Accountability Must be Taken for the Storming of the Brazilian Congress
By: Nico Bers
On January 8, 2023, Brazil’s congress was stormed by supporters of the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Over four hundred people were arrested for breaking into the nation’s principal government building. The rioters were calling for a military coup and denying the election results in which the new left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had won. The similarities between this attempted coup and that of January 6 in the United States have drawn criticism from many about the impact of former President Trump’s precedent for inciting his followers to violence and the destruction of democracy. The repetition of attempted insurrections in democratic nations should be a major cause for concern and condemnation on an international scale, not only of Bolsonaro but also of Trump for inciting violence despite denying direct links.
By consistently fomenting distrust in the Brazilian electoral process, Bolsonaro has intentionally created the opportunity for a situation like the insurrection that occurred in Brazil to unfold. Bolsonaro has claimed that with Brazil’s entirely digital ballot system, “it’s impossible to make any connection between a voter and their vote.” However, this claim has been denied and said to be false by Brazilian election authorities, who cited the several levels of fraud and error protections built into the system. The claims Bolasanaro has fed to his voter base persistently for the past eight years show his culpability in his calls for an undemocratic government by his supporters.
Rioters break the windows to the Presidential Palace.
The dangers of the widespread dissemination of false information have now been shown twice within the last three years with violent riots, which leads one to consider the necessity to moderate fake news over social media. In a report from Rolling Stone, Musk was reported to have fired “any and all employees charged with moderating content for incitement of violence and misinformation had been fired by early November.” For the three months between these mass lay-offs and the January 8th invasion of the capitol, misinformation proliferated unchecked on Twitter. Thus, accountability must also be considered for the social media platforms that have aided in spreading misinformation that incites violence, such as this clearly harmful Twitter move.The final piece of accountability for the far-right rioters who stormed Brazil’s congress is the former U.S. president due to his demonstrating with the January 6 insurrection that very serious threats to democracy are real and current. No doubt, the global headlines for the US Capitol invasion affected the decision in Brazil to attempt the same thing. In the US, it was proved it could be done, and then it was done again—simple Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Thus, we must condemn all ways in which the two most recent attempts by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to destroy democracies were constructed and hold them accountable.
Scenes as rioters stormed the Brazilian congress.
