A Brazilian judge has banned Lula da Silva from using an ad linking incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro to cannibalism.
Brazilians go to the polls in three weeks to elect a new president. The battle between the two remaining candidates, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and his leftist rival, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is fierce (DS 4 October).
For example, this weekend a judge banned a Lula da Silva campaign website linking Bolsonaro to cannibalism. Lula’s campaign venue “lacks context,” the verdict was.
The ad contains a video clip from 2016. It describes Bolsonaro, then a member of Parliament, in an interview with New York times “Ritual cannibalism” he says is still performed by an indigenous community in northern Brazil. “They cook the meat for two or three days and eat it with bananas,” he says. It also seems to imply that he himself is willing to eat “cooked Indian”. Then an audio commentary can be heard saying: “After all the absurdities that Brazil has already heard from Bolsonaro, he reveals here that he will eat human flesh too.”
According to the judge, the interview was edited to falsely suggest “that candidate Bolsonaro will under any circumstances eat human flesh.”
Lula, who was president from 2002 to 2010, defended the announcement. “It is not our campaign that suggests this, he himself told an American journalist. We only inform the voter.
