On Holy Christ Avenue, in front of Bible Square, Brazilian businessman Gilberto Klais buoyantly hops out of an SUV decorated with a giant decal of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
Smiling in a denim shirt, the 39-year-old head of the local business owners’ association is a man on a mission: “On election day, the town of Nova Santa Rosa will cast more votes for Bolsonaro than anywhere else in Brazil,” he says.
The small town in the southern state of Parana already voted massively for the incumbent in Brazil’s first-round election on October 2, casting 82 percent of its ballots for Bolsonaro — the second-highest percentage in the country.
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Now, as the president heads for a runoff Sunday against veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro backers are pushing for an even bigger win.
But this small community of trim little houses surrounded by endless expanses of soy and corn fields has some tough competition, in one of Brazil’s most conservative regions.
The neighboring towns of Quatro Pontes and Mercedes finished third and fifth in the Bolsonaro love fest, voting 80 percent and 78 percent for the former army captain, respectively.
And the town of Nova Padua, in neighboring Rio Grande do Sul state, cast the highest percentage for him with 84 percent.
“Bolsonaro lit our flame for Brazil,” says Klais, who owns a local bakery.
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Visitors don’t have to look far for proof: a sea of yellow-and-green Brazilian flags hangs from buildings — a symbol Bolsonaro has adopted as his own — and his smiling face beams from campaign posters all over town.
Opponents’ criticisms of the president — Brazil’s 687 000 deaths from Covid-19, increasing hunger, destruction of the Amazon rainforest — are mute here.
Finding a Lula campaign sign is an impossible task.
Farming is king in these parts, and Bolsonaro, a close ally of Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector, “has given us security to invest,” promotes “a strong economy,” and upholds God and family “as the supreme good,” says Klais.
“He’s just like us.”
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Battle for Brazil’s soul
On his father’s farm, where a feed truck has been turned into a makeshift billboard with Bolsonaro’s slogan — “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” — Ricardo Lorenzatto is on a mission, too: convince at least 200 of the 800 residents who voted for Lula to switch sides in the runoff.
Bolsonaro “promised to visit the city that casts the highest percentage of votes for him,” says the 35-year-old agricultural engineer, his blue eyes alight.
“My heart leaps just thinking about it.”
He is active on WhatsApp message groups rallying the faithful for pro-Bolsonaro events, such as an Independence Day motorcade on September 7, which, he proudly boasts, stretched four kilometers (2.5 miles).
Lorenzatto says ex-president Lula (2003-2010), who the far-right labels a “communist,” is a threat to his children’s future.
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If Lula wins, “indigenous tribes could invade our land, force us to share our cattle,” he says.
Holding her one-year-old grandson on her porch, Clarice Radoll agrees.
“I would feel very insecure if Lula won,” says the 60-year-old Evangelical Christian, who has Bolsonaro’s picture proudly displayed on the front of her house.
In this town of a dozen churches and around 6,000 inhabitants, Radoll repeats a line often used by conservative pastors: that Lula represents “moral perversion.”
“It’s every Brazilian mother and father’s fear,” she says.
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Agribusiness hero
In Mercedes, just up the road, farmer Andre Fiedler admits Lula’s government also took care of the agribusiness industry during the economic boom of the 2 000s.
“I don’t want to be a hypocrite,” he says.
But Bolsonaro’s administration has backed farming and agricultural exports like no other, “opening new markets for our products,” he says.
He brushes off international criticism over surging Amazon deforestation under Bolsonaro, which experts say is driven by agriculture.
“People say Bolsonaro is damaging Brazil’s image overseas… but that’s just a trade game — protectionism by France, Germany, the United States,” Fiedler says.
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“Who’s the biggest soy producer in the world? The biggest poultry exporter? Brazil,” he says.
“There are vested interests trying to hold us back.”
Bolsonaro, who took 43 percent of the vote in the first round to 48 percent for Lula, trails his leftist rival heading into the runoff — but by a narrowing margin, according to opinion polls.
The new truce plan in Gaza includes “many demands” from Hamas, according to an Egyptian source
The talks held between delegations from Egypt and Israel in Tel Aviv for a truce in Gaza were “largely positive and successful” and included “many of the demands” of the Islamist movement Hamas, an Egyptian security source familiar with the negotiations and another from Hamas reported to EFE on Sunday.
