MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazil: Flávio Bolsonaro promises 500,000 prison places inspired by the Salvadoran model

“There are few prisoners in Brazil, there should be more; there are not more only because the legislation is weak,” the senator said after the meeting

Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the Liberal Party's presidential candidate and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's main rival in October's elections, met on Sunday in São Paulo with El Salvador's justice and public security minister, Gustavo Villatoro, and announced he will incorporate into his programme measures inspired by President Nayib Bukele's security policy.

The plan envisages creating 500,000 prison places over four years and building five federal maximum-security prisons in a complex the candidate has named “Treva”. It also provides for a Ministry of Public Security separate from the Justice Ministry, with transfers of resources and intelligence to states and municipalities, and the classification of the Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho as narcoterrorist organisations. Washington added both to its list of terrorist groups in May.

“There are few prisoners in Brazil, there should be more; there are not more only because the legislation is weak,” the senator said after the meeting, proposing minimum sentences of eight years for mobile phone thieves. Brazil had 964,074 people deprived of liberty at the end of 2025, according to the National Secretariat for Penal Policies, 6% more than the previous year and the third-largest figure in the world in absolute terms, after the United States and China. Among the inmates is his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, serving a sentence for attempting a coup.

The meeting lasted around an hour at a hotel in the city. According to the candidate, he told Villatoro that many in Brazil consider it impossible to eliminate criminal factions, and the minister replied that it is not, because they did it in El Salvador. Parts of the conversation were recorded and will be used in the senator's television campaign advertising.

“In El Salvador they managed to implement one of the greatest and most effective recoveries of sovereignty and to return public security to the Salvadoran people,” Bolsonaro said. International human rights organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture and deaths in custody under the state of exception in force in that country since 2022. The Salvadoran government rejects those accusations and attributes the fall in homicides to its strategy. The candidate did not address the matter at the press conference.

The two countries differ considerably in scale. El Salvador has around six million inhabitants and an area smaller than the state of São Paulo; Brazil has more than 215 million.

Public security tops Brazilian voters' concerns: 35% place it as their first or second worry, ahead of healthcare and corruption. Other candidates, including Renan Santos and Romeu Zema, have also signalled an intention to adopt measures inspired by the Salvadoran model. Senator Sérgio Moro, a candidate for governor of Paraná for the same party, attended the meeting.