Brazil presidential election run-off (10/30/2022); 2023-01-08 Insurrection

Politics & Elections
21

What’s this about the army? I haven’t seen, read, or heard anything of the sort. On the contrary, the pro-Bozo demonstrators were specifically protesting for military intervention, and the silence was deafening. My understanding is that the armed forces specifically did not take any improper actions. Do let me know if I’m wrong!

This article here mentions, among other things, that Bozo reached out to leaders of the armed forces (while turning away ministers and other allies in his silence post-loss) to see if their verification of the election results had concluded (read: can/will they change the outcome) and the response from the armed forces and the supreme electoral court was clear that the outcome can’t and won’t be changed. Silêncio de Bolsonaro teve apelos e conversa com militares - 02/11/2022 - Poder - Folha

Bozo’s allies also pointed out that if there had been any fraud, then Bozo allies wouldn’t have been elected to other positions in government (e.g. Rio now has a miliciano governor, again).

If foreign media has been reporting the military and the police working together in impeding voting, I think the explanation is a misunderstanding of the many types of police here. The biggest branch of police is called the polícia militar, which sounds like “military police” but is actually “militarised police”. They’re not part of the armed forces - police of the armed forces is e.g. polícia do exército. The polícia militar are the reactive force, the uniformed cops that patrol or guard areas, and that (theoretically) respond when you call the cops for assistance. Then there’s the polícia civil, which is the investigative police (i.e. detectives), then the polícia rodoviária, highway police; polícia federal / estadual i.e. federal / state police; guárdia municipal, lit. city guards, who serve no purpose from what I can tell; and probably much more. I’d expect the polícia militar to cause trouble since that’s what they mostly do, plus the Venn diagram of polícia militar and milícia is basically two concentric circles, and the specific allegations of road blocks by police on voting day I read were about the polícia rodoviária.

Anyway, today’s a holiday, so there are protests by Bozo supporters going on here and there, especially in Rio and São Paulo city centers. From the news footage it’s gratifying to see how few people have turned up.

It’s also nice that Bozo and his band of merry lackwits have been so quiet. My take is that this means there won’t be any coup attempt, neither formal nor faux-grassroots, because for that to work you have to either come out denying reality immediately, or just do the coup right away and hang the consequences.

Hopefully Bozo is quiet because he’s trying to think up ways to keep himself and his troglodytes out of jail, either by spurious legal filings or fleeing to a country that doesn’t comply with extradition requests. Brazilian politicians are extremely well protected from the law, but only as long as they are still in office. Out of the last 10 governors that Rio de Janeiro has had, 5 have served time in prison. The last one, Sérgio Cabral, is still in there, thankfully. Pós-impeachment e prisão de 5 ex-governadores, Rio de Janeiro reproduz polarização nacional

On that last point, one funny/odd fact about incarceration in Brazil is that your prison experience depends on your academic achievements. If you have completed a post-secondary education, you apparently get your own cell; otherwise you’re packed in with the general population of utter lunatics in conditions indistinguishable from torture, with cellmates like Petey the Killer: Pedro Rodrigues Filho - Wikipedia
This meant that when Eike Batista, formerly Brazil’s richest man, had to go to prison for bribing the aforementioned governor Cabral, he had/has a really bad time of it since he started university but didn’t finish. Now, from what I see, Bozo didn’t go to university… :smiley:

22

Yep, that one’s a little odd, indeed.
Four inflatable Chet Huntleys say Jair is out of the country by 12:04 am, Tue. Nov. 15, 2022.

23

Brazil seems crazier and saner than the US at the same time.

24

If the generals gave the order to support Bozo, would the troops obey? Would they refuse? Would they start fighting among themselves?

25

I would be inclined to take that bet, actually, with an exception for vacation. Because, if Bozo would flee to escape prosecution, where would he realistically go long-term? Brazil has a little global ill-will due to their refusal to extradite anyone who has Brazilian dependents. See for example Ronnie Biggs (the Great Train Robber) and Cesare Battisti (Italian terrorist), though I see Bozo/Temer had wanted to extradite the latter: Former leftist militant Cesare Battisti handed over to Italian authorities after 37 years on the run
US? Not likely to happen without Trumpist assistance, and I don’t think a midterm change of Congress would be enough. Perhaps Italy under the new government? AIUI Bozo is either an Italian citizen already or has a right to Italian citizenship if he doesn’t. Even so, if/when the government switches they might be inclined to hand him back to Brazil if they request it, even if only for the chaos that would ensue. I doubt Bozo would accept exile in a Middle Eastern dictatorship like Idi Amin, due to his delusions of adequacy.

