty, laid out the arithmetic himself: a captain with eight to nine years in the rank took home exactly 10.433 cruzados a month, by his count.
He went further than complaining. The low pay, he wrote, was behind the exit of more than eighty cadets from the Agulhas Negras military academy, and he said over 90% of the departures came down to the financial crisis hitting the army’s officers and sergeants. He knew the risk. “I run the risk of seeing my career as a devoted soldier seriously threatened,” he wrote, “but the pressure of the crisis and the lack of prospects we face is greater.”
Fifteen days in a military prison
The army answered with discipline. Bolsonaro was jailed for “serious misconduct”, accused of having damaged ethics and stirred unrest inside the military organisation. Brazil’s Superior Military Tribunal later recorded that he took full responsibility for his act and was punished with 15 days in prison.
The penalty did not end his working life so much as redirect it. Americas Quarterly, in a 2018 profile by Brian Winter, wrote that the article launched his political career. Casting himself as a champion of the military’s rank and file in the chaotic, inflation-ridden early years of civilian rule, he won a seat on Rio’s city council and became a congressman in 1991.
The bomb story
A second Veja report, published on October 25, 1987, raised the stakes. It said Bolsonaro and another officer had a plan to set off bombs at military units in Rio to pressure the command, and the magazine printed hand-drawn sketches it attributed to him. Bolsonaro always denied authorship. The Army minister said the two officers had denied the report in writing. The Superior Military Tribunal voted 8 to 4 to find him “not guilty” on that charge, because two expert reports on who drew the sketches were inconclusive.
From backbencher to contender
Winter noted that for years few paid Bolsonaro much attention. In a Congress that included a professional clown, he was, in the words of professor Ignacio Cano, “marginal and pretty much considered harmless.” His commanding officer had once described him as a man of “excessive financial ambition … lacking logic, rationality and balance.” In 1999 he called for President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to be shot for privatising state assets.
By early 2018 the picture had changed. Polls put him second for the October election with about 20 percent. Winter also reported that Bolsonaro had presented a vision of a small state, privatisations and lower taxes to the Council of the Americas in New York. That sat oddly beside his old call to shoot a president over privatisation. His views had evolved, he said. “I’m not an economist.”
Sources
- O artigo em VEJA e a prisão de Bolsonaro nos anos 1980 (VEJA)
- System Failure: Behind the Rise of Jair Bolsonaro (Americas Quarterly, Brian Winter)
