SEVERÍNIA, Brazil — Samurai Caçador hoisted the rifle onto his shoulder and took aim as the pickup lurched through the fields. Bang! The wild hog and her five piglets ran scared in the dark of the night, illuminated by a long-range flashlight. Bang!
“Come hunt with Samurai!” bellowed Caçador, Brazil’s fast-talking, charismatic pro-gun social media influencer.
A massive wild boar—an invasive species that uproot soil and raid crops—lay dead on the ground, warm to the touch. Caçador had let the piglets go. They would die soon enough without their mother, he said.
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Samurai Caçador is not his real name. That would be Mardqueu Silvio França Filho. But six years ago, as França was looking to grow his influence, he picked Samurai—military nobility from medieval Japan—because he has Japanese heritage. He says this pointing to his eyes. For his last name, he picked Caçador, or hunter.
Now, Mardqueu França aka Samurai Caçador, 45, is running for state legislator in Sao Paulo state, one of a slate of pro-gun candidates who not only love U.S.-manufactured guns but also embrace the NRA’s rhetoric and playbook. Under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, they’ve grown from a disparate group of pro-gun enthusiasts into a political juggernaut, with their own movement and agenda.
A former army officer, Bolsonaro has turned gun rights into a centerpiece of his bid to win reelection on October 2, but he’s also unleashed a movement that will likely outlive him. Pro-gun activists have turned the debate over guns into one with distinctly U.S. overtones and created a lobbying group, ProArmas, explicitly fashioned after the NRA. Among their goals is to pass the equivalent of a Second Amendment enshrining the right to bear arms.
“What some countries take 50 years to do, we did in the past five,” Caçador said. “I see the pro-gun movement as the standard for freedom.”
The sea change under Bolsonaro—as he has expanded gun access to an unprecedented level—is astounding. Since he took office in 2019, the number of guns in civilian hands has nearly tripled, to 2 million, while the number of registered gun owners has increased threefold to 1.56 million, according to the Sou da Paz Institute, which tracks gun violence in Brazil. In one of the most violent countries in Latin America, civilian gun owners now outnumber the police and military combined.
“The Pandora’s box has been opened and I don’t see this going back,” said Robert Muggah, a security expert at the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, a think tank focused on security and justice. “Bolsonaro and his family and his most ardent supporters have supercharged the pro-arms movement in this country.”
The number of guns in the hands of Bolsonaro supporters has fueled concerns of civil unrest if Bolsonaro refuses to accept election results, as he has suggested he might. Bolsonaro is a fan of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and like Trump, he questions the reliability of the electoral system without proof and said he wants the armed forces “to oversee” the vote counting in October’s presidential election. His opponent, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is leading in the polls.
On Sept. 5, Supreme Electoral Court Minister Edson Fachin took the extraordinary step of temporarily suspending ordinances that make it easier to buy guns, citing a risk of “political violence” in the lead-up to the elections. That risk, the judge wrote, “makes the need to restrict access to weapons and ammunition extremely and exceptionally important.”
Caçador downplayed such concerns. “They said we’d have a civil war. It was a lie,” he said. “Where’s the war?”
The NRA targets Brazil
Brazil’s pro-gun movement was virtually dead. Then the NRA stepped in.
In 2003, Brazil’s Congress was just months away from passing a landmark disarmament bill tightening restrictions for owning and carrying guns. Alarmed, pro-gun groups in Brazil invited NRA lobbyist Charles Cunningham to strategize with them. Cunningham traveled to Brazil, where he spoke about the need to emphasize freedom and rights, more than just guns.
That strategy was put to the test two years later, in 2005, when Brazilians voted on a measure to ban the sale of guns to civilians. The proposal had the backing of the Brazilian government, the United Nations, the Roman Catholic Church, and, early polls showed, a large majority of Brazilians.
