Brazil’s far-right president,
Jair Bolsonaro, is facing growing calls to explain his family’s alleged links to the
heavily armed and notoriously violent paramilitary gangs that control large swaths of Rio de Janeiro.
Police also
confirmed that one of Bolsonaro’s sons had dated the daughter of the other murder suspect, Ronnie Lessa, and that Lessa lived in the same beachside compound where Brazil’s president lived until moving to the capital following his election last year.
“These relations between paramilitaries and the president of the republic must be explained.Brazilian press reports paint Lessa as a
cold-blooded killer who lost his leg in a 2009 bomb attack and made a fortune as a member of a group of contract killers called the “Escritório do Crime” (The Crime Bureau).
But there was “ample evidence” that left the family’s ties to paramilitaries “beyond doubt”, he claimed, pointing to the president’s
well-documented public defence of death squads and militias.
It must be explained, for example, how a retired policeman such as Ronnie Lessa … was able to own a comfy home in a middle-upper-class condo … the same condo where President
Jair Bolsonaro also has a home – when he earned just 8,000 reais a month,” the newspaper added.