() — A man clenched his fist as he stuck his upper body out of the small window of a bus leaving the Brazilian Federal Police headquarters in Brasilia on Tuesday.
“Victory will be ours,” he shouted. “This is our freedom!”
He is one of more than 1,500 supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who were arrested after storming the nation’s Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential Palace last Sunday, some armed with knives, axes and even grenades, in scenes that They are reminiscent of the Capitol insurrection of January 6 of last year in the United States.
Many are now being released by the authorities after being processed by the Federal Police and will not face charges.
“Our flag will never be red,” he kept chanting, referring to the Workers’ Party of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Next to him, fellow Bolsonaro supporter Wagner Lopes Loureiro was equally buoyed after spending two nights in jail. “Always! I will always keep fighting,” he said. “I cannot allow this disgrace to continue.”
The two, like many of the Bolsonaro supporters involved in Sunday’s assault on Brazil’s government headquarters, refuse to acknowledge the results of Brazil’s national presidential election last year, in which Lula narrowly won one of the closest contests in decades.
Authorities released a large portion of the pro-Bolsonaro protesters arrested in connection with the riots and looting of government facilities in Brasilia.
When they leave, most deny any wrongdoing.
Among those who remain in custody, a protester told that she had entered government buildings along with the protesters who forced their way in, but also denied being part of any violence.
“Right now (the police) are still questioning people. Yesterday they did it with the elderly and with health problems, ”he said about the scene inside the police headquarters.
“Here it is chaos because we don’t know anything, they can’t say exactly if the people are in jail, if they are going to get out,” he said.
So many protesters have been detained since Sunday that authorities had to house them inside a gym at the headquarters. Many were allowed to keep their phones, some sent photos and videos of the location.
The jailed protester told she had spent 50 days protesting outside the Brazilian army headquarters in Brasilia, hoping the military would intervene to annul the election she believes was stolen from Bolsonaro.
The former president had stoked concerns about Brazil’s electoral system ahead of the election by criticizing the country’s electronic voting system and speculating that it might be corrupted. He also explicitly refused to grant the election. However, Brazil’s military found no signs of voter fraud in the elections and Bolsonaro condemned the riots on Sunday.
“Our intention? Not to accept everything that was happening,” said the protester. “The ballot box, we keep demanding that all the time, asking the Armed Forces for help, to help the people. Because it was their coup.”
For her, at the center of the problem is Lula, a two-time former president who enjoyed great popularity in previous terms but later served time on corruption charges. Lula’s conviction was overturned on a jurisdictional technicality by a Brazilian judge in March 2021. The judge ordered that Lula’s case be retried in the correct jurisdiction, paving the way for his political recovery.
“I do not accept Lula,” he said. “We didn’t agree that she should be president and we wanted to know how many people voted for the other side.”
She says that she is not a terrorist, because she was unarmed. “I am not a terrorist. I have no weapons,” she said. “I couldn’t see who started it. It was fast”.
And he does not regret his role in one of the darkest days of Brazilian democracy.
“I do not regret. I don’t regret it Because she wasn’t armed, she wasn’t wearing a mask, she wasn’t wearing protective glasses. I didn’t go with a bomb. I was there democratically, for the future of my children, for something I believe in,” she said.
“We have come looking for our future. Isn’t it democratic for us to do an act for something?”
But for most of Brazil, and even for many who would have preferred Bolsonaro to remain president, Sunday’s riots were an affront to the democracy she believes he stands for.
