The Workers’ Party has spent between 25,000 and 30,000 reais to promote videos on Facebook that associate President and re-election candidate Jair Bolsonaro (PL) with cannibalism.

The announcements were distributed last Sunday (9) and reached about 2 million people. The images were mostly seen by residents of Sao Paulo (28%), Rio de Janeiro (13%) and Minas Gerais (10%). The video was also seen by 5% of the inhabitants of Pernambuco, Amazonas, Para and Rio Grande do Sul.

Bolsonaro’s coalition asked the TSE to punish Lula’s campaign for advertising a video about cannibalism. Photo: reproduction

Information about the cost of the increase and the most favorable states is contained in a lawsuit filed by Bolsonaro’s campaign in the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) last Monday (10).

The coalition has asked the Electoral Court to punish Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s (PT) campaign for continuing to broadcast on television a video linking the current president to cannibalism. Bolsonaro’s statement was given to the American newspaper The New York Times in 2016.

“I cook for two or three days and eat with bananas. And then I wanted to see how an Indian is cooked. Hence the guy: “If you’re going, you have to eat.” I said I am eating. Then, surrounded by no one wanted to go. “Come with me there,” but no one wanted to go. Then, since no one in the environment wanted to go, because I had to eat an Indian … they didn’t want to take me there alone. I didn’t go there. I would eat an Indian no problem. This is their culture… and I have submitted to it,” Bolsonaro told an American newspaper.

According to the request, the campaign material was published “all day long” last Sunday (9). “Representatives not only broadcast the banned insert, but also boosted the show in the blocks with the largest audience, getting the best audience for the low-income and less educated audience, in order to increase the effect of the untruth and imposed insult,” the lawyers say.

Removing ads

Minister Paulo de Tarso Vieira Sanseverino of the TSE last Saturday (8) determined the removal of the election campaign. “On a superficial analysis characteristic of precautionary measures, it turns out that, as alleged, the contested election campaign is a cut of some excerpt from an interview given by a representative candidate, capable of setting up serious decontextualization,” the minister says.

Regarding TSE’s decision to take the video off the air, the PT report said that “the propaganda showed only the speech – the real one – by Bolsonaro himself”. The party contacted the report again, this time about social media promotion spending, and did not return until the last update of the report.