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The victory came two years after he won the presidential race, winning 56 votes out of a possible 70 votes. The growth from one election to the next has strengthened Basilar’s power in the government of Rio de Janeiro, including an election race as a right-wing candidate for the government of Rio de Janeiro.

Although he has been active in the regional game in Campos dos Goytacazis for some time, Rodrigo Bacellar only ran for his first election in 2018, when he was elected state representative. Since then, he has led a meteoric rise to the presidency of Allerg, focusing, along the way, on preparing a report for the impeachment of Governor Wilson Weitzel, which brought his ally Claudio Castro (PL) to the top job in the Guanabara Palace.

Bacellar joined União Brasil in March 2024. He was previously a member of the Liberal Party. In 2023, the English Premier League split. Rodrigo Baselar was a member of the party and was the candidate supported by Governor Claudio Castro, but a dissident wing of the Liberal Party attempted to make Jair Bettencourt fit as president of the ticket, with the blessing of party president Altino Cortés. As a result of the fighting, there were changes at the top level of the Rio de Janeiro government, such as the change of the Minister of Education, who had previously been appointed by Hizb ut-Tahrir and who was now appointed by Basilar.

As the months passed, the two became closer. To put together the new ticket, Basilar and Altinho reached a consensus: the Union would not hold the position of First Vice President, but would instead have a deputy from Hizb ut-Tahrir. Another partisan change is the leadership of the Constitution and Justice Committee (CCJ), the most important in Allerg, which should also be chaired by an MP from Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Basselar thus secured the full support of the Liberal Party. The re-elected president also sought to enlist the help of center and left parties to build a single candidacy. For example, Representative Zidane (PT) remains a member of the Board of Directors. Parliamentarians from PSOL, PDT and PSD also supported Basilar’s candidacy, despite their opposition to Claudio Castro’s government.

In 2010, it was cited as the focus of an investigation by the Public Ministry of Rio (MP-RJ) into a “rent” scheme by the city of Camposí, a municipality of 14,600 people in the northwestern region of Rio de Janeiro.

Three statements from local politicians that O GLOBO obtained in an operation of more than a thousand pages indicate that the current state lawmaker and his father, former councilor Marcos Basilar, agreed to pay Mayor Oswaldo Botelho, known as Favado, R$160,000 a month in order to make decisions in the city, where allegations of bid fraud have emerged. The Basilar people come from Campos dos Goytacazes, in the north of the state, about 80 kilometers from Camposí.

The origin of the conspiracy goes back to the 2010 investigation against Oswaldo Abedo Botelho, known as Oswaldinho, Favado’s son who led the municipal Labor and Income Secretariat. According to the deputy, Favado, 75, stopped working in the day-to-day management of City Hall and unofficially delegated the task of running the municipality to Oswaldeño. But in August of that year, Favado’s son and seven other people were arrested on charges of promoting fraud in City Council bids.

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With the group’s dissolution, leadership of the city was handed over to the Basilar family, according to joint testimony by Council Members David Nye and Leila Velasco and Agriculture Secretary Carlos Vitorino da Fonseca. They told the prosecution that they participated in a meeting, on October 25, 2010, in which the previously unknown city mayor, Rodrigo Basilar, was introduced to Camposi officials, who acted as if he was the person in charge of the city. Officially, at that time he headed the defunct Northern Fluminense State Foundation (Finorte).

“Rodrigo showed himself as mayor, leading the meeting. (…) He was not even appointed and is already in charge of the city,” the trio said in their joint statement issued two days after the meeting with civil servants.

The three also told the deputy that Basilar mocked the group of Oswaldeño, who was arrested two months ago: “They are amateurs who don’t know how to do things right, and they leave traces,” the current president of Allerg claimed at the meeting, according to testimonies of David Nye, Leila Velasco and Carlos Vitorino.

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That month, Basilar appointed his own appointees to the Campuche City Council who to this day remain his strongmen in politics. Roy Paulhus, the current chief of staff to the President of Allerg, became Minister of Works; Márcio Bruno Carvalho de Oliveira, who also served as Basilar’s Chief of Staff, was appointed to the Work and Income portfolio; Leandro Maroso Siqueira was in charge of the tender secretariat, which, according to the data, was the department in which virtually all of them worked.

“An agreement has been reached (…) whereby the mayor will hand over the administration of Camposi and the rent of the city hall, and in return, he will receive R$160,000 per month from Marco Basilar (Rodrigo Basilar’s ​​father),” the two council members and the municipal secretary told the public prosecutor.

A month after the reports, testimony from another local politician revealed the intimidation faced by those who reported on the Basilar and Favado family. On 15 November 2010, Marco António da Silva Paes, Mayor of Camposi, told a member of Parliament that there was a meeting called by Mayor Favado “at a gas station on the road”. Three other city council members confirmed the plot to the deputy.

At that meeting, according to the president of the chamber, Secretary Carlos Vitorino was pressured by Favado to change the statement he made in October, in which he reported on the R$160,000 allowance that the Basilar Group was paying to lead the Camposi City Council and manage the entire bidding district.

It has already ended with the Secretary’s retraction. He returned to the prosecution and re-edited the report, claiming that he had not read the final text of the statement he presented to the deputy with the advisors. In addition to maintaining the replacement version, parliamentarians challenged the new version presented by the minister. They stated that the prosecutor in the case read out loud and in full in front of them the statement they had given.

This was not the first time that the MP received a report about the intimidation of complainants in Camposi. Councilor David Nye, who always sought recourse to authorities to speak out about fraud in the city, had his home shot up in 2010, before the Basselar family gained influence in the city.

In April 2011, following accusations against the current president of Al-Arj, anonymous reports submitted to the MP by citizens indicated that four armed men were seen standing one day in front of the home of Councilor David Nye.

Rodrigo Basilar was not convicted or even heard from by the prosecution in this operation. When the reporter contacted him through the press office for comment, he denied his involvement in the case, but did not take an official position.

Although in a certain part of the process, Basilar’s appointees to the Camposi City Council were described as “more dangerous than the gang that was arrested”, only a request for the dismissal of Mayor Favado was made. Between the comings and goings of court decisions that removed him and reinstated him, it was only in mid-2012 that the Campuche politician left the leadership of the city for good.

In the process, although the Basilar are not targeted as decisive targets, the MP tells other stories about the family in Campos. One of them concerns the alleged illegal use of external staff from the Cambista City Hall in Marcos Baselaar’s office in the chamber. In another case, which even led to the dismissal of the father of the current right-wing candidate for the government of Rio, the electoral representative pointed out deviations in Campos Luz in favor of him and the party to which he belonged at the time, the extinct Workers’ Party do P.