I wouldn’t want to play Top Trumps on this, but my goodness, there are some insane stories here. Since we were talking about crime, there’s the Suzane von Richthofen case. Oddly there’s no Wikipedia article in English, but to sum up: Caso Richthofen – Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre
→ Descendants of the Red Baron of WW1, the von Richthofens, emigrated to Brazil
→ One of them, Suzane von Richthofen, murdered her parents for their money, and is now in prison
→ As she is not in a maximum-security prison (low chance of repeat offence of patricide), she’s allowed out of prison on certain holidays
→ Which meant that the first time I heard of the von Richthofen case was because the news was reporting the absurdity that a woman who murdered her parents was out of prison on holiday due to Mother’s Day

I’m a little less confident on my views regarding the military, as all the Brazilians I know well enough for military service to have come up in conversation were either rejected by the draft, OR were military careerists. (One of them ran for office as a Bozo supporter, and got <200 votes in a municipality of >500,000 :laughing: ) But there are some important contexts here:

  1. Brazil has a universal male draft, though I suppose most candidates are rejected. If you’re told to serve, you must. This means that the enlisted ranks should, in theory, reflect society as a whole, i.e. there’s no overt selection of enlistees based on whether they’re pro-dictatorship or even pro-military. I would actually suspect that, as is so often the case in countries with a draft that isn’t just a lottery, enlistees would skew poorer (=didn’t bribe the draft board for an exemption) and therefore skew non-white, and therefore on both counts would skew slightly anti-Bozo. Even if the latter is not the case, the fact that the armed forces aren’t selecting or self-selecting for pro-coup soldiers means that if the order to overthrow democracy was given, there’s a high likelihood the order would be refused by non-officers.

  2. Being in the armed forces as an officer or other careerist is a really cushy job in Brazil with near-zero expectations. They do have some positive functions in society, notably in patrolling the Amazon on the ground and in the air, but those are limited in scope and in manpower. For the majority of millitary careerists, you sit around base in generally the more pleasant parts of the country and do nothing except relax and/or party in their exclusive equivalents of country clubs. This year when the armed forces have been in the news it’s mostly been to report on public spending on penis enlargements and viagra for the armed forces, in addition to their huge salaries and lifetime early pensions for themselves and all dependents. In essence, a hangover of the military dictatorship is that the military set things up really well for themselves to have a cushy existence with low expectations. There should be little desire by the armed forces to jeopardise that by overthrowing the constitution they have sworn to uphold. Plus I would expect/hope that a lot of officers actually live up to the values that Bozo only claims to support, like patriotism, respect for the constitution, and loyalty to their oaths of service. Even if they did want to overthrow the government again, the question would be, why do so for this disgraceful jackass? It’s a bit of a leap from e.g. General Mourão supporting Bozo’s elected government because it’s ostensibly right-wing and aligned with his own ideals, to overthrowing an established, albeit young, democracy to set up a military dictatorship under an incompetent solder who was dismissed as a captain with zero positive military achievements.

  3. The dictatorship ended bloodlessly with the armed forces peacefully handing over power to a civilian administration under the offensively corrupt José Sarney (whose family continue to run the state of Maranhão as if they were modern-day viceroys) who set up the democratic state and constitution. It’s generally accepted, including AIUI by the armed forces themselves, that the military handed over power to the civilians because they realised they simply weren’t up to the task of governing. Essentially, they had enough self-awareness to realise that being a soldier and governing a huge country with a diverse population and huge potential wealth are different skillsets. Or, to be blunt, they were goddamn incompetents in power (see e.g. investing in trucking over railroads, so there’s now an overgrown highway through the Amazon jungle but almost no trains in the entire country except for museum lines with >100 year old locomotives), and collectively decided they would rather be out of power in a country with positive economic growth than govern a country careening towards bankruptcy that would likely provoke a genuine revolt (well, yet another of many) by the people and could get them all killed. As such, I would think soldiers who actually want the dictatorship back, like Bozo does, are a minority, made up of only of the willfully ignorant or the deluded. Maybe I’m not cynical enough and the willfully ignorant are not a minority :man_shrugging:

Given all of that - I would say the odds of the generals giving an order to overthrow democracy post-election to install Bozo as president or dictator were always near zero. The risk was rather disrupting the electoral process, or sowing doubt on its results beforehand. If the order happened, I would expect the overwhelming majority of units to refuse. If any fighting among themselves happened, it would be on the scale of the “18 of the fort”, where a massive force of 29 rebels (cariocas count rebels as accurately as the Russians name/date their revolutions) attempted to overthrow the government, which ended predictably. Copacabana Fort revolt - Wikipedia

26

Small update: Bozo basically hasn’t left the house since his defeat, and is virtually silent (thank goodness) - no livestreaming, biker rallies, campaigning, or meetings in general. That’s far outside the norm for him, and seems to confirm that there are no plans from Bozo’s side for a coup or even really undermining the handover of power - for that to have any success at all, even just in creating more chaos, he’d have to use what little momentum he had from day 1. Bolsonaro cumpre semana recluso, sem motociata ou live - 04/11/2022 - Poder - Folha

That’s backed up by Bozo allies apparently already talking about specifically not supporting Bozo as a presidential candidate in 2026. Ostensibly (they say) they would see him like a right-wing FHC (Fernando Henrique Cardoso), who never ran for office after his term as president but whose political support/declarations hold some value. I can’t help but read it as the right wing figuring “screw this loser in particular”. Aliados defendem Bolsonaro fora das eleições de 2026 - 04/11/2022 - Mônica Bergamo - Folha

27

That is some excellent news.

