In 1970, troops arrived in the scenic Ribeira Valley in the state of São Paulo, hunting for enemies of the military regime in the woods and farmland around the town of Eldorado. It was the most violent phase of a dictatorship that had started six years earlier with a military coup against President João Goulart. The soldiers in the Ribeira Valley were looking for Carlos Lamarca. The former captain had deserted the army a year earlier to join a leftist guerrilla group and became one of the leaders of the armed struggle against the regime. He had come to Eldorado to set up a training ground in the valley.

President Joao Goulart (L) and President Kennedy (R) leaving the White House, 1962

It was Bolsonaro’s home town - he was 15 years old. “[Lamarca] was in the region and injured six soldiers,” Bolsonaro recalled in a 2017 interview. "He took one of them... as a hostage, and then killed him with strikes of a rifle butt - cowardly.” As the war between the military regime and left-wing guerrilla fighters came near his door, the young Bolsonaro chose his side. “I knew everything in those woods and I passed on information to the soldiers about the places,” he said. He and other young men in the region offered guidance to the army to help find Lamarca’s hideaway. The guerrilla managed to escape, but was killed a year later. As for the boy, he decided to join the army. At 18, Bolsonaro enrolled in the preparatory school for cadets. It was the start of a military career that would mould Bolsonaro’s beliefs.

Our Lady of Guidance Church, Eldorado

He had been born into a family of six children, descended mostly from Italian immigrants - the surname came from his Venetian great-grandfather, initially spelled Bolzonaro. His father was a dentist, the only one in town, and his mother a housewife. They were not wealthy and rented a simple house by the Ribeira do Iguape river. The young Bolsonaro used to go fishing on the river and extracted heart of palm in the woods to make some money. Palmito, as the inner core of palms is called in Portuguese, was one of his nicknames - he was long, lean and very light-skinned. He helped his father produce dentures for his clinic. And he liked shooting birds with pellet guns and going on hunts for gold in areas that had been mined in the past.

Celso Luiz Leite and his wife Maria do Carmo Ferreira Leite