Brazilians fear return to dictatorship as ‘deranged’ Bolsonaro trails in polls

Jair Bolsonaro has called on his supporters to take to the streets on 7 September in what opponents fear could furnish the pretext for an attack on democracy. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters

They were cruel, brutish years. Dissidents languished in torture chambers. Rebels were shot in cold blood. Artists fled abroad.

“It was a time of constant sorrow and fear,” the Brazilian lawyer and former justice minister José Carlos Dias said of the military dictatorship that hijacked his country in 1964 and would rule for more than two decades. “Violence wasn’t just something the torturers enjoyed. It was government policy.”