Maybe the military told him what would happen if he tried something?

28

wolfpup posted this upthread…

I was expecting much more of a mess, and I’m very pleased that my expectations are not being met.

Still some time to go until Jan 1, but so far things have been promising.

29

Bolsonaro may be utterly ruthless, but unlike Trump, he appears at least smart enough to know when the game is over.

30

Mike Pillow is not happy about the Brazilian election. He’s looking into it so we don’t have to.

31

I think we can now definitively say it’s all over bar the whining. Bozo had demanded (long ahead of the elections) that the armed forces check the counting of the votes, and that was the last formal “out” to question the results of the election. Well, they’ve done it, and delivered their findings to the supreme electoral court; no irregularities found. Relatório de militares não aponta fraude nas eleições; TSE afirma que recebeu documento com "satisfação"
That means the chance of a formal military intervention in the election results is now officially zero.

In totally unrelated news, two of Bozo’s sons were spotted at the Italian embassy, and confirmed it was part of their applications for Italian citizenship. Flávio, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, affirms he’s still a senator and intends to serve his term and stand for re-election, and denies he intends to leave the country, which makes me think he’s absolutely on the way out of the country as soon as possible, as the truth is typically the exact opposite of what a Bozo says. Exclusivo: Flávio e Eduardo Bolsonaro vão a embaixada pedir cidadania italiana | Metrópoles

32

I worry about the precedent this sets, what if the military refuses to validate the next election?
Another shitty legacy from Bozo.

33

I’m actually not worried on this point. It’s my understanding that this was a request for this specific election due to specific (spurious) allegations of upcoming election fraud, and didn’t establish a new process to be followed for all future elections. Again, the constitution has a lot of specifics curtailing what the military is allowed to do within civilian administrations, specifically to avoid a repeat of the 1964 coup and dictatorship. Once we’re at the point where the military is officially questioning the validity of an election unasked, then the constitution is already being violated and the JAQing off itself is a coup attempt. Too much of a stretch for me short of very exceptional circumstances, which 1964 already arguably was.

34

I hope you are right.

35

Um.

36

Hopefully Toffe might have some input on this.

37

Oh, FFS. It was so nice to have him out of the news for so long - he’s been hiding at home for 20 days. The only recent news I saw was one of his allies claiming the reason he wasn’t appearing in public was that he had a skin infection and couldn’t wear pants.

I think this fits under the “all over bar the whining” I mentioned above. As some people were stressing during the Lula campaign, looking past specific policies or candidates’ individual flaws, what you have is a battle between those who are in favour of a democratic process, and those who are against it. This petition would seek to invalidate 59% of all votes. The electoral court (TSE) immediately rebutted it, stating that the petition would have to include first-round voting results as well, since the same machines are involved. They have 24 hours to amend the petition, but that runs into the messaging issue I mentioned upthread - if there was voting fraud, why were so many Bozo allies elected in the first round? It’s the TSE showing that the petition is patently ridiculous and that the petitioners are just whining about democracy, not that they have a case. The petition also appears to be only to invalidate 59% of the votes, not to e.g. have a new election, use other methods, etc. I can’t imagine that this case will go anywhere, because it’s so clear-cut - the PL is for denying democratic votes, while virtually everybody else (even other right-wingers) are not. I don’t see any news about non-nutjobs supporting the case.

In short, it’s an annoyance that Bozo’s in the news again, and no surprise that he’s jumping on Trump’s election fraud bandwagon, but I don’t believe it will go anywhere.

38

This doesn’t sound good.

Brazilian congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, has visited Florida since the Oct. 30 vote, meeting Trump at Mar-a-Lago and strategizing with other political allies by phone. He spoke with former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who was in Arizona assisting the campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, about the power of the pro-Bolsonaro protests and potential challenges to the Brazilian election results, Bannon said. He lunched in South Florida with former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller, now CEO of the social media company Gettr, and discussed online censorship and free speech, Miller said.

39

Well, that didn’t take long: The TSE has already shut down the election challenge as a “bad-faith” lawsuit, with a fine of 22.9 million reais (~US$4.3 million) on the petitioners. So that should be that, again apart from the whining. https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2022/Novembro/moraes-condena-coligacao-pelo-bem-do-brasil-por-litigancia-de-ma-fe-e-aplica-multa-de-r-22-9-milhoes

Alt-Q-right nepotist senator visits loser and convict, the latter of which advised the campaigns of loser Trump and loser Kari Lake, presumably for the purpose of campaign advice despite consistently losing, then lunched with different loser who now runs an insignificant media company? Sounds great to me. I hope it wasted a lot of time and money - any resources they spent talking each other up aren’t used on making Brazilian lives worse.

40

This is a relief to hear! Thank you for the update.