"Brazil has gone mad." The concern of the great photographer Sebastião Salgado after the election of Bolsonaro

The great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (Aimorés, 1944), one of the most important contemporary photojournalists (and the protagonist of numerous exhibitions, most recently at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona) expresses his concern about the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil. “I think Brazil has gone crazy,” Salgado, a longtime Paris resident, told the microphones of the France Inter news agency today. “It is not something that happened overnight, but is the result of several years. It is a situation that goes back to the ousting of President Dilma Rousseff. Practically a coup d’état, since she had been democratically elected.”

Salgado refers to what happened in the country in 2016, when Dilma Rousseff was placed in a state of impeachment in May and then permanently dismissed by a Senate vote on Aug. 31, after allegations of manipulation on the state budget to favor her re-election. “A dismissal,” Salgado pointed out, “to put a completely corrupt component in its place. That’s when you lost control of the country. And it became very hard, very violent. And the one who could have won the elections in the first round was put in jail: Lula, who was jailed without evidence. You could call him a political prisoner.” Indeed, Lula was sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption, and was not allowed to run in the elections. Yet, Salgado concludes, “Lula’s government was not pure; there was a lot of corruption. To govern, they bought political endorsements. And this situation backfired on democratic forces.” These, in his view, were the reasons for Jair Bolsonaro’s victory last October 28.

"Brazil has gone mad." The concern of the great photographer Sebastião Salgado after the election of Bolsonaro

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