Guto Zacarias: Deputy reinforces being black and right-wing – 03/13/2023 – Politics

Right wing, of course. His position in futsal couldn’t be any different, where he played competitively as a teenager to the point of being affiliated with the federation. At 23, Guto Zacarias was elected state deputy for São Paulo, the youngest in the next legislature, after a campaign in which he stressed the fact that he was from the right, even though he was young, black and from the periphery: “I want to represent the blacks silenced by the left .”

One of the hits of his social networks is the attack on what he calls “political correctness”.

In a TikTok video, in which he has 916,000 followers, he asks: “Is it true that black people can only date black women?”. And he replies: “A straight man who falls for this little talk is making a huge effort to be straight”, he says.

′′ Brazil has 200 million people. ?”

Guto is the offspring of MBL, the Movimento Brasil Livre, a conservative organization linked to the right, formed mostly by young people, and which elected only two of its members in the last election, both from União Brasil, Sergio Moro’s party.

In addition to Guto, who had 152,481 votes, Kim Kataguiri, one of the founders of the movement, was re-elected federal deputy for São Paulo.

Guto is the son of an accountant father and state school teacher mother. Both “always hated the PT” and were PSDB voters until their son joined the MBL. It is a lower-middle-class family from Socorro, on the outskirts of the southern part of São Paulo, where Guto and his younger brother, aged 19, were born.

The boys studied at a private school in the neighborhood, but Guto, at the end of elementary school, wanted to move to the Norberto Alves Rodrigues State School, where his futsal friends were.

Ilmara Resende de Paula was his science teacher and remembers him as “scholarly and polite”. “He had a differentiated vocabulary, polished, and he was good at argumentation.”

In high school, he studied at José Lins do Rego, also state, as well as others in football — the class played for Kuma, Grajaú’s team.

The lack of identification with leftist ideas comes “since I was a child”, he says. Her father always put “a more liberal agenda in the family’s conversations, defending privatizations and fiscal responsibility”. At 16, Guto started following MBL content and reading economic liberalism authors pointed out by the movement as his references, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He also became a reader of Nelson Rodrigues, who he says he admires for being a conservative and for his more right-wing political positions.

A childhood friend and classmate from Kuma and high school, Matheus Henrique de Lima, 23, says that, at school, he and Guto even considered running for the student union, despite most members being sympathetic to leftist ideas .

It was the time of the occupation of schools by students (2015/2016), who claimed to participate in the decisions of a state government school reorganization project. “We gave up because all the tickets were in favor of the occupation, and we were totally against it.”

Despite the difficulty of getting politically engaged at school, Guto used “this political talk, this easy talk of persuasion, with the girls”, says Matheus, laughing. “He was always a chatterbox.”

It was at this time that he joined the MBL. Within a year he became coordinator of the movement in São Paulo.

In 2018, he worked in the campaigns of Kim Kataguiri and Arthur do Val, both elected, the first as a federal deputy and the second as a state deputy. He became an intern and later an advisor to Arthur do Val, following closely all the controversies in which the politician was involved, until his removal due to leaked audios in which he talks about a trip supposedly for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, in which he says , about war refugees, that Ukrainian “mines” “are easy because they are poor.”

That’s when Guto became the national coordinator of the MBL to immediately start his campaign. With political activities, he developed an on-and-off relationship with higher education. He studied two semesters of law at FMU, on the Liberdade campus, and then switched to economics, which he dropped out to dedicate himself to working with Arthur do Val and later to his own campaign.

In college, “the environment is more conducive to leftist militancy”. “The left reaches young people more easily, it’s more ‘cool’. And the right in Brazil is getting mixed up with Bolsonarism, which is very boring”, said Guto, in an interview with Sheetat the MBL headquarters, in a building in Morumbi (south zone).

“I never liked Bolsonarism, these people who flirt with the 1964 coup. It was always clear to me: The military dictatorship is rubbish and the PT is rubbish, okay?”

It is contrary to quotas for blacks in universities. It defends social quotas, that is, that consider socioeconomic conditions.

For him, the problem of blacks is the same as that of low-income whites: the quality of basic education. “Since most blacks study in public schools, they end up being the minority at universities.”

For him, racial quotas will not favor “the black person from Grajaú who is trying to get into medicine at USP, but the one who managed to take the pre-college course, who has more money”.

This position is linked to his disbelief in structural racism. Blacks must circumvent racism, he defends, “qualifying themselves to the maximum, learning to the maximum, being kind to everyone to the maximum”.

“Political correctness” is a “collective hysteria” that drives blacks away from the left, he says.

“Blacks don’t have basic sanitation, they’re drinking dirty water, and the PSOL is discussing that a blonde can’t wear braids…”, he comments on the idea of ​​cultural appropriation of black culture by whites.

Among the campaign promises are the defense of teaching financial education in schools and that he will refuse the privileges granted to deputies, such as a car, housing allowance and health insurance, in addition to supporting the end of this expenditure.

“The State cannot pay for a congressman to have an agreement. Dona Ana do Capão Redondo cannot pay for that”, he says, that until he was 21, as his mother is a teacher in the state, he relied on Iamspe (health system for public servants) and today has private insurance.

It also disdains structural machismo. In a video, he talks to a guy who tries to convince him that every man is sexist, and spends the whole time replying: “I’m not sexist.”

At the end of this interview with Sheet, the report commented on the fact that, in the MBL office, they only saw around 15 boys, and teased Guto, in an informal tone: “The MBL should have quotas for women, huh?” He laughed.

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X-ray | Guto Zacarias, 23

He is the national coordinator of MBL (Movimento Brasil Livre). He was an intern and later advisor to former state deputy Arthur do Val. He was elected state deputy in São Paulo by União Brasil. He is one of the vice-leaders of the Tarcísio de Freitas government (Republicans) in the São Paulo Assembly.