By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
Movements In Both Countries Deeply
Interconnected
On the evening of Jan.
8, U.S. President Joe Biden took to Twitter to condemn a violent mob's invasion
of government buildings. Hours after a crowd vandalized the National Congress,
Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in Brasília, the official @POTUS
account bashed the “assault on democracy and the peaceful
transfer of power in Brazil.”
It all felt like déjà
vu. Almost to the day, Brazil saw a remake of January 6, 2021, storming of the
U.S. Capitol, which sought to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s 2020
election victory. A day after Brazil’s insurrection, Biden called new Brazilian
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to convey his “unwavering support” for the country’s
democracy. The two decided to meet in Washington in February and are convening
on Friday.
Now, at the White
House, Biden and Lula must face the uncomfortable reality that the two
insurrections that sought to overturn their respective election victories are
part of the same plot. What’s more, Brazil’s iteration would never have
occurred had the United States not experienced what it did on Jan. 6, 2021.
U.S. social media companies’ reluctance fueled the two attacks to police
disinformation related to the election results—and Brazil’s was empowered by
the U.S. justice system’s failure so far to hold former U.S. President Donald
Trump to account. Though Biden was not involved personally in either riot, as
U.S. president, he has a unique responsibility to help Lula combat
anti-democratic forces in Brazil.
Trump’s Big
Lie—falsely claims that he won the 2020 U.S. presidential election and,
more generally, that recent U.S. elections have been riddled with fraud—did not
start after the 2020 election. Trump has promulgated the narrative since 2016.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted
illegally,” he tweeted just 19 days after being elected via the
Electoral College (but losing the popular vote).
Since the 2021 insurrection,
Trump’s claims have emboldened far-right politicians worldwide. In June of that
year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to undermine a vote that
gave power to the opposition by saying, “We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in
the history of the country.” His narrative included a conspiracy about a deep state and calling the
media a “propaganda machine enlisted in favor of the left.” That same month,
Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori promoted her Big Lie about election fraud. At the same
time, she delayed conceding to Pedro Castillo (who would later be ousted by
Peru’s Congress).
U.S. presidential
election and, more generally, that recent U.S. elections have been riddled with
fraud—did not start after the 2020 election. Trump has promulgated the
narrative since 2016. “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of
people who voted illegally,” he tweeted just 19 days after being elected via the
Electoral College (but losing the popular vote).
Since the 2021 insurrection,
Trump’s claims have emboldened far-right politicians worldwide. In June of that
year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to undermine a vote that
gave power to the opposition by saying, “We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in
the history of the country.” His narrative included a conspiracy about a deep state and calling the
media a “propaganda machine enlisted in favor of the left.” That same month,
Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori promoted her Big Lie about election fraud while she
delayed conceding to Pedro Castillo (who would later be ousted by
Peru’s Congress).
But nowhere was
Trump’s Big Lie replicated as eagerly as in Brazil. Former President Jair
Bolsonaro copied so many of Trump’s rhetorical tactics to undermine trust in
elections that they sounded almost like a Portuguese-language dubbing of the
U.S. president. After his inauguration in 2019, Bolsonaro claimed that he had won the election by a more
significant margin than he had in reality. And ahead of last October’s contest
against Lula, Bolsonaro’s administration promoted—and then pushed for a
behind-the-scenes investigation of—bogus claims of widespread fraud in Brazil’s
electronic voting system. Bolsonaro’s allies even made a last-minute
attempt to halt the
Oct. 30 runoff vote by claiming that Brazil’s electoral court was preventing
radio stations from airing the same number of ads for Lula’s and Bolsonaro’s
parties—a Brazilian version of Trump’s “Stop the Count.”
It’s no accident that
Brazil’s insurrection so closely mirrored the one in the United States. The
far-right movements in the two countries are deeply interconnected.
Ties between the
Bolsonaro family and Trump aides date back to 2018. That year, Eduardo
Bolsonaro—the former president’s third son and a member of Brazil’s Chamber of
Deputies—met with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and soon after became the South American representative of the Movement, a coalition of far-right extremists in Europe and
Latin America that Bannon had founded. In a September 2022 interview with BBC News Brazil, Bannon praised the
then-Brazilian president’s expertise in engaging his supporters through social
media and said both he and Eduardo have “charisma” that is lacking in U.S.
politics. He also acknowledged that he spent much of his time “talking
backstage” with the Bolsonaros during the 2022
Brazilian presidential campaign. Two of Bolsonaro’s other sons, Carlos and Flávio, are also deeply involved in the former
president’s political enterprise; Carlos manages his social media profiles.
Since Bannon and
Eduardo Bolsonaro met, Eduardo has spent a great deal of time in the United
States, meeting at least 80
times with members of
the U.S. far right. He was even in Washington before and after Jan. 6, 2021.
The grounds for his visit are still unclear; at the time, the Brazilian Embassy
in Washington said the foreign ministry was unaware of the trip. While in Washington in January 2021,
Eduardo met with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, as
well as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is reported to have suggested that Trump should declare
martial law to stay in power.
