BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s presidential race entered its final stretch this weekend with a tightening poll lead for President Lula and a striking new development on the right: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro met directly with one of the architects of El Salvador’s mass-incarceration security model, signaling he intends to import elements of Nayib Bukele’s approach directly into his own campaign platform.
A Quaest poll published on Friday, August 29, and commissioned by Brazilian media group Globo, found Lula would take 43% of the vote in a simulated runoff against 40% for Bolsonaro — effectively a statistical tie once the survey’s two-point margin of error is factored in.
This latest gauge represents a real narrowing from Quaest’s own polling five days earlier, which had Lula ahead by a wider five-point margin, 44% to 39%.
In a first-round scenario, Lula still holds a more comfortable lead, at 38% to Bolsonaro’s 31%. Bloomberg’s reporting has framed Lula’s position as stronger than it looked a year ago, crediting an unlikely assist from two of his own political adversaries: Donald Trump’s tariff pressure on Brazil and Jair Bolsonaro’s coup conviction, both of which Lula’s campaign has worked to turn into a sovereignty-and-democracy message.
How the Race Officially Began
Both leading candidates formally launched their campaigns August 16 in their respective political strongholds. Lula, 80, spoke to more than 10,000 supporters at Vila Euclides Stadium outside São Paulo — the city where he rose to political prominence 47 years ago as a metalworkers’ union leader during Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Lula appeared wearing a hat following a skin cancer diagnosis and struck a defiant tone on national sovereignty, telling the crowd Brazil needs more of his policies going forward.
Across the country in Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro, 45, gathered thousands of supporters on Copacabana Beach — notably without his father present, who remains barred from public office through 2030 following his coup conviction and continues facing separate health complications.
Flávio’s Weekend Meeting
On Sunday, August 30, in São Paulo, Bolsonaro met with Gustavo Villatoro, El Salvador’s Minister of Justice and Public Security and one of the principal architects of Bukele’s security apparatus, including the Territorial Control Plan that combined large-scale police and military operations with mass arrests to reclaim gang-controlled territory.
Following the meeting, Bolsonaro was blunt: “Tem pouco preso no Brasil. Tinha que ser mais” — “Too few people are in prison in Brazil. There should be more.”
Bolsonaro attributed that gap to what he called “frouxa” — lax — criminal legislation, and pledged to close it.
“We’re going to create half a million new prison spaces, so that a cell phone thief, who should start with a sentence of at least eight years, actually stays in prison. Not just gets arrested, but stays locked up,” he said.
Bolsonaro’s emerging platform includes construction of five new federal maximum-security prisons and the creation of 500,000 new spaces within Brazil’s prison system. He has separately proposed classifying Brazil’s dominant criminal organizations — the PCC, Comando Vermelho, and various militia groups — as terrorist organizations, and has called for creating a standalone Ministry of Public Security, separate from the Justice Ministry, to coordinate directly with state and municipal police forces on funding and intelligence-sharing.
At a campaign stop in Nova Iguaçu, he also floated an eight-year minimum sentence specifically for cell phone thieves and those who purchase stolen goods.
Bolsonaro previously visited El Salvador in 2025, touring CECOT — the Center for Terrorism Confinement, the roughly 40,000-capacity mega-prison Bukele’s government built to house gang members.
El Salvador’s incarceration rate has become the highest in the world under Bukele’s state of exception, in effect since 2022: the country’s prison population surged to an estimated 120,000 people — roughly 2% of El Salvador’s total population of 6.4 million. By comparison, Brazil’s National Secretariat of Prison Policy reported approximately 964,000 people incarcerated at the end of 2025, representing about 0.4% of Brazil’s population.
Around 84,000 people have been arrested under Bukele’s state of exception specifically. Human rights groups have been critical of the government’s treatment suspected offenders, arguing a lack of due process.
Bukele’s approach has nonetheless coincided with a sharp drop in El Salvador’s homicide rate, and has increasingly become a reference point for right-leaning politicians across Latin America seeking a simple, forceful answer to organized crime — an influence already visible in countries including Honduras and Ecuador.
Bukele’s Latin America
Bolsonaro’s embrace of the Bukele model is not occurring in isolation. Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich has separately pursued cooperation with Bukele’s government on security policy, though Bukele himself has cautioned that Argentina’s security challenges differ enough from El Salvador’s that any adopted measures would need to be scaled accordingly.
The pattern reflects a broader rightward realignment across Latin American security politics this year, one that has made the “Bukele model” — however contested its human rights record — a recurring reference point for right-wing candidates well beyond Central America.
With Brazil’s campaign period running through October 3 ahead of the October 4 first-round vote, and the race between Lula and Bolsonaro now within the margin of error, Bolsonaro’s explicit turn toward the Bukele model gives Brazilian voters a genuinely concrete point of contrast heading into the campaign’s final weeks — one that will likely draw both enthusiastic support from voters frustrated with organized crime and sustained criticism from human rights organizations watching how far a Bolsonaro administration might be willing to go to replicate El Salvador’s results.
