Was the attempted insurrection in Brazil foreseeable?

Security forces looked overwhelmed on Sunday as thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court in Brasilia, a week after centre-left President Inácio Lula da Silva took office . However, there was many signs that they anticipated what ended up happening.

“What surprised me was how easy it was with which the demonstrators approached the official buildings, despite the fact that there were known tensions, that many of Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters contested Lula’s victory and sought confrontation,” explains Martin Bernard, RFI correspondent in Brazil. .

Protesters broke through a police blockade, seemingly without much resistance, and they looted everything in their path to the presidency, congress and the Supreme Court.

Although the authorities seemed surprised, Bolsonaro activists had been talking about violent actions for months. As soon as Lula won the October election by a narrow margin – just 1.8 points – hundreds of pro-Bolsonaro activists began camping outside the army headquarters to call for a coup.

At the end of December, the police thwarted an attempted attack.

organized groups

Brasilia, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte… In all the big cities, the Bolsonaristas continued to camp until Friday, when the police evicted them. Before they returned the next day.

Buses full of Bolsonaro supporters continued to arrive on Sunday, while in the networks the calls for violence and insurrection became more and more violent. The media and pro-Lula politicians were forced to sound the alarm.

For Odilon Caldeira Neto, professor of history at the Federal University of Juiz-de-Fora and coordinator of the Observatory of the far right, “it was expected. The different groups have been organized in recent months, articulated by Bolsonaro and then mobilized by some military figures such as General Braga, General Augusto Heleno”.

The academic adds that these groups “have had the financial support of businessmen from strategic financial sectors for Bolsonaro, such as agribusiness. On the other hand, it should be noted that some sectors of the military police, which already showed a certain degree of Bolsonarizzazione in recent years has been more than permissive in the face of anti-democratic revolts”.

Doubts about police action

All these elements increase the question of the role of the security forces. The pro-Bolsonaro group appears to have benefited complicity of the security forces in Brasilia, several analysts in the Brazilian media said on Monday. And on Saturday the head of security in Brasilia, Anderson Torres, left the country for Florida, where Jair Bolsonaro was still on Monday. There, according to reports in the afternoon, he should have been hospitalized for severe abdominal pain.

On Sunday, President Lula declared federal intervention, with the support of the army, to restore order in Brasilia. The leader of the Workers’ Party called the demonstrators “fanatical fascists” who “will pay for this undemocratic act”.

“The images recall the storming of the Capitol two years ago in the United States. It is a frontal attack on Brazilian democracy, one week after Lula took office. But we also have to highlight the particularities of Brazil,” says Odilon Caldeira Neto.

“The question of militarization is even more important in the Brazilian case, because it is based on the presence of the military in Brazilian politics, which is a tradition of authoritarian thought and practice, as well as that of the Brazilian far right,” he points out. .

«On the other hand, the Brazilian episode is even more traumatic because the Lula government already exists, it has already been inaugurated. So I would say that there is a clear similarity with the United States: conspiracy myths are evoked in the same way, but the intensity and political impact of the events in Brazil are even more serious”, compares the expert.

show of strength

Justice Minister Flavio Dino spoke of “terrorism” and condemned the “coup plotters”. There were no shootings or deaths. From this point of view it is more a show of force than a coup. But it was unprecedented and will mark the beginning of Lula’s third term in a very profound way.

The coordinator of the far-right Observatory believes that various personalities played a role in these events and in the radicalization of the protesters: “Ernesto Araujo, for example, a former foreign minister, has published videos in support of the anti-democratic escalation. There are also Bolsonarist figures in the police. So the problem of Bolsonarism as an articulated expression of the extreme right in Brazil is far from being solved.”

Caldeira Neto observes: “This event has an extraordinary dimension, but it is part of a wider dynamic of radicalization and articulation of anti-democratic elements”.

Source: RFI

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