Brazil divided over responsibility for January election uprising

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RIO DE JANEIRO There was a moment, shortly after the uprising, when it seemed that Brazil would finally wake up from its fever dream.

January’s assault on Brazil’s capital, by thousands of Jair Bolsonaro supporters determined to reverse his defeat in the presidential election, was so shocking that it seemed to unify much of the country’s restless political class. around a need to protect democracy torn apart by polarization and political hatred.

The conservatives traveled to Braslia to meet leftist President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva and discuss ways to avoid further violence. Bolsonaro’s congressional allies have declared their commitment to democracy. Even Bolsonaro, whose baseless allegations of voter fraud had prompted supporters to attack, expressed surprise. We deplore what happened, he said from his self-imposed exile in Florida.

But, as happened in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising in Washington, Brazil has since abandoned all semblance of political harmony and retreated to its familiar ideological camps, where interpretations of what is happened that day in Braslia are not decided by facts, but by political orthodoxy.

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Months later, it’s clear: instead of shaking the country into taking its political divisions seriously, the attack has become just one more way of measuring them.

The result will be the same here as in the United States, said Antonio Lavareda, president of the Institute for Social, Political and Economic Research in the city of Recife, in the northeast of the country. Facts will come second, and what will come first is belief and narrative.

According to authorities here, here are the facts: diehard Bolsonarists spent weeks camping outside military bases across Brazil after Bolsonaro’s loss to Lula in October. Repeating Bolsonaro’s unsubstantiated claims that fraud had tainted the results and convinced that Lula had stolen the election, they pleaded with Brazil’s armed forces to block his inauguration.

Lula was sworn in on Jan. 1 and Bolsonaro decamped to Florida rather than hand him the presidential sash, but protesters stayed where they were. In Braslia, their numbers increased dramatically on the morning of January 8, when more than 120 buses brought thousands more from all over the country. Dressed in the green and yellow of Bolsonaros’ nationalist movement, they marched en masse to the most important federal buildings in the country, the presidential palace, the Supreme Court and Congress, and invaded them.

But in a society warped by polarization, facts have become open to interpretation, as misinformation spreads across social media and right-wing groups seek to rewrite history, seizing on recent revelations they say , cast doubt on the efforts of the Lulas government to prevent the assault.

The Brazilian left says the rioters have carried out the most serious assault on Brazilian democracy since the 1964 military coup. One of Bolsonaro’s top lieutenants, Anderson Torres, who was in charge of Braslia’s security on the day of the assault, was arrested on allegations that he was plotting a power grab that would keep Bolsonaro in power. And Bolsonaro, who is expected to testify before federal police on Wednesday, is facing a criminal investigation for allegedly inspiring the uprising.

How Bolsonaros’ rhetoric and then his silence fueled Brazil’s assault

Bolsonaros supporters are nonetheless hardening their stances around a counter-narrative that blames Lula and the left for the unrest. They say the Lula government has been negligent in security planning and has something to hide. Hardline Bolsonarians take their claims further, spreading a conspiracy theory on social media that left-wing sympathizers infiltrated the protests and provoked the attack.

I participated in the acts of January 8, said Gilne Lima, a bolsonarist in Braslia. There were many people undercover, inciting vandalism and crime.

The biggest proponent of this claim is Bolsonaro himself.

Our people would never do what was done on January 8, he told NBC last month. We are therefore more and more certain that it was people on the left who planned everything.

The West hoped Lula would be a partner. He has his own plans.

This tangle of facts, beliefs and fantasies is now the subject of a political battle over whether Brazil should open a congressional investigation into the uprising. Some say an investigation will only deepen the country’s wounds. Others say it’s the only way to cure them.

The Lula administration, reluctant to get bogged down in a protracted and polarizing investigation, has tried to look beyond the attacks and focus on economic issues and foreign policy. But that changed when security footage leaked to CNN Brasil appeared to show a senior Lula official doing little to slow the advance of the rioters, opening the government up to allegations that he had been involved in some way or other. ‘another one.

Who was warned and did nothing? Ciro Nogueira, former Bolsonaros chief of staff, asked on a TV show on Monday.

The videos had been hidden, claimed Senator Sergio Moro, Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, in an interview with the Washington Post. Why do we only find out from a leak on CNN Brasil?

The country now appears to be heading towards a full accounting of what happened, a harrowing process that is sure to absorb the nation for months, if not years. Experts are urging the country to continue, lest the misinformation escalate.

It’s up to government officials not to let this version prevail, that it was a left-wing setup to make Lula look like a victim and become the hero of the resistance, Dora Kramer wrote Tuesday in Folha de S Paul. The savagery was the work of sworn bolsonarists who, on the spot, claimed responsibility for the crime.

Others say a congressional investigation will change little. Too many people have invested too much in the country’s divisions to turn back now.

Many political actors don’t want unity, said Floriano de Azevedo Marques Neto, a political scientist at the University of So Paulo. They want to perpetuate the polarization that gave birth to them.

Don’t expect an investigation to find out the truth, he said.

This is a dispute of narratives where what matters least is factual truth.

Marina Dias in Braslia contributed to this report.

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