Front Burner - The road to Brazil's 'January 6' moment

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Supporters of outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro ransacked the country’s capital buildings this week in a show of defiance against the country’s recent election results. New President Lula da Silva accused his predecessor for inciting the violence and vowed to punish those who took part. Journalist Gustavo Ribeiro has watched and reported for years on false claims from President Jair Bolsonaro that Brazil’s election system is faulty. He describes how Bolsonaro has created a deeply divided Brazil.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. A false claim of election fraud. Far-right protesters storming and vandalizing government buildings. Calling for the overthrow of a democratically elected government.

I'm not talking about what happened in Washington two years ago. I'm talking about this week in Brazil. Total chaos in Brasilia as thousands of hardline protesters invaded government buildings. Authorities responding with tear gas to try and regain control of Brazil's capital. What had looked like a routine transfer of power from former President Jair Bolsonaro to new president Lula da Silva at the beginning of the month turned violent. How did it happen? And how does it connect to the similar attack on the Capitol building in the U.S.? Gustavo Ribeiro has been worried about a week like this for years. He's the founder of Brazilian Report and the host of the Explaining Brazil podcast.

Gustavo, hi, thanks so much for coming back onto FrontBurner. My pleasure. All things considered, of course. Yeah, absolutely. So I remember the last time we spoke, it was a couple months back in the middle of Brazil's election. And you told us then that Bolsonaro has actually been sowing seeds of doubt in the election system for a long time now, long before President Trump began to do

the same, right? And take me back. How did he first start doing that in Brazil? Bolsonaro has said, without any shred of evidence, that the system can be rigged. Even after he won the presidential election, he continued saying that. So in the same way that Trump said that not only he won the electoral college, but he also won the popular vote. I think I did win the popular vote in a true sense. I think there was tremendous cheating in California. There was tremendous cheating. Which was false. Bolsonaro said that he would have won outright the Brazilian 2018 election if he had not been the victim of voter fraud. And then when he lost the election on October the 30th, then that rhetoric became raging among his supporters. And just to be clear here, does Brazil have free and fair elections?

Yes, our system is considered as foolproof as it gets. I mean, it's an electronic system. It is not connected on the Internet, so it cannot be hacked in traditional ways. Every year, these machines go through security checks. They are updated regularly. And on a regular basis, electoral courts ask hackers to try to crack the system and flag any vulnerabilities. And so far, these hackers have never been able to alter the vote tally in any way, shape or form. And it's interesting to point out that Bolsonaro has run for office multiple times and he only lost once, which happened in October.

So he's complaining about a system that allowed him to win public office time and again for decades. Can you give me some examples of what exactly Bolsonaro would say here? Like, what was some of his most egregious statements on these voting systems? He says, and he always uses misinformative reports to back his claims that the source code of electronic machines is poorly done and that it is possible for people to program the voting machines in a way that every vote will count for X candidate or Y candidate. And then, for instance, there are some regions with very few people in Brazil, for instance, indigenous communities, that 100% of ballots went for one candidate or another. This only happens in very small constituencies. And then the far right gets these pieces of data

as this sort of aha moment, like, how can someone win 100% of the votes? But this is really very, very tiny constituencies. So he always tries to say that it is possible to manipulate the software, that the hardware is vulnerable. But Bolsonaro himself has in the past admitted that he has no proof of this. And who helped him get that message out that he had been sowing for so long? We have to point the finger at the armed forces because they have done Bolsonaro's bid. They have raised questions around the security of electronic voting machines, always saying that they are doing that in the spirit of improving Brazilian institutions, but they actually sow in doubt.

And they have made urgent requests for information that are already publicly available, all in a very theatrical way to give Bolsonaro supporters something to cling on to say that maybe there's something fishy there, while they have never been able to prove anything. The president's office may have conceded defeat, but many of Jair Bolsonaro's millions of supporters have not. This is a fraud. And if we need to go to the army, the army will have to intervene. For sure it was stolen. I sincerely hope that we can reverse this somehow.