The elder Bolsonaro,
for his part, did not condemn the attempted U.S. insurrection, stating that
“there were people who voted three, four times, dead people who voted,” which
is false. He used Trump’s Big Lie to say Brazil needed paper
ballots in its elections; otherwise, “we [in Brazil] will have a problem worse
than the United States.”
After Bolsonaro’s
family and close allies helped spread Trump’s Big Lie, critical actors in the
“Stop the Steal” campaign also planted the seeds of mistrust in Brazil’s
electoral system.
In August 2021,
Eduardo was a keynote speaker at an event Lindell hosted in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota, where the businessman promised he would reveal proof of election fraud
in 2020. (His attempt to do so failed miserably.) On stage, Eduardo attacked Brazil’s electronic
voting system, saying, “You dial the number of your candidate and pray to God
that your vote will be correctly counted.” Sitting by his side, Bannon
then claimed that the 2022 Brazilian election would be “the
second most important in the world and the most important of all time in South
America. Bolsonaro will win unless it is stolen by, guess what, the machines.”
Bannon was among the
first to call on Bolsonaro not to concede to Lula last October; he did so on a Gettr livestream just hours after results showed
Bolsonaro’s defeat. Bolsonaro never conceded—and remained publicly silent for
44 hours after announcing the election results while his supporters violently
blocked roads and camped in front of military premises. He did not condemn them
and left the country for Florida two days before the end of his term.
As Lula and Biden
meet, Bolsonaro remains in the United States. And with the news that the
former Brazilian president recently applied for a six-month U.S. tourist visa, his presence is becoming more uncomfortable for the
U.S. political establishment. Several House Democrats have called for the Biden administration to order Bolsonaro
out of the country as more information surfaces about his role in a wider plot
to subvert Brazil’s election. While Brazilian authorities have so far said
there are no grounds to request Bolsonaro’s
extradition, recent
developments in ongoing investigations into the Jan. 8 attacks have placed
Bolsonaro at the heart of a plot to overturn last October’s election results.
Seeking to make a
comeback as the darling of the extreme right, Bolsonaro spoke at an event at a Trump golf course in Miami last
Friday hosted by the far-right organization Turning Point USA. Some of
Bolsonaro’s most prominent Brazilian supporters, such as YouTuber Allan dos
Santos and businessman Paulo Figueiredo—once a
business partner of
Trump in Rio de Janeiro—are also based in the United States, engaging in
Portuguese-language disinformation campaigns aimed at Brazilian audiences from
U.S. soil.
The Biden
administration has a responsibility to help fight ongoing threats to Brazil’s
democracy. Many people spreading disinformation in Brazil are based in the
United States—Bolsonaro included. They have also mostly spread their lies on
U.S.-run social media sites—platforms lacking oversight due to Washington’s
failure to pass substantive tech regulations. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, the continued failure to hold Trump legally accountable for the
U.S. Capitol riot sends the message that anyone can use the Big Lie as a valid
political strategy and get away with it.
The Biden
administration must take a decisive stance on these issues. U.S. and Brazilian
authorities should coordinate on Bolsonaro’s status and his supporters’ actions
in U.S. territory. One U.S. law makes it a crime to organize or help an attempt
to overthrow a government. But it is unclear whether this could apply to
Bolsonaro and his followers. Can repeating a false claim about the legitimacy
of an election be framed as an attempt to overthrow a government?
The White House
should also pressure U.S. social media companies to better moderate
foreign-language content and engage with foreign authorities on how best to curb
threats to democracy in other countries. Research shows that Silicon Valley
must properly combat election-related disinformation in non-English languages.
The bulk of Meta’s 2022 election-monitoring resources, for example, was geared
toward the U.S. midterms, despite the Meta-owned WhatsApp having been central
to the spread of election-related falsehoods in countries such as Brazil.
Finally, the U.S.
Justice Department’s investigations into Trump must move forward. While Biden
has rightly stayed away from the inquiry to avoid the suggestion of political
interference—and should continue to do so—their slow pace has cast doubt on
whether justice will be achieved at all, mainly as Trump campaigns for the 2024
U.S. presidential election amid growing calls to “move on.” To the outside world, the message is that the main
culprit of Jan. 6, 2021, is getting away with it—and political forces in Brazil
are observing.
The Brazilian justice
system, by contrast, has moved more swiftly in the wake of the Jan. 8 attacks
to combat anti-democratic forces. On the day of the invasion, Lula ordered
federal security services to intervene in Brasília. A few weeks later,
Lula fired the head of the army who resisted punishing a
military officer with close ties to Bolsonaro under investigation.
These steps
notwithstanding, a bilateral collaboration between Biden and Lula is essential
to protect democracies worldwide. Today, the two leaders’ response must be
strong and their message clear: We will not let the Big Lie become the new
normal. Democracy will win.
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