Lula defends campaign propaganda recalling that Bolsonaro said he would “eat Indian”

Oct. 8 () –

Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defended Saturday his campaign’s use of a video in which his rival and candidate for re-election, Jair Bolsonaro, said he would “eat Indian.”

“We are not making it up (…). He said it to an American journalist. It’s not ‘fake news. There is no malice. We are informing the people of what our adversary is like,” Lula explained in statements reported by the Brazilian press.

Lula refers to a 30-second video extracted from a 2016 interview with a journalist from ‘The New York Times’ in which Bolsonaro assures that there was no dictatorship in Brazil and recalls that during a visit an indigenous region in the north of the country.

“An Indian died and they were cooking him. They were cooking the Indian. It’s their culture. They cook him for two or three days and eat him with banana,” he said.

“I wanted to see how they cooked the Indian. If I go, I have to eat. I eat! Since the entourage didn’t want to go because they would have to eat Indian, I didn’t want to go alone and I didn’t go. I would have eaten the Indian without any problem. It is their culture and I submitted to it,” he explained.

The statements in Lula’s campaign video are selected and accompanied by a mournful voice warning that “Bolsonaro would eat human flesh.” “Brazil can’t take any more Bolsonaro,” the video concludes.

The president of the Yanomami Indigenous Health District Council, Junior Hekurari, has denied that the Yanomami of Surucucu, to whom Bolsonaro was referring, perform any ritual of cannivalism.