We cannot take the power. The people of this old street, we want the military to take over. We want a military intervention because we can't accept these results. Lula is a thief and he should be in prison. Is it fair for me to say that Bolsonaro and the army, like they're very close, right? Like I remember as president, he called it my army. And he appointed a lot of people from the military into government positions.

Yes, thousands of them. And he also gave hefty raises to army commanders. I mean, Bolsonaro and the army are like Siamese twins. You cannot split them. And at all times, Bolsonaro tried to steer fear in other political brokers in Brazil by insinuating that the army is with him and that he had the coup d'etat card on his deck. And at no point the army did anything to quell these suggestions. Now, a lot of generals say off the record that the president is their commander in chief and that they did not want to publicly contradict their commander in chief. But every time the Brazilian armed forces could have shown any distancing from the Sputnik

rhetoric, they failed to do so. So, I mean, they are in many ways also responsible for what we saw on Sunday in Brazil. What about the media ecosystem in Brazil? Do they play a role in parroting these claims? Yeah, since social media became so central in Brazil, we have seen this proliferation of a far-right media ecosystem, and that has also pushed some old traditional media outlets to brand themselves as the far-right radio or the far-right channel in a push for audience and more ad money. So you have some very powerful outlets that spend the most part of the Bolsonaro years just blindly supporting the former president and just trying to legitimize whatever false claim he would put forward. So with all of this context in mind, take me to Brasilia on Sunday. What happened at the capital?

What did it look like to you? So on the days leading up to Sunday, we saw dozens and dozens of buses taking pro-Bolsonaro militants to Brasilia. Now, this is important to explain that Brasilia is a capital built to avoid the kinds of scenes we saw on Sunday. It is isolated from the rest of the country, thousands of miles away from the biggest urban centers. the rest of the country, thousands of miles away from the biggest urban centers. We have vast open spaces and the structure just allows the police to contain any sort of mob that comes. What we saw was throngs of Bolsonarista militants arriving in Brasília on Saturday and Sunday. And then by 2 p.m. on Sunday, they started marching towards the Congress building, the Three Powers Square, which is a big square where we have the Congress building, the Supreme Court building, and the presidential palace. This is a four-mile walk,

so it's not as if you don't have the time to react to this sort of walk but when they got there they only had like a couple of dozens of police officers trying to prevent them from reaching public buildings some police officers tried to stop them with pepper spray. They were overwhelmed. But also others were just taking selfies, chatting with the radicals, and filming as they stormed the Congressional building, then the Supreme Court, then the Presidential Palace, and just began trashing and looting the place.

There are reports that police forces found a lot of blood, urine and feces on the premises, so they just, they literally left their mark on these buildings. What did they say they wanted from these protests and, I guess, this ransacking? When you look at their action on social media, they were talking about the Brazilian Spring. They were talking about reclaiming power for the people. And for these people, democracy means putting Jair Bolsonaro in power by whatever means. We want new elections, clean ballot boxes. We don't believe that this election was democratic.

There are several indications that there was fraud, that there was corruption. Best case scenario, they wanted to create an atmosphere of terror in Brazil. Worst case scenario, they wanted years ago in the U.S. is that Congress and the Supreme Court are not in session during the month of January. And Lula was not in Brasilia. So these buildings were largely empty. And I mean, it's in the millions of dollars, the amount of damage that they caused. But it could have been much worse. We could be talking about murdered people there. So fortunately, they did that while

these buildings were largely emptied. How did law enforcement or have they responded to what looks to be a pretty tepid response? responded to what looks to be a pretty tepid response. I mean, tepid might be an understatement. You just had to go on Twitter to see that there was something brewing. And what we saw was best case scenario, total and utter incompetence from local authorities. But what members of the federal government have accused the Brazilian government is of having just allowed them maliciously neglected public security to allow this protest to evolve into the scenes of ransacking and rioting that we saw. Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva sworn in just a very important detail, I mean, not a small detail. The top security officer in Brasília until Sunday was the man who served as justice minister under Jair Bolsonaro. So there is a lot of suspicions from the federal government that this was orchestrated or premeditated. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

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vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. How does it feel watching all of this and then watching this response? Like, what have you been thinking about the last day or so? Disappointing, disheartening, but not surprising. It's like Groundhog Day meets Friday the 13th, right? The former Brazilian president has created this massive gulf between his supporters and the rest of the country, and has tried to convince his supporters that all the situations are fundamentally rotten, and that the only solution for Brazil is just to implode everything He imposed everything and just put him ahead. Yeah, he did.

