Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian Insurrection attempt

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Jair Bolsonaro is one of a new brand of radical extremist ideologues. Although he has disavowed any role in the attempted coup in Brazil, there is no doubt that he is at the center of the spiderweb that inspired an attempted insurrection. His supporters take their cue from their conservative cohorts and populist leaders in imperialist countries, such as Trump in the United States, the “ultras” who lost the democratic contestation attempted to seize power by force.

They came. They saw. They got arrested.

That these insurrectionists did not succeed is a testament to the strong democratic institutions and an adherence to the rule of law of most of the security and intelligence forces of Brazil. Another factor is that these agents of chaos are few in number. Even though the Brazilian election results were tight, the vast majority of those who voted for Bolsonaro would respect the results of the election that went against their desired outcome. This is true of civilians, functionaries, and the military alike. The counter-revolution was less of a popular uprising, and more of a badly backfiring damp conservative squib, poorly supported and ill-conceived.

This attempted coup was carried out by a small group of anarchists and reactionaries, and their pathetic response to losing a democratic contest was to be expected. This tiny lunatic fringe drew their inspiration from the January 6 insurrectionists in the United States. These are people who take partisanship to the extremes of ideology. They create their own set of superstitions, they weave webs of conspiracy theories into a narrative that gives their views a primacy over the rest of the polity. They are holy warriors waging a culture war that must be won at any and all cost.

These are people, a small minority, whose ideology is an amorphous blob of rhetoric, sloganeering, expedience, and hate. The coalesce around ultra-right wing populists masquerading as messiahs like Jair Bolsonaro. They are cyphers for a set of conservative agendas that stymie the needs of the poor and the working class. Instead of “Order and Progress”, they channel only “caos e destruição” – chaos and destruction.

President Lula must leave nothing to chance. The story of the latin America is punctuated with coups d’etat by right wing or imperial forces. Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras, Equador, Paraguay, Guatemala, Argentina, El Salvador, Peru, have all fallen prey to anti-Democratic interventions in the 21st Century alone. It is clear that this recent attempted coup could not have been launched without the explicit or implicit support and complicity of security and intelligence. If functionaries cannot remain politically neutral non-partisan servants of democratic institutions, they must be removed because they pose a threat to the democratic will of the people.

President Lula must also conduct a thorough investigation into whether these rogue actors have been co-opted, and who were the puppet masters, domestic and foreign, pulling the strings. From both within and without, this was an attack on the sovereignty of Brazil. The inevitable investigation into the complex web around former president Jair Bolsonaro would be instructive.