‘Democracy is at risk’ Lawmakers take stock

Sônia Guajajara should have been making history last Tuesday afternoon, being sworn in as the head of Brazil's first ministry for Indigenous peoples at S a ceremony at the presidential palace in Brasília.

- Tom Phillips

 

Damage by rioters at the supreme court building AMANDA PEROBELLI/REUTERS

Instead, with that building wrecked on 8 January by thousands of far-right extremists, she sat in her office overlooking Brazil's similarly ransacked congress, reflecting on the stunning attempt to overthrow one of the world's biggest democracies.

"It was truly frightening ... such insanity," said the politician who hails from the Amazon and worked as a cleaner and nanny before becoming a leading Indigenous activist.

"They say they are patriots who are fighting for Brazil ... [but] this is terrorism ... and this was engineered by people with economic and political power," Guajajara said, as her government tried to identify those behind the most serious outbreak of political violence since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.

In the days since the insurrection - a week after the leftist veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office - the scale of the alleged plot to overthrow Brazil's democracy has become clear.

Lula's administration has accused hardcore supporters of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, of attempting to stage a coup. They believe it was aimed at encouraging security forces to rise up, allowing Bolsonaro to return from the US - where he has been since the eve of Lula's 1 January inauguration - to retake power.

Last Thursday, federal police reportedly found a document in the wardrobe of Bolsonaro's former justice minister, Anderson Torres, which allegedly outlined a plan for the former president to seize control of the supreme electoral court to overturn October's election, which Lula won by more than 2m votes.

"Brazilian democracy has been unquestionably tarnished and is at risk," the commentator Mauro Paulino said on the GloboNews television network.