Bolsonaro's doctors rule out operating on him but he remains hospitalized

Jair Bolsonaro walks with a probe in a São Paulo hospital Instagram @michellebolsonaro

The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, admitted since Monday to a hospital in São Paulo, will not have to go back into the operating room.

The intestinal obstruction that forced him to interrupt his beach vacation and be admitted has been eliminated with the treatment "so there is no indication for surgery," the health center reported on Tuesday in a note.

The 66-year-old president has been examined first thing in the morning by the doctor who treats him for the aftermath of a stab wound in the abdomen that was inflicted by a mental patient in the 2018 election campaign

The medical team that attends him has also communicated that the Brazilian leader is evolving favorably, that he will begin to take a liquid diet and that, for the moment, there is no forecast that he will be discharged.

The crisis caught his doctor abroad. That is why Bolsonaro has had to wait for Dr. Antonio Luiz Macedo, who was on vacation in the Bahamas, to return to Brazil to examine him in person. The surgeon has landed at the São Paulo international airport shortly after dawn and has gone directly to the hospital. The specialist returned to Brazil from the Caribbean islands on a plane chartered by the health center, according to local press.

Bolsonaro has spent his Christmas holidays in Brazil. Specifically, on the coast of the southern state of Santa Catarina when on Sunday after eating he began to feel discomfort and abdominal pain. Given his medical history, he was airlifted to the Vila Nova Star Hospital in São Paulo, the same where he was treated for a similar crisis last July. Nor then did he require surgery. But since the stabbing, the president has undergone surgery several times because of the aftermath.

As a result of the attack, the then candidate did not participate in any of the electoral debates.

And his popularity soared in the polls that Lula da Silva had led until the judges disqualified him from attending.

With his political rights restored, the veteran former president Lula, 76, once again leads the polls at the beginning of this election year.

The hospital admission has silenced a controversy that has accompanied him throughout the president's vacations, who maintained his leisure plans and declined to travel to Bahia to visit the victims on the days around Christmas due to heavy rains.

Most Brazilians, including part of the president's supporters, have criticized the persistent insensitivity that he has shown since the beginning of the pandemic for those affected and their families.

But the hospitalization has resurrected, instead, the attack he suffered after a rally in Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais) a month before the first round of the elections.

The aggressor, declared unimpeachable by the judges in view of his serious mental problems, said that he was obeying God's orders.

This Monday the Bolsonaro clan and its most loyal followers took advantage of the crisis suffered by the president to remember that the attack was real (and not an invention as some conspiracy theories claim).

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