After the rampage: Brazil’s new leaders to fight hard in wake of ‘insane’ coup attempt
Sônia Guajajara should have been making history last Tuesday afternoon, being sworn in as the head of Brazil’s first ministry for Indigenous peoples at a ceremony at the presidential palace in Brasília.
Instead, with that building wrecked last Sunday by thousands of far-right extremists, she sat in her office overlooking Brazil’s similarly ransacked congress, reflecting on the stunning attempt to overthrow one of the world’s biggest democracies.
“It was truly frightening … such insanity,” said the 48-year-old politician who hails from the Amazon and worked as a cleaner and nanny before becoming a leading Indigenous activist.
“They say they are patriots who are fighting for Brazil … [but] this is terrorism … and this was engineered by people with economic and political power,” Guajajara said, as her government battled to identify those behind the most serious outbreak of political violence since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.
In the days since the insurrection – which came just a week after the leftist veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office as president – the scale of the alleged plot to overthrow Brazil’s democracy has become clear.
Lula’s administration has accused hardcore supporters of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, of attempting to stage a coup by storming the presidency, congress and supreme court. They believe that was aimed at encouraging security forces to rise up, allowing Bolsonaro to return from the US – where he has been since the eve of Lula’s 1 January inauguration – to retake power.
On Thursday, federal police reportedly found a document in the wardrobe of Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, Anderson Torres, which allegedly outlined a plan for the former president to seize control of the supreme electoral court to overturn October’s election, in which Lula won by more than 2m votes.
“Brazilian democracy has been unquestionably tarnished and is at risk,” the commentator Mauro Paulino warned on the GloboNews television network.
On Friday night, the supreme court announced Bolsonaro would be investigated as part of the inquiry into the alleged attempt to topple the country’s new government. Bolsonaro’s lawyer denied wrongdoing, calling the former president a “defender of democracy”.
Torres, who was security chief in Brasília at the time of the attacks, was arrested on Saturday morning after flying back to Brazil from the US – where he was purportedly on holiday when the rebellion took place. The former justice minister, whose arrest was ordered for alleged acts of omission, has denied involvement, claiming he planned to shred a document that had been taken “out of context”.
“Deep down, I think we have so many good intentions that we didn’t believe something like this might happen,” said Celso Amorim, one of Lula’s closest aides, in his office in the presidential palace on Wednesday afternoon, with hundreds of troops and an armoured vehicle stationed outside to prevent a repeat invasion.
Amorim, who was Brazil’s foreign and defence minister during Lula’s 2003-2010 administration, said he hoped the uprising had been nipped in the bud. “But I can’t rule out attempts, here and there, that will need to be prevented if possible, and repressed if necessary,” he said.
“We need to be really vigilant,” Amorim said. “We can’t just think it was something that happened and is over and that’s it.”
