As Brazil veers right, evangelical bishop elected Rio mayor

[WorldNews]

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By Paulo Prada RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - An evangelical bishop was elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro on Sunday in a second round of municipal voting that cemented a rout of the leftist party and allies who dominated Brazil's presidency and major cities for over a decade. Marcelo Crivella, a controversial conservative who is a senator, bishop and nephew of the founder of an evangelical megachurch, defeated a progressive former schoolteacher to run Brazil's second biggest city by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points. The 59-year-old pastor weathered an uproar over past criticism of homosexuality and Catholicism, the dominant religion in Latin America's largest country, by distancing himself from those comments and vowing to govern for Rio's residents, not the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the influential congregation from which he hails.

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