Bolsonaro will be tried for racism by TRF-4 on Tuesday

Less than a week after being sentenced by the Supreme Court (STF), Jair Bolsonaro will face on Tuesday, 16, a new trial. The Federal Regional Court (TRF) of the 4th Region, based in Porto Alegre, will analyze a public civil action for “public statements of prejudice, discrimination and intolerance against black people”. In case of conviction, this type of process does not result in arrest, but in the payment of compensation.

The lawsuit was filed by the Federal Public Prosecution Service, together with the Federal Public Defender’s Office against Bolsonaro and the Union. The request is for the former president to pay collective compensation of at least $ 5 million. In the case of the Union, the value is $ 10 million. As the damage would have been caused to society, the values ​​would be deposited in a public fund.

The action was filed in July 2021, when Bolsonaro was president. The request was denied by the first instance of the judiciary. Appeal to TRF-4 was presented, which scheduled the trial for Tuesday. Last week, the Supreme Court sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years and three months in prison for plotting a coup d’état.

The lawsuit was motivated by Bolsonaro statements on the outskirts of the Alvorada Palace on May 4 and 6, 2021 and on July 8 of the same year. He would also have dismissed offenses in official speech through social networks, in the so -called “Live of the President.” According to the lawsuit, “the responsibility of the Union, in turn, stems directly from the discriminatory conduct of the President of the Republic, given his condition of maximum representative of the Executive Power.”

On July 8, Bolsonaro, laughing, compared the curly hair of a black person to a “cockroach breeding.” According to the process, he was aware that he was being filmed and that the video would circulate on social networks. Then the then president stated: “You can not go to in-rhectin, will kill all your lice,” in reference to the deworming that recommended for the treatment of COVID-19. The target of the statements was among the supporters of Bolsonaro and recorded at the time that it was not bothered by the joke, as it was not a “vitimist black.”

Before that, on May 6, Bolsonaro had already made a similar joke with the same supporter by saying, “I’m seeing a cockroach here.” Two days earlier, the then president had asked another person with curly hair: “What do you create in this hair there?”

On July 8, Bolsonaro invited the citizen who was the target of the statements to the “Live of the President.” He did not express any regret and reinforced the “jokes” by saying phrases like “if I had such hair at that time, my mother would cover me by blowing”, “Do you take a bath as many times a month?” And “if you create quota for ugly, you will be a federal deputy.” In the same live, Bolsonaro showed a newspaper report with the photo of the host Maju Coutinho and asked if she was beautiful. He commented, “It wasn’t talking about Maju here.”

The MPF and DPU claim that the conduct of Jair Bolsonaro “goes beyond the limits of individual and specific offense to the citizen present at the occasions of his manifestations, since the speech given, before being directed to an indiduine, constitutes true stigmatizing offense of discrimination and intolerance to any black person.”

He adds: “The conduct of the President of the Republic Jair Bolsonaro aims to transmute an element of affirmation of black identity into something dirty, execrable and identifies a phenotypic pattern of the black population as something that would subjugate it to a lower social position in evident discriminatory behavior.”

The action mentions other episodes in which Bolsonaro made racist statements to reinforce the argument that the episodes by which the indemnity is asked were not isolated facts. Among the statements remembered in the action, there is one from April 2017, when Bolsonaro was a federal deputy: “I went to a quilombo. The lighter African descent there weighed seven arrobas. They do nothing! I think even for procreator he serves more. More than $ 1 billion per year is spent (sic) with them”.

For the MPF and DPU, the episodes show that Bolsonaro’s discriminatory behavior against the Brazilian black population encouraged his government’s high -ranking servants to adopt equally discriminatory attitudes, “in the notorious dissonance of the duty of the democratic rule of right to confront racism and racial inequality.” The action also asks Bolsonaro to refrain from committing other discriminatory and intolerant acts, as well as public retraction to the black population and removing videos with racist demonstrations from their channels and social networks.