Brazil's runoff day produced its sharpest confrontation not at a polling station but in a bus garage. On Sunday morning the president of Bahia's Regional Electoral Court, Judge Maurício Kertzman Szporer, ordered the arrest of Pablo Souza, the mobility secretary of the state capital Salvador, after at least 75 city buses stayed in their depots instead of carrying voters to the polls. Inspectors found 55 buses parked and ready to run at a single operator's garage, and later counts put the number of idle buses across the city's depots far higher.
The court's order was sweeping: Salvador's full fleet back on the streets immediately, free fares maintained, a fine of one million reais for every hour of noncompliance, proof of restoration within the hour, and the Civil Police sent to monitor enforcement, drones included. The file was referred to electoral prosecutors and the federal police for possible election crimes.
The city tells a different story about how the buses came to be parked. Mayor Bruno Reis, an ally of the Bolsonaro camp, blamed union activists for illegally sticking Workers' Party material on the vehicles, and the mobility secretariat said it had ordered every bus released and that service was being normalized. Souza himself was reported to be in Paris when the arrest order was issued; an order is not yet an arrest, there was no confirmation he had been detained, and he was expected to present himself on his return.
The politics are impossible to separate from the buses. Bahia is Lula country, and its working voters ride public transport; a thinned-out fleet in a city hall held by the other camp, on the one day every vote had to be cast, is why the president's party also went to the Superior Electoral Court asking for voting hours to be extended in Salvador and in São Paulo, where a reduced fleet was reported as well and a judge had already ordered the full fleet out the day before. Sunday's runoff between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro — who took the first round — turned in part on who could physically reach a ballot box, and in Salvador the courts decided that question would not be left to the garages.
Never miss a story.Join our Telegram channel and get every article link the second it is published.
Join Telegram Channel