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(CNN Spanish) --

The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who is running for re-election against former president Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, has repeatedly criticized the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, for attacking his opponent for the presidency and trying to take the lead in a close election that will be defined this October 30.

In his most recent statements against Petro, Bolsonaro - who participated only in the presidential debate this Wednesday - said that the only interest of the president of Colombia is to legalize cocaine.

"Other countries want it, like Colombia," Bolsonaro said, referring to Brazil's instant payment system PIX, adding: "But I don't know if now with its new president (Gustavo Petro) they don't want it anymore because their business now is to free (legalize) cocaine," Reuters reported.

"He is also a friend of Lula, who can discuss the matter with me," Bolsonaro said in a televised debate this Sunday, a week before the presidential second round.

The president of Colombia has advocated a paradigm shift in the fight against drugs, which he says has failed, which is why he calls for a new approach based on public health and not on the criminal persecution of consumers.

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And it was just after the speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in September, when Bolsonaro criticized Petro, rejecting his proposal to change the objective of the fight against drugs.

“The president of Colombia went to the UN to defend the release (legalization) of cocaine, and do not forget that this new president of Colombia is an old friend of that thief Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,” Bolsonaro said last September. , quoted by the agency Efe.

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Bolsonaro and his attack against the left

Bolsonaro, a politician who was a military man and who presented himself as a liberal, Catholic and far-right conservative, became president of Brazil in 2019 after more than a decade of left-wing governments, fallen to less after a series of corruption scandals. and political crisis that ended with the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) and a significant number of political leaders in prison, including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010).

Lula was sentenced in 2019 to more than 12 years in prison, but after serving more than 19 months, in March 2021 a Brazilian court annulled Lula's corruption convictions, allowing him to stand in the 2022 presidential elections.

Since then, Bolsonaro has established himself as the Brazilian Donald Trump due to his populist style and his excessive lies, among others, about the Brazilian electoral system.

The president of Brazil, in a widely used strategy to dismiss his political container, has questioned not only Petro, but has also criticized other leftist governments on the continent, putting them as an example of "regression" and anti-democracy in the region and associating them with Lula, in an attempt to make leftist governments a public enemy.

"Look what just happened with the CNN signal in Nicaragua. It was cut off by Lula's friend," who "says that social networks must be regulated," Bolsonaro said, referring to the decision of the government of Daniel Ortega to take the CNN en Español signal off the air on September 22.

And without leaving aside the much criticized government of Nicolás Maduro, the conservative politician has also mentioned "the violence that Venezuela is experiencing", a country about which he has said that it was "led to failure" by "the left friend of Lula".

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In addition, Bolsonaro has defended his conservative agenda under the slogan "God, Country and Freedom", he is against the so-called 'gender ideology', against abortion, against the liberation of drugs and in favor of weapons.

"Through a strong campaign also in the evangelical mega-churches that are not only openly favoring Bolsonaro but also saying things against Lula, in some things they are true, and in other cases they are lies," Brian Winter, editor in chief, told CNN. head of Americas Quarterly.

The political style that has characterized Bolsonaro during his last years can be summed up in that he has created distractions to avoid focusing on things that really matter, such as reforms or privatizations, or even the large number of scandals and controversies during his presidency.

"He creates that circus environment to divert attention," Lorena Barbería, a researcher and full professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo, previously told CNN.

And part of these distractions is to create a public enemy, which in this case is the left embodied in Lula, which has a slight advantage in the polls: according to the most recent Datafolha measurement, the leftist leader has 49% of the intention of vote compared to 45% of Bolsonaro.

According to Federico Finchelstein, an expert on populism and author of the book "From fascism to populism in history," Bolsonaro shares a style with populist leaders and has elements of fascism, like other political leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Javier Milei in Argentina and former president Donald Trump, who have constructed a rhetoric full of lies "to demonize what is different", in this case, the left.

But Bolsonaro insists that he is a defender of democracy and the constitution and rejects the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and what happens there with the rights and freedoms of opponents and democratic processes, and since Colombia has its first leftist government in history, has created a new scapegoat to demonize its political containers.

But rhetoric is not the only one that will define a result, according to the editor-in-chief of Americas Quartely, as he said that while the economy and religion may favor Bolsonaro, "the memory of the pandemic" may work against him.

"There he will clearly favor Lula, who was always in favor of vaccines and science in general. Bolsonaro did not have that advantage, but he has several factors in his favor at the moment. It will be a difficult election and anyone could win at this point." Quarterly said on CNN.

-- With information from Reuters and Sofía Benavides and Rafael Romo from CNN en Español. 

Gustavo PetroJair BolsonaroLuiz Inacio Lula da Silva