Juazeiro do Norte

“We need to stop thinking about just Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro isn’t the principal leader,” Alberdan Souza, 28, who administers a Telegram channel about geopolitics, said by phone from Juazeiro do Norte in Brazil’s poor northeast, where he said he is the rare schoolteacher to be proudly right-wing.

The local population kept on believing, and his followers have transformed Juazeiro do Norte into a place of pilgrimage, one of the leading centers of popular religiosity in Latin America with hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Padre Cicero was both a priest and a politician, serving as mayor of Juazeiro do Norte for 15 years.

In Juazeiro do Norte, demonstrators cornered the mayor inside a bank for hours and called for his impeachment, while thousands of others protested teachers’ salaries.