Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has used his international debut to sound the death knell for South America’s “Bolivarian” left and proclaim a new, conservative era of clean governance and godliness in the region.

But his terse and widely-panned appearance at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday was overshadowed by a snowballing scandal back home involving one of his sons, the recently-elected senator Flávio Bolsonaro.