Updated Aug. 13, 2014 1:09 p.m. ET
A view of damaged buildings where the aircraft crashed Wednesday in Santos, Brazil. European Pressphoto Agency
SÃO PAULO—Eduardo Campos, the Brazilian Socialist Party candidate for president in this October's elections, reportedly was among seven people killed when the private jet on which he was traveling on plowed into a residential district Wednesday morning while en route from Rio de Janeiro to the coastal city of Santos, according to Brazilian TV reports.
Campos campaign officials said they had lost contact with the candidate this morning after his private plane left Rio de Janeiro at 9:23 a.m. Mr. Campos was en route to a meeting in Santos, according to his aides.
A campaign press officer said the plane had difficulty landing in bad weather at Santos and had been attempting to change course.
Eduardo Campos, candidate of the Brazilian Socialist Party for October's presidential election, speaking last week. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Television stations reported that the jet, a Cessna 560XL, struck a three-story building in the Boqueirao neighborhood of Santos, about 35 miles south of São Paulo.
The Brazilian Air Force said it couldn't confirm the number or identities of those killed in the crash.
Mr. Campos's apparent death would throw Brazil's presidential election season into turmoil. According to opinion polls, Mr. Campos was running a distant third behind the front-runner, President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' Party and Aécio Neves of the Social Democracy Party. According to the latest poll by Datafolha mid-July, 8% of voters said they would choose him. However, his running mate, Marina Silva, would be a likely favorite to replace him at the top of the ticket. Ms. Silva was a disruptive force in the 2010 presidential election. She garnered an unexpected 19% of the first-round votes, forcing a runoff between Ms. Rouseff and Jose Serra.
Mr. Campos, 49 years old, had made some popularity gains over the past year; less than 5% of voters supported him in early 2013. (He was hovering around 4% for most of 2013, and has been hovering at around 10% for most of this year.)
As news of the accident spread, speculation already had begun over who might replace Mr. Campos as his party's presidential candidate.
"Eduardo Campos was a possibility of a real variation in power," said Sen. Cristovam Buarque, a member of the Democratic Labor Party. "Brazil has had the same political and social model for 20 years. Campos was the candidate who could really offer an alternative that hadn't been tested before."
A spokeswoman for Ms. Rousseff's campaign said the president had suspended her campaign out of respect and will make a public statement shortly.
Reports of Mr. Campos's death triggered volatility in the Brazilian stock market, with the benchmark Ibovespa index recently down 1.2% at 55,753 points. Shares of Petrobras, which have been particularly sensitive to election-related news given the Brazilian government's intervention in company decisions, were off 2.5% at 19.17 reais
Mr. Campos is married and has five children, including one newborn. His wife wasn't aboard the plane, officials said.
—John Lyons, Paul Kiernan and Paulo Trevisani contributed to this article
Write to Reed Johnson at Reed.Johnson@wsj.com and Luciana Magalhaes at luciana.magalhaes@wsj.com
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1vIQaF8
0 comments:
Post a Comment