Middleboro Review 2: POLITICO NIGHTLY: The American politics of Brazil’s insurrection

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

POLITICO NIGHTLY: The American politics of Brazil’s insurrection

Supporters of Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro, look out from a shattered window after they stormed the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil. | Eraldo Peres/AP Photo

FLORIDA MAN — The White House announced today it would host Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), in Washington in February, one day after supporters of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed and ransacked government buildings in Brasilia, the nation’s capital.

Bolsonaro, who left Brazil two days before his term ended in a symbolic snub of new Brazilian President Lula and the democratic transfer of power, is reportedly under investigation in at least four criminal probes in his home country . Bolsonaro has been staying in Florida, where a Brazilian news organization reported that he had been admitted to an Orlando-area hospital because of abdominal pains, though that report could not immediately be confirmed.

Bolsonaro’s close relationship with former U.S. President Donald Trump , his attempts to cast doubt on Brazil’s election results and the similarities between the attack on the Brazilian seat of government and the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol have heightened the politics surrounding Sunday’s violence.

President Joe Biden faced calls from within his own party today to extradite Bolsonaro, who Lula blamed for “encouraging” the rioters while arguing the “fascist fanatics” and those who funded them should be punished.

To make sense of why Bolsonaro is still in Florida, what his ties are to U.S. politics and the parallels between Jan. 6 in Washington and Jan. 8 in Brasília, Nightly spoke with Bruna Santos, a senior advisor at the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center. This conversation has been edited.

Bolsonaro reportedly has been staying in Orlando, Florida, since the final days of his presidency. What is the significance of his visit?

There are a couple of ways to look at Bolsonaro’s time in the American state of Florida. On the one hand, this has been a common meeting ground for Bolsonaro in his former visits with American far-right leaders, like Donald Trump who he met with back in March of 2020. In some ways, it’s only natural, considering Bolsonaro faces legal questions over his abuse of power, and was looking for an escape.

But it’s also important to recognize that the Brazilian public can be very in tune with the broader state of Florida politics. For instance, there are a number of Brazilians who migrated there since the 1990s, many of whom are now middle to upper class, and had to escape very real threats of violence. Both far-right Americans and a portion of Brazilians are really still drawn to his perspectives. He has developed something of a network there of supporters. His rages against woke culture, progressivism and totalitarianism can find very receptive ears.

How close are the ties between Bolsonaro and Trump-world? In what ways have the two learned from each other?

Investigations conducted in Brazil show the relationship between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump runs deep. Bolsonaro and his family have spent significant amounts of time in the United States in an effort to build alliances with far-right Americans. For instance, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Jair, met with Steven Bannon in 2018 as Eduardo was making a name for himself in Brazil’s far-right Social Liberal Party. Since that point, the two have met almost 80 times, according to certain reports, which has very real electoral impacts.

Certain social media hashtags and general misinformation that spiked during the lead up to the Brazilian election and the attack on the Capitol yesterday, can also be traced back to the U.S. Trump advisors including Bannon, who has helped popularize election misinformation, have played a role in the events that took place. Networks of the international far-right currently build off of each other.

What role did misinformation play in the insurrection? What were some of the warning signs prior to Jan. 8?

Bolsonaro and his allies have planted seeds for an insurrection since before the start of his presidential campaign. He has long made false claims about shadowy forces in Brazil manipulating election results. In 2018, for instance, he said hackers unsuccessfully tried to steal the election from him. Now, those same sorts of claims have added weight to them, given his power and connections with Brazil’s Congress as well as conservative pundits even with him on his exit from office. In the weeks leading up to the election, we saw these same types of claims about election security really pick up steam on social media, especially on Telegram and WhatsApp. It’s a similar pattern we can see in the U.S., where far-right figures with massive online audiences are really adept at sowing this kind of chaos.

How closely does what happened in Brazil resemble the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol in the United States?

