In Fact, Maybe Brazil Can Punish Some Of Ours Too-- Bannon & Miller Are Complicit
When my grandfather’s family fled persecution in Russia almost 12 decades ago, he and one sister were allowed into the U.S. The rest of the large family wound up in Bahia in northeast Brazil. Now their descendants live all over Brazil, many still in Bahia (Salvador) and Recife, but also in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre. When I was growing up I was the only one in my family who could communicate with them when they came to New York (my Spanish and their Portuguese worked well enough), soI got to know some of them. And I follow Brazilian politics. I was 12 when Brasilia, now the third largest city in the country (around 4 million people), was built from scratch and Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture thrilled me.
Yesterday, I saw a MAGA-like mob of Brazilian fascists storming those buildings I so admired when they first went up in 1960. These Bolsonaro thugs organized this almost 2 years to the day after Trump’s attempted coup, operating based on the same liars about electoral theft. These fascist sore losers need the death penalty— both Trump and Bolsonaro to discourage this kind of behavior in the future. And speaking about Trump, likely voters wer4e asked whether or not Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 coup. 59% said he was responsible, as opposed to 24% who said he bears no culpability at all.
50% of likely voters think Trump should be criminally charged and 44% think he shouldn’t be (including 80% of Republicans).
As for Bolsonaro, who’s hiding out in Florida, there has been an increasingly loud insistence that he be shipped back to Brazil and not be permitted to use the U.S. as a refuge. President Lula, who was in São Paulo during the insurrection, has vowed that the perps would be punished. He said that “These people are everything that is abominable in politics. All the people who did this will be found and punished... We’re going to find out who the financial backers are.” This morning, the Washington Post reported that Lula accused Bolsonaro, “of encouraging Sunday’s violent attacks— and described the attack as his predecessor’s ‘responsibility.’”
Bolsonaro’s insurrectionists broke into Congress, the presidential office complex and the Supreme Court, where offices, public spaces, artwork and personal property was desecrated or destroyed. It appears that the police charged with protecting the buildings were in cahoots with the insurrectionists and it took anti-riot police and the Brazilian Armed Forces to quell the violence. As of last night, around 400 people had been taken into custody.
Federal District Security Secretary Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister, had been appointed to the Federal District office by current governor Ibaneis Rocha and he was fired last night. The country’s public defender asked the Supreme Court to issue an arrest order for Torres and “other public agents responsible for acts and omissions.” Early this morning top court Justice Alexandre de Moraes criticized the “despicable terrorist attacks on democracy” and ordered Rocha himself removed from office for 90 days while his responsibility in the security breach is investigated.
Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarape Institute, a think tank in Rio de Janeiro, called the riots the most significant threat to Brazilian democracy since the 1964 coup, and that it will be celebrated by many members of Brazil’s far right. “They will treat this as a rallying call for future disruptions,” Muggah said. “Today’s violent insurrection is a reminder that democracy can never be taken for granted.”
Last night, Anne Applebaum wrote that visits to the U.S. inspired independence leaders from all over the world, and they still do. “Would-be democrats from Myanmar and Venezuela to Zimbabwe and Cambodia reside in the United States, and study the institutions of the United States, even today… [B]y far the most important weapon that the United States of America has ever wielded— in defense of democracy, in defense of political liberty, in defense of universal rights, in defense of the rule of law— was the power of example. In the end, it wasn’t our words, our songs, our diplomacy, or even our money or our military power that mattered. It was rather the things we had achieved: the two and a half centuries of peaceful transitions of power, the slow but massive expansion of the franchise, and the long, seemingly solid traditions of civilized debate. That tradition was broken, not just by the Trump administration but by the claque of men around Donald Trump who began dreaming of a different kind of American influence. Not democratic, but autocratic. Not in favor of constitutions and the rule of law, but in support of insurrection and chaos. Not through declarations of independence but through social-media trolling campaigns. Many of the actual achievements of this claque have been negligible, or, more likely, exaggerated for the purposes of fund-raising. Steve Bannon once implied he had influence in Spain, for example, but actual members of the Spanish far-right laughed at that idea when I asked them about it in 2019. Bannon’s attempt to set up some kind of alternative, far-right university in Italy ended in failure."
In Brazil, the Autocracy International has finally had a “success.” Although public institutions in the country’s capital have been attacked before, most recently in 2013, today’s events in Brasília contained some new elements. Notably, some of the protesters who today sacked the Brazilian Congress, presidential palace, and supreme court; beat up policemen; and broke security barriers were holding up signs in English,as if to speak to their fans and fellow flame-throwers in the US. The phrases “#BrazilianSpring” and “#BrazilWasStolen” have been spreading on Brazilian social media, again in English, as if some American public-relations company were pushing them. There are clear links, some via radical Catholic organizations, among far-right groups in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Not long ago, members of some of those movements, including Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, met at a special edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Mexico City.
Still, I suspect that the real influence of the American experience in Brazil comes not from the preening likes of Bannon, the former Trump adviser Jason Miller, or any of the minor figures who have excitedly, and perhaps lucratively, been promoting #StoptheSteal in Brazil, but— as in the 18th century— through the power of example. Note the pattern here: After he lost November’s election, ex-President Jair Bolsonaro refused to attend the inauguration of his successor. Instead he went (of all places) to Florida. He and his followers have been pursuing fictional claims in lawsuits in the Brazilian courts. They then chose January 8, almost exactly two years after the assault on the American capital, to stage their attack— a strange date in some ways, since the sitting president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has already been inaugurated, and the chaotic assault on Congress will not block him from exercising power. Today’s riot makes more sense if the point was to create a visual echo of what happened in Washington.