But opinions quickly changed as the pro-gun camp put out ads that emphasized gun ownership as a symbol of freedom. One television ad featured Nelson Mandela and connected his fight for freedom to the idea that people should have the freedom to own guns. Another TV spot referred to the “right” to own a gun, although no such right exists in Brazil.
“We view Brazil as the opening salvo for the global gun control movement. If gun control proponents succeed in Brazil, America will be next,” NRA spokesperson Andrew Arulanandam told investigative journalism group CorpWatch a week before the vote.
The measure was soundly rejected by more than 60 percent of voters. Less than 20 years later, Brazil has one of the biggest handgun manufacturers in the world, Taurus, and has become a lucrative emerging market for American gun companies.
“It’s a virgin market,” said Luis Horta, international sales director for Latin America for Illinois-based Springfield Armory, a gun manufacturer that sells handguns and rifles. “There is no other country that has the potential Brazil will be in 10 years.”
A US-inspired political gun movement
On July 9 this year, some 3,000 gun enthusiasts showed up at a pro-gun rally in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. The demonstration was organized by ProArmas, the NRA-inspired lobbying group, to demand a further loosening of gun restrictions. They marketed it as a “rally for freedom.”
Since its founding in 2019, ProArmas, or ProGuns, has become an influential force in Brazil’s Congress and mobilized tens of thousands of passive gun owners into an enthusiastic voting bloc. Those voters were now flying in from around the country to attend the rally. Most were white men and a large number wore T-shirts featuring the Bolsonaro quote “An armed people will never be enslaved” with a picture of a semi-automatic rifle.
Caçador arrived in his trademark camouflage button-down shirt, a black hat with his name splashed on it, and his brand logo tattooed on his forearm. He enthusiastically greeted pro-gun supporters as they stepped off commercial buses. Some recognized him from Instagram, where he posts multiple times a day with gun-related content to his 85,000 followers. He posed for selfies with fans, their fingers in the shape of a gun, a defining symbol of the Bolsonaro campaign.
Bolsonaro advocates a vigilante, shoot-first approach when it comes to Brazil’s crime problem, and has expanded gun access in that ethos. Through a series of executive decrees, he lowered the age for purchasing a gun, cut back federal police and army oversight of gun ownership, lifted the ban on the sale of high-powered rifles like AR15s to civilians, and increased the number of guns civilians could own—from 12 to 30 for hunters, and from 16 to 60 for sports shooters. The number of shooting clubs during his presidency has soared from 215 to over 2000.
As the ProArmas rally kicked off in July, there was talk that Bolsonaro might make an appearance. Instead, attendees were treated to the next best thing: Bolsonaro’s third son, Eduardo, a federal deputy and his father’s trusted adviser, ideologue, and ambassador. He has forged close ties to the NRA and the Trump family. Admirers mobbed him seeking selfies as bodyguards hovered around him.
Before a reverent crowd, Eduardo boasted about his father’s success. The homicide rate plunged by some 30 percent during Bolsonaro’s presidency, which the Bolsonaros claim is a result of more guns in civilian hands.
“Recently, Jair Bolsonaro stood alone against gun control. Now, we have this huge crowd here supporting him,” Eduardo yelled into a megaphone atop a float overlooking the crowd. “Yes to being armed because we’d rather have criminals die than have to worry our wives may get raped.”
He ended his speech railing against Da Silva, his father’s presidential rival in the upcoming October election, and joined the crowd as they erupted into Trumpian chants of “Lock him up!”
Afterward, Eduardo spoke to VICE World News as bodyguards held eager fans at bay. “The United States is a reference when you talk about democracy, when you talk about freedom and when you talk about gun control,” he said. “Here in Brazil we are building our NRA, which is ProArmas.”
The gun rally itself was notably devoid of guns. Brazilians are prohibited from carrying them in public unless they’re going hunting or to a shooting range, or have a permit to do so. They are also required to pass background checks and psychological evaluations before purchasing a gun, which can take months.