In a very similar way that the January 6th riots broke out, we in Brazil woke up to a country under attack. The invasion of Brazil’s Congress was clearly an expression of outrage from Bolsonaro supporters, who were baselessly alleging electoral fraud. In terms of the response, we see a very similar comparison to what happened in Brazil and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

But when we break it down, there are certainly differences. Keep in mind that there was no one working in Brasilia and all the time limits for the election passed. The vote certification, the inauguration and the formal declaration of results had already taken place at the time of the riot. What’s positive about that is it limited some of the potential of violence and death like we saw in the U.S., but it also says something broader about political institutions. The timing of the riot shows the intentions of Bolsonaro’s supporters as creating chaos, maybe for the purposes of instituting a military coup, rather than changing the results of the election. In that way, the attacks against the political institutions of Brazil could be considered even more profound than that of the U.S.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Contact tonight’s author at ahawkins@politico.com or on Twitter at @_AriHawkins .

WHAT'D I MISS?

— Special grand jury completes Trump investigation: The Atlanta-area special grand jury investigating efforts by Trump to overturn the 2020 election has concluded its investigation, according to the state judge overseeing the probe. The special grand jury is expected to make a charging recommendation related to Trump and other targets, about whether their efforts to overturn the 2020 election violated state law. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis must then make the ultimate charging decision after presenting the panel’s findings to a regular grand jury.

— Schumer taps Peters again as Senate campaign chief in hopes of 2022 repeat: Michigan Sen. Gary Peters will once again lead his caucus’ campaign arm , according to two people familiar with the matter and confirmed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The second-term senator successfully defended Democrats’ majority last cycle under difficult circumstances, with the party even picking up one more seat in the chamber. Still, Peters had initially turned down entreaties to do the job again, hoping to get a breather from the exhausting role.

— Federal judge temporarily blocks portions of New Jersey’s new gun law: A federal judge today temporarily blocked part of a newly-enacted New Jersey law that prohibits guns from being carried in certain parts of the state. U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb issued a temporary restraining order for a section of the law that specifically bans guns from being carried in public libraries or museums, bars or restaurants that serve alcohol and entertainment facilities. One catch-all provision barring guns from being carried on private property where the owner did not explicitly grant permission was also blocked, as was another section that prohibits guns from being carried in vehicles unless they are unloaded and stored in a closed area.

AROUND THE WORLD

Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group. | Pool photo by Sergei Ilnitsky

EXPANDING OPERATIONS — Top U.S. officials are increasingly tracking the movements and efforts of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military group, outside of Ukraine as Moscow continues to use the organization to launch influence operations in Africa and Europe , writes Erin Banco.

Last month the Biden administration downgraded classified intelligence saying Russia is relying on the Wagner Group, owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, in Ukraine to recruit prisoners and launch offensives in the city of Bakhmut.

But U.S. officials are also gathering intelligence related to the group’s activities in countries such as the Central African Republic, Mali and Serbia, according to cables obtained by POLITICO, where Russia is using Wagner to fight anti-Putin sentiment and defend government mining interests with troops and weapons.

The recent statements from American officials underscore the degree to which the administration is concerned about Russia’s reliance on the group and Wagner’s ability to shape events in countries where the U.S. and its allies hold business and diplomatic relationships.

Prigozhin and Wagner have been under U.S. sanctions for years. But the U.S. has recently taken additional steps to try to control Wagner’s access to weapons. At the end of December, the Biden administration implemented additional export controls on Wagner, making it more difficult to access any equipment with U.S. technology.

CLOSED CORRIDOR — For the past month, the so-called Lachin corridor that links Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia has been closed off , leaving as many as 100,000 people living there under effective blockade, with supplies of food, medicines and other essentials running low, writes Gabriel Gavin .

“Over the last two days, I’ve barely been able to find anything to eat in the shops,” said Marut Vanyan, a 39-year-old blogger living in the region’s de facto capital, Stepanakert. “First it was vegetables and fresh fruit that disappeared. Now, there’s only alcohol left on the shelves and not much else. In the mornings, some milk and yogurt comes in from local farms, but it goes very fast,” he told POLITICO.

This isn’t the first conflict to play out over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of the South Caucasus long mired in an ethnic and territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the 1990s as the USSR collapsed, Armenian forces moved to take control of areas inhabited by ethnic Armenians in the neighboring Soviet Republic, fighting bloody battles with Azerbaijani troops over land that both sides consider their ancestral soil.

