Page/12 in Brazil
From Brasilia
The indefatigable Lula. The day after the assault on the Planalto Palace perpetrated by followers of Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, returned to the headquarters of the Executive Power in ruins. Determined to reverse the coup tide, in a gesture of strong symbolic weight, he went on foot this Monday night to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in downtown Brasilia. In his march through the central square of the capital, he was accompanied by the head of the STF, Rosa Weber, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, some governors, senators and representatives.
This kind of civic march began after a meeting with governors to discuss the crisis caused by the invasions of the palaces of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. The president used a frontal tone to refer to the events of Sunday, saying that “we are going to investigate” who were manipulated and who were the intellectual leaders who were not present at the Planalto Palace to take the shots and generate a climate of rupture institutional. “What were they demanding, a salary increase? No, they were demanding a coup.”
The president added that “there was a coexistence of the police supporting the protesters, while the soldiers talked with the people (subversives) as if they were their allies,” he denounced.
Early
Early, at nine in the morning on Monday, the new head of state arrived at the Planalto, seat of government, where almost nothing was left standing. The far-right mob unleashed its anti-democratic anger on Sunday, destroying everything in its path, from furniture and computers to the painting Las Mulatas by one of the fathers of national modernism, the immortal Di Cavalcanti. The 1962 work, valued at $1.4 million, was looted by invaders.
Why such cruelty with that pictorial jewel? Perhaps because it portrays some Afro-descendant girls, frowned upon by this racist right and vindicated by the new government responsible for recreating the Ministry of Racial Inclusion, headed by the young black woman Anielle Franco. And perhaps because Di Cavalcanti was a member of the Communist Party.
On his return to the destroyed property, Lula in a gray suit and dark shirt without a tie watched dozens of employees pick up glass, stack furniture, take it out into containers, and clean up the feces left behind by that group of fascists, as scatological as they are politically illiterate.
One of the few offices safe from the plague was the presidential office, on the third floor, where the head of the Workers’ Party (PT) and his deputy Alckmin, from the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) sat next to each other. They were accompanied by the head of Congress, Senator Veneziano Vital do Rego, the head of Deputies, Arthur Lira, and the president of the STF, Judge Rosa Weber.
Joined
“We are united so that the institutional measures are taken, we urge society to maintain serenity in defense of peace and democracy, the country needs normalcy,” says a document signed by Lula, Vital do Rego, Lira and Weber . “The powers of the Republic, defenders of the Constitutional Charter, reject the terrorist acts, vandalism, criminal and coup actions that occurred yesterday afternoon in Brasilia.”
That the first document of the representatives of the powers of the republic chooses the word “terrorists” to allude to the horde of militants who depredated public property, says a lot about the seriousness of the coup attempt, a plan about which Bolsonaro began to talking and agitating for two years, in January 2021, when US President Donald Trump persuaded his people to storm the Capitol in Washington. The adventure of the oligarch of the Republican Party foundered, in part, because he lacked the support of the Armed Forces.
Contrary to the United States, in Brazil the Armed Forces joined Bolsonarismo and agreed with the plan to destabilize Lula. That is why the Army General Headquarters was ceded as a hideout where two thousand extremists set up a camp from where they launched urban terrorism operations, the last one last Sunday.
As the investigations progress, it is noted how the military used the protesters to generate chaos and install ungovernability. With the capital’s palaces on fire and the Bolsonaro police immobile, Lula would be forced to decree military intervention in internal security. That is to say: abdicate before the military corporation a week after assuming the government.
The plan failed because the president, instead of asking the military to go out and patrol the streets, chose to intervene in the Brasilia government and take control of its police to return to “normality”, as the document presented this Monday says.
Camp
The intense presidential agenda this Monday sought to broaden the political alliances that allow isolating the concentrated nucleus of the coup formed by Bolsonaro, the military and the zombie activists. After speaking with the heads of the Legislative and Judicial branches in the morning, in the evening Lula met with the governors to agree on common measures against the rebels.
While the meetings were taking place in the Planalto in the reconstruction phase, Lula sent a couple of ministers to the Army Headquarters to agree on the evacuation of the right-wing revolutionaries. At first, the generals objected, but as the hours passed and the pressure of public opinion, they were forced to consent to the departure of 1,200 campers and their transfer to a Federal Police headquarters to be interrogated.
two ministers
With this pressure on the Bolsonaro military leadership, the government won a transitory but important victory. The political revenue is for the president and his Minister of Justice, Flavio Dino, who is in favor of doing justice to the material and intellectual authors of the “terrorist” acts. If Dino’s thesis goes forward, investigations could reveal the names of the businessmen who financed Sunday’s uprising. And not only that: they will also shed light on the probable complicity of the military and the almost certain responsibility of Bolsonaro from the United States, where some Democratic deputies asked the Joe Biden government to expel him.
The triumph of the Minister of Justice, Flavio Dino, with the expulsion of the militants encamped in front of the Army, was a defeat for the appeasing Minister of Defense, José Mucio, a native of the conservative camp, who proposed a reconciled exit with the military, including the tolerance with the rioting groups that it does not treat as coup plotters but as demonstrators with the right to express their ideas. The head of Defense points towards an amnesty, which would also cover Bolsonaro. That project today lost a battle with Lula walking towards the STF and Dino becoming strong in the search for justice.