Bolsonaro did denounce the actions of his supporters on Twitter on Sunday, right? Is that significant? I wouldn't say denounce. And after this weekend's riots, he tweeted that the invasion of government buildings crossed the line. Tweeting, invasions of public buildings are outside the law. Tweeted that peaceful demonstrations were democratic, but the invasion of the government building was an exception to that rule.

I think it was a very tepid response. At no point he tried to calm their spirits. At no point he urged them to just like stop doing that and blatantly and unequivocally condemned their actions. And where was he while this was all going down? In Florida. Bolsonaro has been in Florida since December the 30th. He left the country to skip Lula's inauguration and not hand him the presidential sesh. But now we don't know because we have several criminal cases against Bolsonaro for pandemic-related crimes and other issues.

And now, if things get too heated, the big question is, will Bolsonaro return to Brazil? Will he go to another country? It remains to be seen. We've been talking about this throughout this conversation. I think probably for people listening, this sounds eerily familiar to what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. But just talk to me a little bit more about the connections that you see here. There are deep ties between both the Bolsonaros and the Trumps. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president's third eldest son, He's close to the Trump family.

He's close to Steve Bannon. He has been trying to import a lot of the culture war aspects of Trumpism to Brazil. And we have seen Bolsonaro taking a lot of pages from Trump's playbook. It's also important to say that when the Capitol riots broke a few days after that, Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the former president's sons, he said that if the protesters were organized, they would have been able to kill every cop inside the Capitol and avoid any casualty on their side. And he said at the time that once the right is at least 10% as organized as the left, we would see civil wars breaking in every Western country. So, I mean, that comparison is by no means far-fetched.

Gustavo, before we go, before the holidays, we did this overarching episode looking at the state of democracy in the world, basically. And we talked about Brazil and we talked about it in the context that it was really kind of like a good news story last year, that there had seemed to be this peaceful transfer of power to Lula, even with all the concerns people had about the attempts to undermine the election. And Bolsonaro, he didn't appear to put up this massive fuss, at least at the time, right? And so are you concerned now about whether Brazil's democratic institutions can withstand this? I think I'm more optimistic than pessimistic

in the way that the institutions have endured for years of Bolsonaro. And I think they would not survive eight years of Bolsonaro. So in that sense, the fact that he's no longer the president and the fact that we see a disposition of the current government to go after these radicals and show that going against rule of law will have consequence, that is a silver lining. At the same time, it's worrisome to see how deeply divided the country is. And just every time we see this kind of thing, it seems to chip away a little bit of the legitimacy of institutions for parts of the Brazilian society. So I'm cautiously optimistic that after resisting Bolsonaro,

Brazilian democracy will once again prevail. All right. Thank you so much for this, Gassama. It's really a pleasure to have you on. I learned a lot. Thank you. Anytime. All right. So before we go today, as of Monday, Brazil's justice minister said at least 200 people have been arrested, and the Supreme Court ordered authorities to dismantle the protesters' camp. Facebook committed to removing posts praising the ransacking of the government buildings, and in Florida, ex-president Bolsonaro's wife confirmed her husband was admitted to the hospital with abdominal pain. The former president had been stabbed in the abdomen during his 2018 presidential campaign. Some Democratic lawmakers

are calling on President Joe Biden to extradite Bolsonaro from the U.S. If you want to hear more about the makeup of Bolsonaro's supporters and how misinformation, conspiracy theories, and Brazil's culture wars played into what's happening this week, listen to the CBC podcast, Nothing is Foreign, on Thursday.