The attack by thousands of radical Bolsonaristas on the buildings of Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential Palace on Sunday left several scenes of their celebration on social media that can be used to incriminate them. The Senate plenum was one of the first rooms to be invaded. A man in his 50s with a graying beard and a natural talent from Divinópolis takes off a bulky mask and boasts that his home remedy works against tear gas. He’s sitting in the Senate President’s chair while someone else is yelling from behind, staring at his cell phone: “We’re here in our house, in the Senate, the Senate is the church of God’s people!” In this seat of the legislature, Bolsonarists were also seen throwing themselves down a slide from the stands. In one of the most viral videos of the invasion at the nearby Supreme Court building, a man screams with delight while showing his buttocks as if defecating.
Most of the videos came from WhatsApp groups from Bolsonaro circles, but ended up on Twitter and now half of Brazil is looking for the putschists. For example, the Instagram profile @ContragolpeBrasil is dedicated to spreading the images of the attackers’ faces and in a few hours had more than 800,000 followers.
In the heat of the moment, many did not hide the fact that they were in the midst of a monumental act of vandalism. A 65-year-old woman, visibly upset by the situation, recorded for her friends from the front of the National Congress: “There is vandalism and everything you can imagine, but it’s what I always say: nothing is being done, without breaking anything eggs. Whoever stirred up the people was nothing more than mismanagement, they reap what they sow,” she said with satisfaction.
Once the euphoria of the moment has dissipated, the story begins to change as the hours pass. This Monday, around the Bolsonaro camp set up in front of the army headquarters, Cleber Borges, a shirt salesman who hails from faraway Belém do Pará in the north of the country, tried to distance himself from the serious events: “Sunday was vandalism It wasn’t necessary, but all actions have consequences. Now they are paying that price. I went to the protest but it could have been better, all the chaos wasn’t necessary.
Between the Bolsonaro ecstasy at the time of the attack and the warning 24 hours later there is a period of more than a thousand detainees. Borges, for example, was saved from being among the more than 1,200 arrested in the eviction of the coup plot because he spent the morning away from the compound. He came to pick up some things at noon when it was already quiet, but he didn’t seem too worried about his colleagues’ situation: “I think they will let them go, it’s a matter of time. Nothing will happen to you.”
According to the military, those detained at the camp have been identified by police and may be under investigation for their involvement in Sunday’s violence. Those arrested in the act during the attack on the buildings in Plaza de los Tres Poderes, some 300, are already being transferred to Papuda Prison, a maximum security prison, and could face terrorism charges, according to the Federal District Civil Police .
Now, to distance itself from the images of broken glass, vandalized furniture, and damaged artwork, and to avoid accusations of an attempted coup, the Bolsonaro narrative seeks to solidify the idea that all acts of vandalism were the work of left-wing “invaders.” All sorts of conspiracy theories are circulating on social media, fueled in part by the ambiguous message left by former President Jair Bolsonaro on Twitter, in which he appeared to condemn the acts but at the same time said that the left did the same in 2013 and in 2017.
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