Bolsonaro locking up farm votes, with boost from ex-minister

CAMPO GRANDE, Brazil (AP) — Tereza Cristina pours coffee for visitors to her home surrounded by vast soybean plantations in Brazil’s farm country. The guests sitting in wicker chairs on her porch are friends and farmers keen to hear how they can help President Jair Bolsonaro’s re-election bid.

Cristina, Bolsonaro’s former agriculture minister, has become the face of the far-right president in Mato Grosso do Sul state — one of the agribusiness strongholds that is an important part of his effort to overcome leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The 68-year-old Cristina resigned as minister in March to run for a Senate seat and won a whopping 61% of the Oct. 2 vote. That’s even more than Bolsonaro earned in the first round of the presidential race in the state of 2.8 million people.

But Bolsonaro trailed by a few percentage points in the national tally and the two now are competing in a decisive Sunday runoff. With the race apparently close, the president's advantage even in sparsely populated rural regions can be crucial.

The state's economy — like that of Brazil as a whole— had boomed under da Silva from 2003 through 2010. But the state also weathered deep national economic downturns in the years since.

Its per capita GDP grew by more than 10% in real terms since 2012, while that of the nation contracted, according to Sérgio Vale, chief economist at MB Associados.

Cristina focuses on issues such as the regularization of land ownership for hundreds of thousands of farmers under Bolsonaro and says they helped more people than during the export-driven commodities boom under da Silva — who she said had favored big farmers over small ones.

“During these years (as minister) I worked much more for small farmers than for the big ones. The big ones don’t need the...