One of Brazil’s most popular late-night television hosts, Jô Soares, is arguing with a politician about his tough-on-crime attitude. Police violence could only create more violence, Soares argued.

“I don’t understand why no one agrees with me, or at least a considerable percentage don’t agree with me,” the politician responds. “A million people disagree with this slogan, ‘um bandido bom é bandido morto,’ [a good thug, is a dead thug] but fifty thousand agree, especially those who have been victims.”

That politician was not Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s proto-fascist president-elect who vowed, just last month, “a cleansing never before seen in the history of Brazil” of “red criminals.” Rather, it was José Guilherme Godinho Ferreira, commonly known as Sivuca, who began his career in the 1950s as an elite police officer — he was part of former president Getúlio Vargas’s personal security team — before winning election to the Rio de Janeiro state legislature in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. It was Sivuca’s campaign that popularized Bolsonaro’s favorite “bandido morto” slogan. Sivuca, however, also added that the dead thug should be “buried upright to not take up too much space.”