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The similarity in detail and even in character between the attacks of the carapintadism Bolsonaro in Brasilia and the coup attempt with the Trump invasion of the Capitol in Washington in 2021 it is as evident as it is significant.

But the more serious point of these similarities is what they reveal fragility in republican architecture in the two major powers of the hemisphere. Under them almost anything seems possible. The institutional notion has become a piece of paper from border to border.

There is Peru with the attempted coup of the inexplicable Pedro Castillo wrapped in a story that turns into putschists to those who did not accompany the coup.

Nearby, the internal battle between Bolivian President Luis Arce and his mentor Evo Morales is resolved violent arrest of the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, detained without mediation on his privileges, tried for the alleged coup of November 2019.

In Argentina, at the same time, the government ignores the judgments of the Justice and seeks to dismiss the Supreme Court or control it as former president Jair Bolsonaro sought in Brazil -“I will never obey justice”, proclaimed more than once – or Donald Trump did it in the United States.

I’m a populist lodge whose methods and contempt for democracy align them, beyond ideological rhetoric, with grotesque extremes such as Chavista Venezuela or the Nicaragua of the Somoza’s devoted disciple, Daniel Ortega.

IS anarchy is coming, as Robert Kaplan headlined an excellent essay from the end of the last century which alluded to the lack of control in a world of inequalities. This description of something that’s okay would have been astounding and fictitious just a few years ago.

Not today. The root is an enormous concentration of income which produces anti-system caudillismos, establishes political adventurers and multiplies wars for income. That is Bolivia, Peru or Argentina, nothing else. It’s the same equation it repeats itself and builds only abysses.

The true function of democracy is to protect, surround, resolve and liberate, above all the future. When almost none of this happens, the threads that support it break and degenerates.

It is not something that happens artificially. The disruption of boundaries by fascist methods is usually the collateral damage to the preservation of that concentration against the social threat in a phase of global crisis, declining income and increasing poverty and precariousness.

The limits of Brazil

The case of Brazil is relevant in many respects. This country accounts for more than 50% of South America’s GDP. Its borders touch almost all the nations of the area. The political, economic, cultural influence of Brazilian ideas and behaviors does not allow measurement.

But its ability to convince and right has been damaged, as is the case with the United States. The populism of self-styled alt right, the medieval i-liberal far right embracing Putin or the Hungarian Orban, it has cut off the democratic discourse and governance capacity of these countries.

Bolsonaro has a deep partnership with Trump that fuels suspicion in Brazil a conspiratorial hand Behind these nightmares

The former president and his son, the MP Eduardo, who was in Argentina before the elections, curiously celebrated by confused liberal politicians, visited the tycoon at his residence in Mar-a-Lago and both attended dinner parties at Steve Bannon’s housedesignated as one of the organizers of the Capitol bombing.

Now this ultranationalist has just relaunched as “Freedom Fighters (Freedom Fighters)” to participants in the barbarism of Brasilia last Sunday.

Eduardo Bolsonaro is the Latin American head of the ultra-organization formed by Bannon and which has allies in Italy with Matteo Salvini, in Spain with Franco’s Vox, in Hungary with the government of Viktor Orban and in Germany with the extreme right of Alternative für Deutschland. among others of fundamentalist team illiberal world.

Lula came to power with a nod to the North American democratic government in the hope that a powerful figure in a regionally gravitated country could order this space.

Washington is requesting it as a temporary solution to moderate the intense flow of migrants to its borders among other demands, including symbolic ones on the light of democracy on the hill that purportedly emits the power of manifest destiny.

But how could Brazil today, not even the United States, pave roads that put an end to dictatorships which are still valid in the region?

The very serious accidents of last Sunday were predictable. An official of the brand new PT government tells this reporter that this fanatical and rebellious force, commanded by Bolsonaro or his relatives from his self-exile in the United States, it won’t thin quickly.

I’m a civilian version of the facepainted who challenged Raúl Alfonsín, but in this case there will be nothing but punishment. “IS the only way to exterminate this problem”the official is excited.

Comparisons are always limited. The affinity of these radicalized groups with the military is partly explained by a serious historical dysfunction in Brazil.

Unlike Argentina, Chile or other Latin American nations, the governments of Brazilian democracy, including those of Lula da Silva, they avoided addressing the authoritarian past of the brutal dictatorship which dominated the country for 20 years from March 1964.

There has not been a single actual case of prosecution for the abuses and not even, above all, a social didactic about what happened which allows the construction of a common sense that prevents the claim or the return of authoritarianism.

That absence allowed Bolsonaro during his government to praise the dictatorship and which his followers today consider legitimate to claim a military coup to resolve their repudiation of the election result.

For an Argentinean, Chilean or Uruguayan it may seem exotic, but in Brazil there have also been street demonstrations in major cities, São Paulo in particular, praising those despotic regimes on their anniversaries which were no different in their barbarism from those that ravaged the rest of South America in the 1970s.

internal differences

For Lula this contingency has a favorable side, because it has consolidated it. If he came to power with a tiny difference of 1.8% of the vote, the majority in Brazil perceive that this barbarism is part of Bolsonaro’s decision-making system, expanded this difference.

More than 50% of those questioned indicate the former president as responsible for the attacks and the rejection of what happened: 75% to 18%, according to a survey by the company Atlas.

But the episode brings with it the problem that the sectors of the PT, which they believe that Lula and the party are, remain tough revolutionarieslooking for ride this challenge try to reorder the government, in particular ideologically homogenize the cabinet of 37 ministers that the president has built.

The accusation against Defense Minister José Múcio, considered soft on the armed forces, is one of them critical looks. They also doubt the vice president, the right-wing liberal Geraldo Alckmin, or the minister of agriculture, an important figure in agribusiness.

They are clearly concerned about the Minister of Planning, Simone Tebet, in charge of budget implementation and public expenditure management, who has just appointed the economist Gustavo Guimarães, a former finance officer during the management of monetarist Paulo Guedes in the Bolsonaro government.

That intern is just starting to make an insinuation. «These people from the PT always want everything and don’t want to share», protests a critic of the same government, who concludes with an interesting reflection: «they don’t quite understand what it is about, and where Lula always wants or has In any case, it is who does not know if he will survive politically”.

Brasilia, special envoy

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