America, beacon of anti-democracy
It only took two years. A copycat coup was virtually inevitable (Associated Press):
Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to accept his election defeat stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and presidential palace Sunday, a week after the inauguration of his leftist rival, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Thousands of demonstrators bypassed security barricades, climbed on roofs, smashed windows and invaded all three buildings, which were believed to be largely vacant on the weekend. Some of the demonstrators called for a military intervention to either restore the far-right Bolsonaro to power or oust Lula from the presidency.
Regional leaders reacted angrily, one calling the insurrection a “cowardly and vile attack on democracy.”
Where did Brazilian extremists get such ideas? The events in the Southern Hemisphere left a feeling in the pit of my stomach hauntingly familiar from two years ago on Jan. 6. Strongmen fanboys are a plague. What’s more unsettling is that the plague is spreading. And it’s not as if no one saw this coming in Brazil.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) warned that coups “travel internationally” less than a month ago:
Jan. 6 has been studied by authoritarians abroad who see it as a blueprint for armed actions. [Steve] Bannon, an advisor to Jair Bolsonaro, hoped that Brazil (where a 1964 coup led to two decades of military dictatorship) would experience its own Jan. 6 after Bolsonaro’s loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Ben-Ghiat warned that “hard-core Bolsonaro supporters persist.”
It took reactionaries another few weeks. Draped in the green and yellow of the Brazilian flag, they mounted their insurrection on Sunday when the Three Powers Square capitol complex in Brazilia was largely unoccupied. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who took office under a week ago was visiting the flood-torn city of Araraquara 500 miles away. Bolsonaro took refuge in Florida before the inauguration.
Bolsonaro’s third son Eduardo visited South Florida after the Oct. 30 election to consult with former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller. He also spoke by phone with Bannon who was in Arizona assisting failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Eduardo was in Washington, D.C. for the Jan. 6 attack and helped organize the Conservative Political Action Conference in Brazil.
Bannon, of course, christened the rioters for Bolsonaro “feedom fighters.” He’s spent months spreading lies about the election they lost. “Lula stole the Election… Brazilians know this,” Bannon wrote Sunday on Gettr. Jan. 6 organizer Ali Alexander cheered them on over former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social: “I do NOT denounce unannounced impromptu Capitol tours by the people.”
BBC:
As in the US in 2020, partisan election-deniers focused their attention on the mechanisms of voting. In Brazil, they cast suspicion on electronic vote tabulation machines.
A banner displayed by the rioters on Sunday declared “We want the source code” in both English and Portuguese – a reference to rumours that electronic voting machines were somehow programmed or hacked in order to foil Mr Bolsonaro.
A number of prominent Brazilian Twitter accounts which spread election denial rumours were reinstated after the election and acquisition of the company by Elon Musk, according to a BBC analysis. The accounts had previously been banned.
Mr Musk himself has suggested some of Twitter’s own employees in Brazil were “strongly politically biased” without giving details or evidence.
Belief trumps evidence and facts are disposable with the international authoritarian movement. No government not dominated by them is legitimate. Heads, they win. Tails, you lose. Democracy is for show. Give us what we want or else.
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic Party member of the US House of Representatives and a member of the committee that investigated the Capitol riot, called the Brazilian protesters “fascists modeling themselves after Trump’s Jan. 6 rioters” in a tweet.
David Adler was on the scene with a long thread. Police were underprepared and outmanned. When troops finally arrived to clean out the rioters, the buildings had been ransacked in a fashion familiar from Jan. 6.
A follow-up report from Associated Press early this morning:
In a news conference late Sunday, Brazil’s minister of institutional relations said the buildings would be inspected for evidence including fingerprints and images to hold people to account, and that the rioters apparently intended to spark similar such actions nationwide. Justice Minister Flávio Dino said the acts amounted to terrorism and coup-mongering and that authorities have begun tracking those who paid for the buses that transported protesters to the capital.
“They will not succeed in destroying Brazilian democracy. We need to say that fully, with all firmness and conviction,” Dino said. “We will not accept the path of criminality to carry out political fights in Brazil. A criminal is treated like a criminal.”
So far, 300 people have been arrested, the federal district’s civil police said on Twitter.
Lula flew back to the capitol late Sunday and promised that the malefactors would see justice (Washington Post):
The president arrived in the capital, Brasília, from São Paulo and walked by the shattered windows and ripped artwork in the presidential palace and was then taken by two justices to see the destruction at the Supreme Court, according to the local television station Globo.
“The terrorists who promote the destruction of public spaces in Brasília are being identified and punished. Tomorrow we will resume work at the Presidential Palace. Democracy forever. Goodnight,” he tweeted.
Monday morning, police surrounded an encampment of Bolsonaro’s far-right supporters near the army’s Brazilia headquarters.
“Yesterday’s serious events in Brasilia prove that the so-called “patriotic” camps have become incubators for terrorists,” tweeted Brazil’s incoming justice minister Flavio Dino. “There will be no amnesty for terrorists, their supporters and financiers.”
A day earlier, police located and defused a bomb planted in an airport fuel truck. They arrested a 54-year-old suspect:
Police also found assault-style rifles and other explosives at an apartment rented by the man in Brasilia. [Brazilia Civil Police chief Robson] Candido said the suspect was a registered gun-owner, known as a CAC, a group that has swelled sixfold to nearly 700,000 people since Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 and began loosening gun laws.
Candido also said the man, and those helping him, had tried to activate the explosive device, but it had not gone off. He said it was still unclear how many other people were involved.
“We’ve never had bombs here in Brazil,” he said.
Trump’s multi-pronged Jan. 6 plan was not designed to succeed, yet almost did. Had Trump convinced his Secret Service detail to ferry him to the Capitol after his “Stop the Steal” rally that day, his presence would have provoked even greater violence and perhaps death for some members of Congress.
Bolsonaro was more cowardly still. He observed his rioters from Florida on a Sunday when the Three Powers Square complex was empty of lawmakers. Theymay have had sympathizers among the police and military, but there was no intervention and there were no lawmakers to attack. From Florida with the benefit of plausible denial, Bolsonaro “stopped short of condemning the mob outright,” per The Guardian.
In both riots, government overthrow is a bonus, but not the measure of success. What Bannon and his ilk seek is to undermine faith in democracy itself. Sow enough chaos and public distrust in the institutions of governance and they have paved the way for despots and dictators to fill the power vacuum.
They are not about to stop trying. Not there. Not here.
Update: More background to the attack from the Washington Post, including
On Telegram, an organizing hub for Brazil’s far right, a viral video taken down by authorities called for the murder of the children of leftist Lula supporters.
Despite their seeming similarities, Brazilian researchers said, Bolsonaro supporters are careful not to draw too many comparisons to Jan. 6 in the United States because doing so could trigger arrest for inciting anti-democratic acts, a crime in Brazil. If Jan. 6 is referenced, as it was in a handful of posts this week, the utterances appear in code, said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online, far-right movements.
Still, Chagas said, Sunday’s riot was “a clear attempt to emulate the invasion of the U.S. Capitol, as a reproduction of Trumpist movements and a symbolic signal of strength and transnational connections from the global far right.”