Brazil's Bolsonaro preparing a coup attempt

By virtually every poll for the 2022 election, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro is losing by double-digits to former president Lula da Silva. What's more, the direction of the polling is going against Bolsonaro as well.
In the spirit of desperate times require desperate measures, Bolsonaro is pulling a Trumpian January 6.

Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro pushed through police barriers to advance towards Congress in Brasilia on Monday night, the eve of a day of planned demonstrations to back the far-right leader in his dispute with the judiciary.
Trucks honked their horns as hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters dressed in the green-and-yellow national colors cheered them through, videos posted on social media showed.
But they failed however to reach their target of surrounding the Supreme Court, which some demonstrators have planned to occupy in a protest modeled on the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

Bolsonaro supporters are very, very clear on what they want.
They aren't interested in winning people over to their side, or even in democracy. Their objective is power, pure and simple.

“The right thing to do is put them on the wall and fucking … shoot them,” the 60-year-old protester declared on Tuesday morning as thousands of the Brazilian president’s most loyal supporters gathered in the country’s capital to celebrate their leader.

“They are traitors. They are traitors to Brazil,” Meneses said of the supreme court justices and leftist senators he claimed deserved to meet the firing squad for daring to thwart Bolsonaro’s plans.

“If I was the president I would do that … and I would sleep very well after their deaths, you know what I mean?”
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“We will support him wherever he is … Even if we need to pick up arms and die for Brazil then we’ll do that,” said Luis Bonne, a 50-year-old civil servant who was also among the thousands who had turned out.

All around him, on the boulevard leading towards Brazil’s congress and supreme court, lorries and pickup trucks – driven into the area hours earlier after clashes with police – were draped with banners calling for an immediate Bolsonaro-led military takeover in Latin America’s largest democracy.

“President Bolsonaro make an intervention. Our armed forces are committed to democracy and our freedom,” read one green and yellow sign brandished by a group of middle-aged women who were making gun signs with their hands outside the finance ministry.

Across the esplanade outside the defence ministry, a banner draped from the back of a truck demanded the cleansing of Brazil’s democratic institutions: the supreme court, congress and supreme electoral court.
In case the message was not clear to foreign visitors, a young female activist had penned a placard in French. “Monsieur Le Président,” it read. “Utilisez L’Armée.”

At least in the United States the right-wing still gives lip-service to democracy. Not so in Brazil.
And speaking of the far-right wing in the United States, they are deeply involved with the Bolsonaro government.

Rep. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son and a former Federal Police officer, has served as an unofficial ambassador to Trump World in recent years and was in Washington, D.C.. meetings with Trump’s inner circle before and after the Capitol riot. Eduardo is also close with Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who is under investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police for his suspected role in attacks on the country’s electoral system.

Bolsonaro has already said he might reject the 2022 election results if he loses, like Trump.

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a real nice guy

In a 1999 TV interview, Bolsonaro, a member of Congress at the time, notoriously called for a civil war — with greater bloodletting than even the dictatorship era. “Through the vote, you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! Things will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do,” he said, going on to explicitly call for the killing of tens of thousands. “If some innocent people are going to die, fine. In any war, innocents die.”
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At least five federal investigations are closing in on Bolsonaro and his family, not to mention his political associates. A steady trickle of his allies have already been arrested for anti-democratic incitement, corruption, and more.
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CB's picture

Bolsonaro publicly stated he won't recognize the election if he loses. I noticed that his supporters are mainly white. This election may well have a lot of bloodshed if it doesn't work out for Bolsonaro.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFujzhwAdC0]

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the knives are out for Castillo

The regional character of Castillo’s cabinet, drawn heavily from outside Lima, is perhaps the real sticking point for the Peruvian political establishment. While there has been some deserved criticism that the government includes only two women, critics — in Lima especially — tellingly overlook the fact that Castillo’s cabinet represents a sea change in political representation: while 60 percent of the ministers from the seven previous government’s cabinets were born in Lima, Castillo has inverted that tendency, with nearly 70 percent of his ministers born outside the capital.

Meanwhile, the Peruvian press has been at pains — and ultimately failing — to brand the newly appointed cabinet as stocked with frenzied radicals bent on stoking social conflict. In the first days of his tenure, Prime Minister Bellido personally led a delegation to Chumbivilcas, Cusco, to act as mediator in a long-standing conflict between local Indigenous communities and the massive Las Bambas copper-mining project, located in neighboring Apurímac. A native of Cusco himself, Bellido was photographed riding a horse and establishing direct communication with the local peoples, with whom he spoke fluent Quechua — an unusual gesture coming from a Peruvian prime minister. Bellido managed to broker an impressive truce between the communities, showing that a cabinet perceived as prone to conflict and radicalism might be the opposite: more capable than any other government of intervening and resolving social tensions outside Peru’s capital.
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The opposition has responded in kind by calling for Castillo’s impeachment even before he assumed office. Having failed in that enterprise, their new goal was to either give a vote of no confidence to the cabinet or, that failing, subject every minister to individual congressional inquiry and effectively stall government appointments, as was done by the majority Fujimorista Congress in 2016–19.

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the OAS and the State Department.

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Only God

While an attempt to impeach the president over his handling of the Covid crisis was blocked by the speaker of the lower house of Congress, Mr Bolsonaro is portraying himself as under attack from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Last week, he told evangelical leaders - who are among his staunchest backers - that "I have three alternatives for my future: being arrested, killed or victory".

And he again took up that theme in his speech on independence day, saying that "only God will oust me".

He also used his speech to again cast doubts on Brazil's electronic voting system, telling his supporters he would not take part in an election "farce" in 2022.

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