Prior to assuming the presidency in January 2019, then-federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro publicly articulated his disdain for quilombos in an address at a 2017 conference in Rio de Janeiro. He declared that, during a visit to an unnamed quilombo community in Eldorado (São Paulo), he found “the lightest African-descendant there weighed seven arrobas [approximately 230 pounds]. They don’t do anything. I don’t think they even manage to procreate anymore.” An arroba is a unit of measure to weigh cattle. Bolsonaro’s deliberate use of the term was a throwback to chattel slavery, when blacks were indeed treated as animals, often housed together, branded with the same iron, and driven to labor by the same whip. His racist rhetoric associated quilombolas with unproductiveness (“they are all on welfare”) and dehumanized all black people by identity politics. He added that “more than R$1 billion a year is spent on them,” and if elected president, there would not be “a centimeter [of land] demarcated for indigenous and quilombola communities.”