“A 1983 holiday expedition with fellow officers to a garimpo (an informal gold mine) in Bahia led to criticism from his superiors, who claimed they were concerned by his “excessive economic and financial ambition”. –
“A military court judgement earned him a fourteen-day prison sentence. A year later, he found himself in even hotter water. In a piece published in October 1987, Veja named him [Bolsonaro} as one of the ringleaders in a plot to bomb military installations: armed action designed to lend force to his group’s trade-union style demands. The attack never took place and the military court found him not guilty. But in practice the affair meant his days in the army were numbered. In December 1988 Bolsonaro quietly transferred to the reserve and started a new career.”

What den of squalor do they scrape these fraudsters up from?

I was thoroughly blindsided by this spectacular & supremely revealing compendium on both Brazil & the lurden & low-life Bolsonaro & co.
If your looking for a substantive, extensive & highly-penetrative foray into Brazil delivered with adroit attention to detail & minutia, Lapper’s tightly researched take is difficult to beat.
In terms of the contemporary curve of extremities under the festering FUBAR of Bolsonaro & the gigantic ravages wrought by his criminal stint of appalling misrule & politically assisted criminality – this is currently the best thing going in English.
a chance discovery whilst pursuing O ovo da serpente – Bolsonaro e a Direita [The Serpent’s Egg -Bolsonaro and the New Right] by journalist Consuelo Dieguez – which is not as of yet translated into English – I still can’t believe how much expertise & investigation is literally crammed into this majorly revelatory book.
It was published in 2021, before Bolsonaro’s narrow ousting from presidency in 2022, but the breadth & extent of the investigation, including historical & inter-related politics, is just off-the-scales.

It’s rare, if not unique, to have a candidate that can challenge Trump in sheer, raw feacal conduct, but the unfathomable energies would be tested by this singularly detestable contender who proudly presented himself as the Tropical Trump.
Away from the brain-bending excremental contortions & erupting depravity of these utter degenerates, let’s examine some of the crucial elements of this calamity.

Bolsonaro relied massively on micro targeting, mass-manufactured misinformation & tidal social-media retardation & manipulation (Cambridge Analytica mark 2 with familiar faces & an even more familiar stench)
Brazil was one of the few countries to allow Steve Bannon access & conscript him as an “advisor” & political strategist (most other international proto-fascist, populist or hard-right/libertarian political parties reject Bannon’s attempts at “collaboration” as they know that their sovereignty will be suborned & savaged to American extremist interests).
Bolsonaro was either dumb enough, corrupt enough or/& willing to betray Brazilian national integrity by signing up to Bannon’s tutelage & symbiosis under the same colostomy cocktail of neo liberal, red meat & insincere religious posturing that is the preferred Trojan horse & outward facade for the regular ransacking & regulatory atomisation that ensues.

Although Lapper’s book is rammed with precious information & leads, the crux of this shit-trail to the shadow lords of U$A (Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch et al) is not entirely exposed or solely scrutinised.
It is an area that urgently needs intense investigation – as the clear conspiracy & cooperative mingling with the worst elements of an aggressive & predatory foreign power were all fully embraced.
So telling & severe is Bolsonaro’s guilt, recreance & incrimination that he literally now resides in a mansion in Florida U.S., like an outed agent, defector or classic traitor.

On top of the filth & feculence with treasonous & deeply improper clandestine subterfuge with hyper pernicious US actors comes the Netanyahu & Israeli collusion that has marked the Bolsonaro government from the outset.
A grotesque cast of characters then, all renowned for using the most underhanded, dishonest & dishonourable techniques to further their depravity & corrupting influence no matter the cost or consequences.
An ill intentioned unholy alliance & orgy of the excrements.

Bolsonaro’s augmentation, encouragement & blanket indemnity for almost all criminal elements – large & small – & their wholesale pillaging, organised crime, contraband, murder, drug running, piracy, terrorism, arson, contamination, ecocide & environmental obliteration in the Amazon region is one of the strongest examples of “criminal capture” & “crime state” misappropriation & misrepresentation by a criminal organisation in the world today.
It is a text book extreme example of parliament operating by criminals on behalf of criminal enterprise for criminal interests, period.
The shredding of all but the measliest of safeguards, regulations & regulatory bodies, the repealing of budgets & funding for protective entities & general strategy of suffocation for any & all protective measures & law enforcement.
That is a crime state.

100% assisted banditry & solicitation of relating criminalities & their expansion.

Criminal capture.

Lapper lays it out, & so, so much more, in this absolute howler.
This is indispensable reading for anybody interested in the shit scourge of Bolsonaro, Brazilian politics from any angle, & those studying criminal capture, failed states, modern organised crime & large scale transnational criminal groups.

“Elections won’t change anything in this country,” – “It will only change the day civil war breaks out here and we do the job that the military regime didn’t do and kill 30,000 people. If we kill some innocent people that’s fine [because] in every war innocent people die.” – Jair Bolsonaro on TV Band in 1999

Richard Lapper, 2021, Manchester University Press, 260 pages