The day after around 3,000 aggressive supporters of the voted-out right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro besieged the government district, the process of coming to terms with the situation in Brazil begins – with consequences for personnel too. The governor of the capital district, Ibaneis Rocha, was suspended by the Supreme Court for 90 days. Brasília’s security chief, Anderson Torres, who had been justice minister under Bolsonaro, also lost his job. He was fired by Rocha before his own suspension.
There has been sharp criticism of the authorities in Brazil’s capital. The reaction of the police was too hesitant, although Bolsonaro supporters had been formed in Brasília for days, complained about Brazil’s Social Democrats, who lead the new government. The television reports showed how the police escorted the demonstrators and filmed themselves with cell phones.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was the primary target of the attacks, accused the police of “incompetence or malice”. He ordered by decree that in future the federal police would no longer be responsible for security in Brasília, but rather the local authorities. More than 200 rioters were arrested, the Justice Department said on Monday. The Bolsonaro supporters’ protest camp was surrounded and broken up by heavily armed soldiers and police officers.
Lula got an idea of the damage caused by the rioters on Monday night. During the storming of the government district, he himself was not in Brasília but in São Paulo, where he had visited the victims of a flood disaster. The government will resume work immediately, the president said. The “putschists” have been identified and will be punished. “We will also find out who funded it,” announced the President.
It took hours on Sunday for the security forces to regain control of the situation. The demonstrators managed to break into the parliament building, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court building. There they knocked over desks, scrawled slogans on the walls, damaged works of art and threw computers out of windows. They partially flooded the Supreme Court building. One attacker even took the office door of federal judge Alexandre de Moraes, who was particularly hated by Bolsonaro supporters, as a trophy.
The comparison with the storming of the US Capitol two years ago suggests itself. Back then, too, the crowd was incited by claims that the election had been rigged. Jair Bolsonaro has never publicly admitted defeat and, before defecting to Florida at the end of December, had called on his supporters to resist. However, he had made general statements and – unlike Trump on January 6, 2021 – not in direct temporal connection with the protests. Several US politicians are now calling for Bolsonaro to be expelled from the United States. The Democrat Joaquin Castro says about him: “He is a dangerous man”.