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris who lived alongside them were displaced or killed, and the region was governed for nearly 30 years as the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh, sealed off behind defensive lines and accessible through only one mountain road from Armenia.

That all changed in 2020, when Azerbaijani tanks and soldiers rolled across the mine-strewn frontier, taking back swathes of territory and leaving the Karabakh Armenians in control of only Stepanakert along with some surrounding towns and villages.

A Kremlin-brokered cease-fire saw 1,500 Russian peacekeepers deployed to act as a buffer and oversee the Lachin corridor, now a vital lifeline for the Karabakh Armenians flanked on both sides by Azerbaijani-held positions.

But now, it seems the Russian peacekeepers are unable or unwilling to keep the corridor open. On Dec. 12, a group of self-described Azerbaijani environmental protesters, most with no apparent record of eco-activism, pushed past the wire fencing and set up camp on the highway as Moscow’s military contingent watched on.

NIGHTLY NUMBER

Over 7,000

The number of nurses who went on strike in New York City today , after their union failed to secure new contract agreements demanding increased staffing levels at Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai Hospital. The strike is one of the largest nurses strikes in U.S. history, and follows strikes last year from nurses in Minnesota, California and Hawaii.

RADAR SWEEP

VETERINARY CIVIL WAR — We often associate veterinarians with those caring for household pets such as dogs or cats, but veterinary medicine often goes hand in hand with the meat production industry, Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova reports. Animal activists have been protesting the American Veterinary Medical Association, which represents the majority of the country’s 121,000 veterinarians, for their “method of mass culling methods on animal farms.” Known as ventilation shutdown plus, or VSD+, Bolotnikova describes the practice as “sealing off the animals’ housing and turning up the heat to lethal temperatures so that they die of heatstroke.” Despite being an AVMA policy, many lawmakers and activists have demanded an end to its usage. Bolotnikova explores the AVMA’s close involvement with the poultry industry through the history of veterinary medicine in the United States and how industry activists who oppose the practice often phase career-ending consequences.

PARTING WORDS

U.S. President Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden, President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his wife Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller pose during a welcome ceremony as part of the '2023 North American Leaders' Summit in Mexico City, Mexico. | Hector Vivas/Getty Images

HEADED SOUTH — Joe Biden has no shortage of topics to tackle in his first presidential trip to Mexico , write Myah Ward and Jonathan Lemire .

There’s the major shift in border policy that came just days before the trip. There’s the arrest of an alleged drug trafficker in Mexico long sought by U.S. authorities. And there’s the border itself, which Biden visited for the first time as president when he made a stop in El Paso, Texas, on Sunday evening.

All that casts a shadow over the president, who arrived in Mexico City hours after the El Paso swing. Biden’s schedule at the North American Leaders’ Summit is packed: One-on-one discussions, trilateral meetings, working lunches, dinners and, of course, photo opportunities.

Biden will be the first U.S. president to visit Mexico since Barack Obama in 2014. For decades, presidents traditionally made their first overseas trip to either Mexico or Canada as a sign of solidarity among the trio of leaders. Often, the “Three Amigos” would pledge to be a (mostly) unified North American front. But that informal tradition ended in 2017 when President Donald Trump opted to make Saudi Arabia his first international destination. And then, with the globe in the grasp of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden delayed his first foreign trip for nearly five months before traveling to the United Kingdom to meet with G-7 leaders in June 2021.

Competitiveness and trade might be the most important issues on the table, said Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s former border czar and an ambassador to Mexico under Obama. Biden and Trudeau are headed to Mexico during a time of increased trade frictions between the three North American trading partners in the area of autos, energy and agriculture.

Both Canada and Mexico have accused the United States of adopting an overly stringent interpretation of the automotive trade rules in the two-year-old USMCA agreement, making it harder for cars produced in the two countries to qualify for U.S. duty-free treatment.

A dispute settlement panel is expected to release a decision in favor of Canada and Mexico in the days following the summit, raising concerns over whether the Biden administration would drop its strict interpretation to comply with the ruling. If not, it could face Canadian and Mexican retaliation in the year ahead.