It is cold comfort that most of the militants who sacked Brazil’s governance institutions this weekend were amateurs, much like their counterparts in the January 6, 2021, insurrection in the United States. As in the US, rounding up and jailing Brazil's insurrectionists will prove to be the easy part.
SÃO PAULO – The storming of Brazil’s democratic institutions this weekend was no spontaneous “accident.” Conspiratorial plots and appeals for a military coup have been circulating on far-right social media for months, and they predictably intensified after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential election last October. They sky-rocketed in the days before this weekend’s protests rocked Latin America’s largest country.
SÃO PAULO – The storming of Brazil’s democratic institutions this weekend was no spontaneous “accident.” Conspiratorial plots and appeals for a military coup have been circulating on far-right social media for months, and they predictably intensified after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential election last October. They sky-rocketed in the days before this weekend’s protests rocked Latin America’s largest country.