Loosening such restrictions is among ProArmas’ long-term objectives. The group’s immediate goal, though, is to codify into law the expanded gun access that Bolsonaro made through executive decrees. That would prevent Da Silva from repealing the decrees, as he’s promised to do if he wins the election.
ProArmas has also endorsed 89 local and national candidates across the country, including Caçador and Marcos Pollon, the group’s 41-year-old founder, who is running for federal delegate. Eight are women. All of them support Bolsonaro.
“We fight for the freedom of our children, and the children of our children,” Pollon told VICE World News at a barbecue following the rally as American pop hits blasted in the background. A lawyer who hails from the midwest state of Mato Grosso do Sul—what he described as Brazil’s “redneck” region—Pollon echoed many of the NRA’s key lobbying points, including that “the only way to stop an armed maniac is with an armed good man or woman.”
He went on to call former President Da Silva “one of the greatest criminals in the history of humanity” and said the only way Da Silva would win the election was through fraud. If Da Silva takes power, Pollon insisted, “all opponents like me will be arrested or murdered, and we will live in a dictatorship. We will simply be murdered like flies just like in Nazi Germany.”
Only Bolsonaro’s ex-wife, Ana Cristina Valle, who was also at the rally, entertained the idea that Bolsonaro might lose. If that happened, she said, the family would “probably move out of Brazil.” Bolsonaro could face charges of “crimes against humanity” for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his and Valle’s son, Renan, is being investigated for money laundering.
Fueling the far-right—and gangs
In August, John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and whose 1998 book “More Guns, Less Crimes” became a rallying cry for the NRA, traveled to Shot Fair, one of the largest gun conventions in Latin America. He was treated like a minor celebrity—people with “Don’t tread on me” T-shirts posed with him for selfies. At Lott’s keynote address, audience members asked what motivates “George Soros, Barack Obama, and CNN” to support disarmament when they know the data is “manipulated.”
“People on the left, like George Soros and others, think they’re much smarter than everybody else,” Lott responded. “They don’t trust you to make decisions in a wide variety of areas in your life. And guns are no different.”
Lott added that “it’s the most vulnerable people in our society who benefit the most from having guns for protection.” Still, most Brazilians can’t afford a gun—they are far more expensive than in the U.S.
“If you see the people who are buying guns in Brazil, it’s rich people, white people and males,” said Bruno Langeani, a researcher at Sou da Paz Institute in São Paulo. “For the poor population, the only side of the policy that they are seeing is the gun wound, the gun shot.”
Even those in law enforcement caution that more guns can lead to more crime. The country’s most powerful gangs, the Red Command and First Capital Command, have long trafficked in drugs and weapons, especially U.S.-manufactured guns smuggled through neighboring Paraguay. The expansion of Brazil’s legal gun market offers them another, cheaper supply of guns and ammunition. More than two dozen registered gun owners have been accused of selling arms and ammunition to some of Brazil’s largest criminal groups.
“More guns on the streets will [mean] more guns in criminal hands,” said Pedro Correa Santos, the head of bank robbery investigations in São Paulo. He opened a closet stuffed with 151 guns that police had seized during bank robberies in prior months. At least half were manufactured in the U.S., nearly all of them semi-automatic rifles.
“These guns are criminals’ guns,” he said. “I don’t know why someone [would] want to buy a gun like this.”
Bolsonaro supporters have been buying guns in droves as the election nears.
Jorge Sousa, who also attended the Shot Fair convention in August, owned three guns for most of his life. In the last year alone, he’d purchased 26 more. He was looking to buy his 27th—an AR-10 from the American manufacturer Springfield. While the gun retails for around $1,300 in the U.S., it costs upwards of $5,500 in Brazil.
“It’s a passion,” he said.
Caçador was too busy greeting supporters to check out the guns. “Our task at hand is to keep this market,” he said, “regardless of the government.”
