A Letter From the Editor

History Repeats: The recent Brazilian Insurrection and its connection to the events of January 6th.

While I entered this issue of The Jaguardian with the intention of producing a hard news article on a world event I deem to be important, it, unfortunately, fell through. Even after multiple rounds of emails being sent to sources and hours spent researching on my own, almost no one got back to me, and I was forced to abandon the idea. However, that does not mean that this current event is not worth talking about. 

I trust that the majority of the New Roads community is well-acquainted with the insurrection that took place on January 6th of last year. For nearly 24 hours, supporters of former US President, Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol building and caused overall mass destruction. Congresspeople were forced into a lockdown, police, and military responded (some more helpfully than others) and rioters looted offices and ransacked the property — all in the name of Trump and the recent election that they claimed was rigged. The country was sent into a state of emergency and chaos reigned as many of us watched in horror at the havoc on TV. Almost exactly a year later, this series of events has taken place again, just not in the United States. 

(Screenshots courtesy of Rolling Stone and Foreign Policy)

Scenes from the January 6 insurrection in the US vs. the events of January 8 in Brazil.

On January 1, 2023, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — more commonly known as “Lula” — was sworn in as president of Brazil. A representative of the Workers Party, the 77-year-old returned to power (previously leading from 2003-2010) after defeating the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. Lula is generally regarded as a liberal whose policies focus on addressing poverty, debt/inflation, unemployment, public health, and education. His original selection in the early 2000s was viewed as a major part of the “pink tide” — a political wave that saw many Latin American countries veer to left-wing governments and ideals.

Bolsonaro, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. Elected in 2019, the 67-year-old is an infamous far-right figure. Throughout his presidency, he maintained stances against abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and secularism while supporting the free market, liberal economic structure, and the destruction of indigenous and forest land. He received criticism from many countries, including the United States, for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — which he greatly downplayed — and his treatment of the Amazon rainforest, with a whopping 59.5% deforestation rate during his four-year term. As a military man, his time in power was viewed by many as a dictatorship, where he sought to maintain power through bogus claims of corruption within any system that took a stand against him.

Head to head, the election of Bolsonaro and Lula went to a runoff, which the latter narrowly won with 50.9% of the votes. Bolsonaro, unsurprisingly, responded with more claims of election fraud, saying that the process had been “unbalanced” and that there had been an “attempt to manipulate the result.” Exactly as Trump did, Bolsonaro refused to attend the inauguration, instead escaping to Miami, while his baseless, yet inflammatory claims circulated online. His words sparked a movement among his supporters — mainly blue-collar and evangelical populations — who, inspired by America’s Capitol rioters, decided to carry out some destruction of their own.

On January 8, 2023, one year and two days after the US insurrection, Bolsonaro supporters stormed the Brazilian capital. Thousands violently broke into government buildings and proceeded to destroy everything in their surroundings — throwing chairs from windows, setting rooms on fire, graffitiing the walls — all while calling for Lula’s immediate resignation. The entire city police force was deployed as a result, and over 1500 rioters were detained. The country soon issued a state of emergency.

(Image from ABC News)

Bolsonaro supporters were captured breaking the windows of government offices.

Identical to the US, these rioters consisted of radical right-wing members of the public who believed they were defending their country from the corruption that had been claimed by their favorite governmental official. Just as Trump declared “the only way [Democrats] can take this election is if this is a rigged election” in 2020, Bolsonaro was able to use his words and the media to manipulate his supporters into believing misinformation. In neither of these instances was any evidence of election fraud found.

This attack was not random, instead, it was strategically planned by Bolsonaro’s supporters who had been camping out near the capital for months (as a result of the original election), receiving funding by individual extremists and far-right companies alike. The timing was purposeful, as well as the target and behavior, and it has been — and should be — a wake-up call to all who believed we had left January 6th in our past. This fight is not over. Whether it be here in the United States or abroad in Brazil, extremism, violence, misinformation, and hatred exist in our society and it is up to us to acknowledge and address them. Nothing has ever been solved through ignorance. So, if you didn’t know about any of this before, I’m glad you do now. Keep reading.

-Isabella Carbonari, Co-Editor-in-Chief