Jair Bolsonaro’s contentious first year in office

Since jair bolsonaro became Brazil’s president on January 1st 2019, he has quarrelled with an impressive array of foreign leaders and celebrities. After France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, accused him of encouraging deforestation of the Amazon, Mr Bolsonaro called his wife ugly. When Greta Thunberg, a young Swedish climate activist, highlighted the murder of indigenous people in the Amazon, the Brazilian president called her a “brat”. Michelle Bachelet, the un human-rights commissioner (and a former president of Chile), criticised a rise in killings by police in Brazil. Mr Bolsonaro responded by praising Chile’s dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, which tortured her father.

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