Overview

During 2020, the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, came under the spotlight as Covid-19 pandemic denier and promoter public gatherings with supporters while cases and deaths were rising daily.

In response, the Senate opened an investigation to look into possible failures and omissions by the Federal Government and asked the Presidency for Bolsonaro's travels records in the capital of Brazil, Brasília, and area.

The press widely reported the gatherings, and Bolsonaro himself published photos and videos of the events on his social media.

Nevertheless, the government stated that "no official records of travels were identified". That's how the idea for the article was born.

Although the president considers social networks as official platforms, I looked for something more "institutional".

Browsing the Presidency's communication website, I found a link to Presidential Flickr profile — a professional photo platform — which recorded all the events of Bolsonaro and his predecessors.

The logic was: if the presidency photographer was present — and the government published the photos albums, it could be considered an official event.

I made a scraper using Node.JS to capture all the albums published between January 20, 2020, and May 20, 2021, which resulted in 584 albums with more than 20,00020 thousands photos.

I grouped the events using keywords from album titles and descriptions to facilitate data processing. This resulted in 20 categories.

The hard part would come next: the goal of the article was to count Bolsonaro's events and gatherings caused by the president. We defined an agglomeration as when five or more people are in an open or closed place without respecting the social distance -- two meters (six feet) at the time. But how to analyze more than 500 image albums?

The ideal would be to automate the analysis, but the article was time-sensitive, so I chose to analyze all the albums manually. In compensation, this exhaustive process opened up room for new data.

I was able to classify if the president was wearing a mask, and even contextualize if the events had military participation - Bolsonaro is criticized for his proximity and the high number of the Armed Forces personnel in the government.

The categorization found 459 relevant events — filtered since the first day with a confirmed case of Covid-19 in Brazil. To add more value to the analysis, we have appended the numbers of cases and deaths to the spreadsheet.

Outcome

The article was published in digital and printed formats. For the digital version, my editor, Carlos Marin, and I opted for scrollytelling with Mapbox.

In the second part of the piece, the deeper analytical content comes in, with a summary of all Bolsonaro's visits and his growing presence at military events. In this section, there were four graphics, two made via Datawrapper and the others with HTML + CSS by Carlos Marin.