A delegation from Hamas, headed by the member of the political bureau Khalil al-The Hague, is expected to arrive tomorrow in Cairo, mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group, to deliver its response to the mediators, according to the Egyptian source, which asked not to be identified by the sensitivity of this issue.
This new proposal, on whose content it did not provide details, “overcomes the obstacles that hinder” the declaration of a truce, a ceasefire, the exchange of prisoners and hostages, as well as the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip.
The possible announcement of a truce “will contribute to the approval of a first phase and to the efforts of the entire international community to consolidate this ceasefire and seek to move to a permanent truce instead of a temporary one,” according to the informant.
On the other hand, a source of the Palestinian Islamist movement, which also asked for anonymity, confirmed to EFE that tomorrow a delegation from Hamas will arrive in the Egyptian capital to present its response to the new Israeli proposal.
The informant added that the proposal includes “reducing the minimum number of kidnapped that Hamas will commit to freeing and eliminating divisions in sections of the Gaza Strip.”
Last Friday, an Egyptian mediating delegation traveled to Tel Aviv to discuss this truce with Israel, while the Jewish State has warned that it will not allow the Palestinian group to delay and has once again threatened to invade Rafah, at the southern end of the strip and where more than a million refugees are overcrowded.
Hamas warns the United Kingdom that if it sends soldiers to Gaza they will be a “legitimate” military target
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warned the United Kingdom on Sunday that if it deploys military personnel in the Gaza Strip, after information that they could help in the distribution of humanitarian aid, they will be “legitimate targets” of its armed wing.
“We alert Britain, or any other country, against the deployment of forces on land or on the coast of the Gaza Strip and affirm that they will be legitimate targets for our people and their resistance,” Hamas said in a statement.
The armed group charged against any initiative in the Palestinian enclave that does not have its approval.
The Islamist group responded to the information released on Saturday by the British network BBC, according to which the British Armed Forces could deploy troops to deliver humanitarian aid on the ground arriving in Gaza through the new floating dock that is being built by Israel and the United States.
The public broadcaster indicated that the United Kingdom could be the intermediary to which the United States referred when it said that it would not be the American soldiers, but others, who would distribute the food packages sent by ship from Cyprus and then transferred to Gaza.
Yesterday, the Israeli Army assured at a press conference with international media that international organizations would be in charge of the distribution of humanitarian aid, but did not indicate which ones would have agreed to collaborate.
Although the British Government has not confirmed the news, the BBC affirms, according to anonymous sources, that the Ministry of Defense is considering getting involved with ‘wet boots’ on the ground.
The possible role of the British forces would involve driving the trucks with the help from the landing boats on the floating runway, hundreds of meters long, and delivering it to a safe distribution area on dry land, the station explained.
The London Ministry of Defense reported on Friday, in turn, that the British Navy auxiliary ship RFA Cardigan Bay set sail from Cyprus to provide support for the construction of the temporary dock, which is led by the United States.
This ship will provide accommodation for hundreds of American sailors and soldiers, about whom Washington has made it clear that they will not set foot in Gaza territory.
Nancy Pelosi says that Netanyahu “could not have made things worse” in Gaza
Former President of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said that the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, “could not have made things worse” in the conflict in Gaza, in an interview broadcast this Sunday by the BBC.
Pelosi, who on Thursday participated in an event at the English university of Oxford, told the ‘Laura Kuenssberg Program’ that Netanyahu “was never a peace agent” and admitted that she “is not a great fan of his.”
The congresswoman said that what is happening in the Strip “challenges the conscience of the world” and maintained that the impact of famine on children “is almost unforgivable”, while calling the Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7 “barbaric”.
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but the way it is doing it is a challenge because Netanyahu has never been a peace agent,” he said.
“I’m not a great admirer of yours; I couldn’t have done things worse than those tens of thousands, or whatever number it is, of dead people, malnourished children and the uncertainty that exists… and that’s what people are talking about,” he said.
Asked if she understood why young people in the United States used controversial tactics when protesting against the conflict, Pelosi opined that “when they go beyond the campuses and block the Golden Gate Bridge, or something else, for a long time, and people can’t go to the doctor or the hospital or anything urgent in their lives, they don’t get support.”
But he added: “How can demonstrations on (university) campuses be criticized? That’s a way of life in the United States.”
On Thursday, the British police evicted two pro-Palestinian protesters who protested during their speech on populism to students from the University of Oxford, while abroad another group criticized her for her defense of Israel and her position on the movement to support Palestine.
