Jefferson, the savage, shoots at the Federal Police and mortally wounds Bolsonaro's campaign.

By Tereza Cruvinel

Yesterday, Jair Bolsonaro's campaign felt the full extent of the damage caused by Roberto Jefferson's bullets and grenades against the federal police officers who were removing him from house arrest and taking him to prison, from where he should never have been released. Bolsonaro himself assessed the seriousness of the friendly fire and disowned his ally, saying that he deserved "treatment like a bandit." "I don't even have a picture with him." Many photos appeared on the internet within minutes.

If Bolsonaro truly believed that the PTB ally should be treated like a criminal, he wouldn't have appointed his Minister of Justice, Anderson Torres, to mediate the surrender. An ordinary Brazilian who had acted like Jefferson would have been riddled with bullets.

Bolsonaro will not be able to hide the truth with his lies. Brazil knows that Jefferson is a guerrilla fighter for Bolsonarism, a defender of armament, a preacher of hatred, machismo, and misogyny. He embodies like no other the ideal of society and behavior contained in Bolsonarism: barbarity and vulgarity. Yesterday's outrage and the attack he made on Friday against Minister Carmem Lúcia of the Supreme Federal Court and the Superior Electoral Court are being rejected even by Bolsonarists. For many undecided voters, it will be the push towards voting for Lula.

Jefferson was under house arrest, investigated in the inquiry into digital militias, prohibited from speaking on social media, giving interviews, and having contact with others investigated in the same inquiry. On Friday, through his daughter Cristiane Brasil's account, he unleashed a misogynistic attack, of vulgarity, savagery, and violence unthinkable in any country in the world, against a Supreme Court Justice.

Her insults deserve to be reproduced, but I apologize to the otherwise sober Minister Cármen for transcribing them because, causing nausea in those who hadn't read them, they give a measure of the kind of people who need to be banished from Brazilian public life. “I went back to review the vote of the Blair Witch, of Cármen Lucifer, on the prior censorship of Jovem Pan, and it's unbelievable. It really reminds me of those prostitutes, those sluts, those who turn to a guy and say: 'Honey, it's the first time in the ass.' She did it for the first time. She gave up on the unconstitutionality for the first time. Blair Witch, she's rotten inside and hideous outside.”

The president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Minister Alexandre de Moraes, ordered Jefferson's return to prison because he violated three of the conditions that guaranteed him house arrest: he gave instructions to PTB (Brazilian Labour Party) supporters, granted interviews, and shared fake news via social media. And this had to be done before Tuesday, when the rule comes into effect that voters can only be arrested in flagrante delicto (caught in the act).

Lula's campaign initially considered Morais's decision reckless. They feared Jefferson would play the victim, and the far-right would disrupt the final stretch of the campaign with attacks against the minister, doubling down on accusations of bias, being a dictator in robes, and persecuting Bolsonaro and his allies. They never imagined that this savage, driven by his "most primitive instincts"—an expression he used in 2005 to try and intimidate José Dirceu—would shoot Bolsonaro in the foot.