Supporters line up to visit the coffin of Eduardo Campos during his wake outside the Pernambuco Government Palace in Recife yesterday.
Agencies/Recife, Brazil
More than 130,000 mourners turned out to pay their respects to Brazilian presidential candidate Eduardo Campos here yesterday after the popular socialist politician’s death in a plane crash last week.
A line of mourners stretching some 3km queued to file past Campos’s coffin, placed outside Recife’s local government headquarters to allow people to say a final farewell.
Brazil President Dilma Rousseff was in attendance as ceremonies got under way with an open air mass.
Campos, 49, died when his campaign jet slammed into houses in Santos city in bad weather on Wednesday, killing all seven people on board and setting buildings alight. He had been running third in opinion polls for the October election.
A popular former governor of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, Campos was married with five children.
Around 250 police officers were on duty for yesterday’s ceremonies, which began at 10.30am (1330 GMT).
Rousseff, who leads the polls for October’s elections, was booed by sections of the crowd as she arrived for the mass.
Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and several ministers accompanied Rousseff.
Lula, a close friend of the family, wept as he embraced Campos’s widow Renate after the mass, followed by Rousseff and the current second place presidential contender, Aecio Neves.
Rouseff and Lula left Recife before the burial set for 5pm.
Campos was laid to rest at a cemetery in Santo Amaro alongside his grandfather, Miguel Arraes, a revered local politician in northeast Brazil.
Meanwhile, the Brazilian Socialist Party plans to launch environmentalist Marina Silva as its presidential candidate this week, replacing Campos, a senior party official said on Saturday.
The PSB, as the party is known, has agreed to rally around a Silva candidacy after she pledged to honour the party’s program and its regional alliances, said Beto Albuquerque, a party congressman from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.
“She will be the PSB candidate and she will honor those agreements,” Albuquerque told Reuters. “Marina already signalled she will take over the candidacy.”
Silva’s candidacy, along with the name of her running mate, is expected to be announced after a party meeting scheduled for Wednesday, he said.
Concern among some prominent PSB members about Silva’s conservationist views and other issues such as economic policy were the main obstacles to her nomination.
Albuquerque, himself a favourite to become Silva’s running mate, said the vice presidential candidate should be a person from the PSB who defends Campos’ legacy, while being close to Silva.
Earlier on Saturday, three leading Brazilian newspapers reported that the PSB is likely to announce Silva, who was Campos’ running mate, as its presidential candidate next week.
Silva, who placed a strong third in the 2010 presidential race as the Green Party candidate, is hugely popular among younger voters who are disillusioned with Brazil’s political establishment. A devout Christian, she also has a loyal following among evangelical voters, an increasingly influential demographic in Brazil.
A Silva candidacy could deprive Rousseff of the votes she needs to avoid a runoff between the two best-placed candidates.
A new survey to be published today will show whether Silva has more support than Neves, who has been running second place in the polls.
Rebel accused of helping kidnap 3 Americans nabbed
Colombian police captured a suspected FARC rebel accused of participating in the kidnapping of three Americans held hostage from 2003 to 2008, authorities said Saturday.
Duverney Ospina, also known as ‘Giovanny’, allegedly joined the FARC a decade ago and was the confidante of Hernan Velasquez, or ‘El Paisa’, a leader within the leftist rebel group, a police statement said.
Ospina was detained in the southern Colombian city of Florencia.
Police said there were 19 warrants and six standing convictions against Ospina for aggravated murder, kidnapping, torture, terrorism, rebellion, drug trafficking, making military weapons for private use and a jailbreak. Authorities accuse him of helping kidnap three US contractors - Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Tom Howes - on February 13, 2003, after their plane was shot down.
The FARC said the contractors were US spies and sought to exchange them for captured rebels.
However, Stansell, Gonsalves and Howes were rescued on July 2, 2008 in an operation that also saw the liberation of former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and 11 other hostages.
Ospina also stands accused of orchestrating the killings of five council members in a town in Caqueta state in 2005 and of eight more in a town in Huila state in 2006.