The action of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) this Sunday (8) in Brasília —which culminated in the invasion of areas of the National Congress—, bears similarities to an event that took place in the United States that, coincidentally, completed two years this year. week.
On January 6, 2021, inflated by then-President Donald Trump, who spoke in Washington, demonstrators invaded the US Legislative building, in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election —the Republican and his followers maintain until today the lying speech that the election was defrauded.
The biggest recent attack on American democracy was classified by many as an attempted coup d’état and became the target of a series of investigations, by the Department of Justice, the FBI and Congress itself. The attack resulted in the death of five people, including a policeman.
Since then, the US federal police have arrested more than 950 people – the investigation is considered the largest in the history of the body – and opened cases against 940, according to the Program on Extremism, a group at George Washington University. More than half of the defendants, 482, confessed their guilt, and another 44 were considered so by the Justice.
The longest sentence so far was given to a former New York military and retired police officer, Thomas Webster, 56, who was sentenced in September to just over 10 years in prison — for, among other things, hitting a police officer with the flagpole. of a flag and hanged him trying to remove his helmet and gas mask. The aggression was recorded by the agent’s body camera and by other protesters.
On January 6, the strategy was to convince parliamentarians to invalidate part of the election results. The then president considered that he could reverse the defeat if he managed to get congressmen to change the numbers of some places – an unfeasible maneuver in the Chamber – and pressured his vice, Mike Pence, who would lead the session, to refuse data sent by the states (which he refused to do).
Trump that day held a rally to question the result of the popular vote and urged his supporters to fight back, without explicitly asking them to storm Congress. He then withdrew and remained quiet during the raid for over two hours, despite pleas for him to do something.
Messages from Meadows already released showed that several allies were ignored. “Him [Trump] gotta condemn this shit fast,” wrote Donald Trump Jr., son of the then president, to the then chief of staff, who replied: “I’m pushing hard. I agree.” Trump Jr. insisted: “We need a speech in the Oval Office. He has to take the lead now. It went too far and got out of hand.”
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