RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (AFP) Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, no stranger to controversy, sparked a new brouhaha this week by repeatedly defending the practice of child labor.
“I’ve been working since I was eight years old… and today I am what I am,” the president said during his weekly live forum on Facebook.
“Look, when a child of eight or nine years old works somewhere, many people denounce it as ‘forced labor’ or ‘child labor,'” he added. “But if that child smokes coca paste, nobody says anything.”
“Work brings dignity to men and women, no matter their age,” he said.
On Saturday, he republished a 2017 AFP video showing Frank Giaccio, the 11-year-old owner of a lawn mowing business and admirer of U.S. president Donald Trump, trimming the White House lawn. Bolsonaro added the words “work ennobles.”
According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), some 2.5 million children and adolescents aged five to seventeen work in Brazil.
Bolsonaro is not known for being politically correct. In 2011, he told Playboy magazine he would rather see his own son “die in an accident” than come out as gay. He has also said poor people are too ignorant to understand family planning.
Last Saturday he said that “Brazil is a virgin that every foreign pervert wants…” and as a congressman in late 2014, he said that a colleague was not “worth raping, she is very ugly.” A judge ultimately ordered him to pay the woman US$2,500.
(Source: AFP)