Monday, August 31st 2026 - 22:13 UTC
“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.
