Assaults on Congresses in Brazil and the US, similar but not the same

Angry mobs stormed government buildings that represent the democracy of their respective countries. Fueled by conspiracy theories about their candidates’ defeats at the polls, they smashed windows, searched lawmakers’ desks and vandalized offices in a display of frustration that lasted for hours before order was restored.

Sunday’s attack by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian capital drew immediate comparisons to the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump two years earlier.

The two populist former presidents shared a close political alliance with some mutual supporters, some of whom helped spread Trump’s lies about voter fraud after his defeat in his re-election bid, and later repeated similar allegations of Bolsonaro after his own setback in the elections last October. Bolsonaro was one of the last dignitaries to acknowledge Joe Biden’s triumph in 2020.

“The American example of election denialism and creating alternative facts, and radicalizing law enforcement and openly denigrating democratic institutions is not a model that was the brainchild of Bolsonaro and others,” said Scott Hamilton, a former US diplomat at Brazil.

However, experts recommend not linking the two attacks.

There were “undeniable similarities” to January 6, said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Investigative Laboratory, which monitors disinformation around the world.

“The images. A lot of calls on social media are very, very similar,” she stated. “But there is a huge caveat. Democracy in Brazil is very different from democracy here in the United States. The culture, the context, even the institutions are very different, and that’s really important.”

Many of the connections are obvious. Bolsonaro’s son, lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, joined the international populist movement of Steve Bannon, a Trump adviser, in 2019. Bannon became one of the biggest propagators of Trump’s 2020 election lies and has escalated Bolsonaro’s accusations about rigged voting machines.

Trump was one of Bolsonaro’s few international allies, and Bolsonaro often applauded his American counterpart’s leadership, even posting photos of himself watching Trump’s speeches. He and his son visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and both attended dinners at Bannon’s home.

Following Sunday’s riots in Brasilia, Bannon posted a video on social media in which he referred to the protesters as “Brazilian freedom fighters.”

The Conservative Political Action Conference, a major gathering of right-wing activists that has become a breeding ground for pro-Trump enthusiasm, met in Sao Paulo in September. Brazilian authorities later detained one of the attendees, former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, before he left the country.

“We are not in favor of violence, but we believe that peaceful protests are appropriate and that the situation in Brazil should be fully investigated,” Matt Schlapp, one of the main organizers of the conference, said in a statement sent to The Associated Press in response to the riots over the weekend.

Rioters stormed the headquarters of Congress, the Federal Supreme Court and the presidential palace, some of them calling for the armed forces to remove President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from office. Others waved banners suggesting they believed accusations that voting machines were programmed to steal the election from Bolsonaro, reminiscent of banners seen in the United States on Jan. 6 promoting similar conspiracy theories.

The images of the Brazilian demonstrators confronting the police officers who were guarding the complex, breaking into government offices and searching the desks of opposition legislators, also evoked what was seen in the assault on the Capitol in Washington.

The attacks followed months in which Bolsonaro exploited fears about electoral integrity without presenting evidence, much like Trump did in 2020.

In November, Bolsonaro blamed his defeat on a software glitch and called for most electronic votes to be annulled. Independent experts rejected his accusations, and Bolsonaro’s attempt to annul the votes failed.

However, social networks were flooded with misinformation about the elections, and posts calling on Brazilians to gather in the capital on Sunday to challenge the election results went viral on TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and other platforms. One post surpassed 800,000 views since Friday, according to analysts at Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checking organization.

Wendy Via, president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said Sunday’s riots are yet another example of how misinformation and rhetoric can lead to violence if used by a leader with a large enough audience.

“We saw it coming,” Via said. “This does not only happen in Brazil or the United States. This is a global problem. Should what happened in Brazil be compared to January 6? I would say definitely because it is the same manual.”

But there are important differences between the two attacks and the forces behind them in the two countries.

“This was not part of an orchestrated move to reverse the election results,” said Christopher Garman, acting director for the Americas at the Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory group. “This was a little different” from January 6, he added.

On January 6, 2021, Trump was still president, and he called on supporters who turned out for his rally on the White House Ellipse to march on Capitol Hill and stop the ratification of Joe Biden’s victory in Congress. In Brasilia, the demonstration occurred on a Sunday, when there were few people in the government offices and Bolsonaro had already ceded power.

Bolsonaro had even left the country, for Trump’s adopted state of Florida, where he appears to reside in the Orlando area. On Monday he was admitted to an area hospital for abdominal discomfort.

Garman said Bolsonaro may have held back because Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court has been strictly sanctioning misinformation about the elections, to the extent of censoring social media accounts and news reports that it considers misleading. The former president knew that if he insisted, the court could have prevented him from running for elected office again.

“If he had followed in Trump’s footsteps, his political rights would have been suspended by now,” Garman said.

The situation in Brazil is also more delicate than in the United States. Systematic corruption is a major concern in the South American nation, as is the stability of what remains a fledgling democracy after decades of authoritarian rule that lasted until the 1980s. The man who defeated Bolsonaro, Lula, He is a former president who was imprisoned on corruption charges during the 2018 electoral process and whose conviction was annulled by the Federal Supreme Court.

Frustration with the government might be familiar to those who follow US politics: a highly divided atmosphere with a weakened center, coupled with growing mistrust in both the institutions and the opposition.

“It is not healthy for any democracy to have these levels of mistrust,” Garman pointed out.
Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channel Youtube and activate notifications, or follow us on social networks: Facebook, Twitter and instagram.