This story begins in 2018 in Brazil; it could start before, but for the sake of not turning this into a 15-series part of articles, we’ll start there. The critical date: the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in Brazil. It was always going to be terrible – but predictable – for my country.
The important thing for the reader to understand is that, as awful as Bolsonaro is, nothing he said or did was new; he constantly affirmed what he believed. His presidency was consistent, insomuch as it was anti-science, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-native people and anti-nature. Still, importantly for this article, it was a conspiratorial presidency. His election was determined and won by a flood of what some might call fake news, but what I call conspiracy theories.
We were told that Brazil would become “a Venezuela”. We would all be forced to eat our pets, people would be forced to share their homes with homeless people, baby bottles would be replaced by bottles with penis-shaped caps (mamadeira de pirocas), and kids would be indoctrinated to be gay in school – these would all be the consequences if Bolsanaro’s opposition won the election for the presidency. They were all lies, of course, and they were even lies that had been used before, when Bolsonaro sought election to congress or when he just wanted some attention.
As such, it’s not surprising that he chose to follow a conspiratorial path whenever a crisis emerged. His approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was to become a superspreader of misinformation. When faced with the destruction of the Amazon, he dismissed the numbers as fake. Even when he won elections, he would claim that he’d won by a much greater margin – so much so that he pushed for the government to use paper ballots. Since 1996, Brazil has used electronic voting machines, tested and confirmed to be fair, providing secure and clean elections. Bolsonaro, however, disagreed.
The notion that electronic voting machines are insecure and prone to fraud, while a prominent narrative in Trump’s America, was not exported wholly from the US to Brazil – we had already seen similar claims in the 2014 election when Bolsonaro and other right-wing groups pointed to vast protests in 2013 to claim that Dilma could not have won fairly. The accusation was nothing but lies, but the myth persisted. With the lukewarm results for congress in 2020, which meant Bolsonaro’s government failed to get everything he wanted, plus the pushing of the Big Lie in the US, things were heating up for 2022.
First, the attempt to move back to paper ballots failed. Bolsonaro ramped up his rhetoric, saying in speeches that they would be fraudulent unless the elections were conducted using paper. According to Bolsonaro, the elections would only be legit if he won because all the numbers and data were lying. He was the most popular president; that was his belief. He would beat Lula – or any other candidate – by a margin of at least two digits in a fair election. As the election of 2022 came around, one of the leading candidates was filled with conspiratorial belief, hellbent on the idea that his victory would be the only legitimate outcome.
The Brazilian Army
To understand what happened on January 8th, as well as Bolsonaro, we cannot overlook another factor: the role of the Brazilian Army. The Brazilian Army is an institution that gave birth to Bolsonaro. In his 15 years of military service, it provided him with all his beliefs, his lies, and his methods.
This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is not – the army sees itself in Brazil as a tutor of democracy, a moderate power to guard the country against the excesses of civilians. Even today, the army sees the coup of 1964, which caused a dictatorship of 21 years and destroyed the government, as necessary to save Brazil from the communists. So, just like Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Army is a reactionary, conspiratory force that refuses to give up what benefits it has gained.
In 2018, the army saw one its own elected to President, promising to defend and act on all their conspiratorial beliefs, including ending the “comissão da Verdade” – a commission to discuss crimes of the dictatorship – attacking native groups in Amazon, decrying other Green parties as a plot to steal Amazonia from Brazil. For the army, an explicitly right-wing, anti-leftist government was a dream that was coming true and promised all benefits like high pensions and salaries. It was no surprise that they would back Bolsonaro’s government to the end – indeed, at the time of writing, they still do. When Bolsonaro wanted a military parade, the army said yes. The army backed him when he tried to force the opposition to approve paper ballots. Any move to perpetuate its power was okay for the military.
Post-defeat plotting
What could be done when the 2022 election came, and Bolsonaro lost? While Bolsonaro stayed silent for weeks, his supporters were primed by years of conspiracies and fake news – including his supporters in the army. When supporters came to the door of the military barracks, asking the army to take over in a military coup, it’s fair to say they would have loved to oblige. However, as the entire world quickly sent their notes congratulating Lula on his victory, it was clear that a coup would have no international support. Faced with the impossibility of getting their wishes and the chance of losing all their benefits and position of authority, the military allowed groups of Bolsonaro supporters to camp out in front of the barracks.
The situation continued for months, with all that resentment brewing; Brazil saw two attacks against public buildings on the 7th of September and the 1st of January. Crucially, the police and authorities were still under the control of Bolsonaro, leaving his supporters free and without significant repercussions for their actions. All of this to the 8th of January, when rioters invaded the Praça dos Três Poderes – the home of the three branches of the Brazilian government – and destroyed everything inside. We even have evidence of some army members covering for the terrorists (a more apt name), allowing some to escape and even stopping the police from arresting them.
So, that was the 8th of January in Brazil when the army and its child, Bolsonaro, riled up a group of people with conspiratorial speech and the promise of lax punishments. Did they deliberately spend four years provoking supporters to perform a coup? Or were they trying to cause enough chaos to justify the army intervention? I prefer not to answer those questions, as we don’t yet have concrete proof of the objectives, but the path that led to the events of the 8th of January is clear for all to see.
