We shouldn’t jump to conclusions about Sunday’s events in Brazil, and that goes for everyone, not just the Liberal-Left — In response to Andrew Korybko for his article about the Bolsonarist Revolt last Sunday in Brazil.

35 min readJan 13, 2023

By: Daniel Albuquerque Abramo.

In memory of Luiz Alberto de Vianna Moniz Bandeira.

On Sunday, unusual events took place in Brasília, the capital of Brazil.

Naturally, analysts and intellectuals from different parts of the world were engaged in trying to explain this phenomenon. Among them was Andrew Korybko, a notorious North-American political analyst based in Russia, famous in Brazilian lands for being the author of the book “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”. Exactly about that this, this present text aims to be a commentary and a contextualization on Korybko’s analysis.

In the first place, it is important to stress that this text is not about disparaging the work of my professional colleague, whom I respect as an intellectual. Nor is this a chauvinistic attempt to control the outside narrative about what is happening in my country.

Since I talk about Russia, China, India, South Africa almost every day of my routine and, like Korybko in the case of Brazil, I am not present in these countries and do not have all the information available, it would be hypocritical to attack or do something like that to my colleague.

Evidently, it is natural that there are some disagreements between us in this present matter, since I represent the thinking of the anti-imperialist Brazilian radical left, and therefore it is natural that there are specific differences in the way we see the political phenomenon.

But more than that, in this particular case, I believe that there is an immense cultural barrier that prevents the full understanding of events, due to the loss of much relevant information.

Furthermore, even though speculative thinking often proves to be incorrect, it is undeniable that even in error we can find good points that are capable of leading us to some dreadful truths. Let’s start with some context.

Introduction:

Right at the beginning of Korybko’s text titled “Everyone Should Exercise Caution Before Rushing To Judgement On What Just Happened In Brazil.”, we come across the following highlighted excerpt representing a summary of what this article is about:

“Far from being a failed so-called “fascist and terrorist coup” attempt, it convincingly appears as though Sunday’s sequence of events was artificially manufactured via collusion between the American and Brazilian “deep states” in order to advance their shared ideological agendas.”

So, to reinforce the advice in the title of Mr.Korybko’s text, and to understand some nuances regarding the statement highlighted above, before we start to comment Mr Korybko’s text itself, let’s start a contextualization about some important layers of Brazilian life in its relatively recent military-history:

As we all know, Brazil is a relatively young country, it stopped being a colony and became independent exactly 200 years ago and only became a Republic in 1889. This last event occurred after an exotic process related to the external context, but which, in short:

Brought together the interests of the Brazilian Army – previously not so relevant as political actor, but with enormous prestige after the war of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay – and the interests of the oligarchies, regional landowners, largely revolted with the Emperor because of the end of slavery (although a minor part of them were abolitionist and republican ) without seeing more value in the monarch’s existence.

If the only function of the monarch in this context was to politically preservation of the disgusting institution of slavery for the surplus of the landowners, then the “weapons of the empire”, and who actually financed these “weapons”, the oligarchies, no longer needed to live in a Monarchy. It is necessary to point out that the Brazilian Army were more popular, mestizo and with many former slaves, and it was much less racist than the oligarchies that lived and received benefits from slavery.

From this alliance, which continues to exist to some extent until today, the Brazilian ruling class and the Brazilian Army “disputed projects” at the very beginning of the Brazilian Republic. Most of the time without going out of the scope of the initial alliance. It so happens that the exoticism of the construction of the Brazilian republic, like some other Latin American and third world republics, is that the Armed Forces never necessarily understood itself as a tool of bourgeois democracy, it doesn’t matter what kind of speech they choose to embrace.

— The most important point of this to summarize this debate in depth:

Due to the way in which the Brazilian Republic was founded as a continuation of the Imperial system in many ways (but without the figure of the monarch), due to the exotic nature of the figure of the old moderating power of the Monarch who was present in the Imperial institutionality and the absence of formalization of this power in the new system, it ended up generating a vacuum used by the military to consolidate itself since the beginning of the 20th century not only as part of the State as a mere tool of defense and repression as is the usual, but, instead, as political actors with their own agenda and their own project of Brazil.

Thinking more about this in Brazilian history:

Of course, this had positive and negative aspects during the 20th century. For example, in 1922 a series of young lieutenants rebelled for popular causes. In many cases allied with workers and unions who also defended an agenda for some time, many of them created communes. We even had Luis Carlos Prestes, the military, leading a march through the countryside that later inspired Mao Zedong “great march”.

This period of Brazilian history will end up flowing into what we call the “Revolution of the 30s”. A political movement which breaks with this system of façade republic represented by the First Brazilian Republic. Not only this, and tries for the first time in national life, from a syncretic fusion of agendas of the groups that composed it, to create an ideal of national-popular republic.

Already in this period, a split of interests between different groups that participated in the Revolution of 30 started to appear. Worst, the old oligarchies who were not totally killed from political life, although they lost a good part of their power in the new system, were still alive.
And again we had the military as one of the actors that tried to impose their power and conquer the hegemony of the revolutionary process. Many of them were former lieutenants, but also, part of the military structure itself that has not been completely changed.

During the 1930s, this caused a huge problem, because at the same time that Getúlio Vargas pragmatically negotiated with everyone, and even included socialists in his government, as he represented a kind of moderator between the interests of the oligarchies, the military, and the population. He postulated for a foreign policy of extreme neutrality in order to bargain for a better international position for Brazil and to industrialize the country. But a big part of the military were aligned with the Axis because they had relations with Krupps industries and a some of them were Integralists (the Brazilian weird version of fascism). The civil bureaucracy and workers’ movements were aligned with the Allies, some of them because of the USA, some others because of USSR.

After a series of complex events, in the beginning of the “Estado Novo” period, Getúlio suffers an attempt of an Integralist coup. It was an attempt to assault the official residence of the president with the intention of assassinating Vargas. This coup attempt, of course, was facilitated by several elements of the Armed Forces that left the president exposed and deliberately took hours to come to his aid. Many experts claim without any fear that such a coup attempt was entirely planned in the barracks of the Brazilian armed forces [1]. However, the Integralist coup attempt was a failure and this led Vargas to have hegemony in society to harshly repress the same Integralists.

Already in the 40s, after Brazilian ships were attacked by German submarines, the movement of students, workers, socialists, civil bureaucracy and civil society, deeply influenced Brazil to enter the Second World war against Nazi-fascism by sending the Brazilian Expeditionary Force. This is a key moment for us to understand what happened, and how the actors in yesterday’s history are very similar to the actors in recent years. Many of the lower ranks of the Brazilian military structure who fought in Italy were nationalists, socialists and other leftists. But the top was the same who previously showed “sympathy” for the Axis.

During that experience, top rank officials were deeply influenced by US military personnel. Upon returning to Brazil, they had ceased to be Axis sympathizers, and now, in the context of the Cold War, were allies and ideologically aligned with US strategic thinking for Latin America. Worse, from that point on, they started building a new military doctrine, aimed at preventing revolutions, applying revolutionary strategies in order to carry out a “counter-revolution”, as a protective farce. This is a fundamental point to understand, nowadays, who are the actors behind Bolsonarist propaganda.

And in fact, from that point on, in contact with the US military structures, Brazilian military aligned with this thought began to tutor the republic for a forced position of alignment with the US. We can cite as direct occurrences with the participation of the same military group, the coup suffered by Vargas in 1945, the events that ended in his suicide in 1954, the attempt to prevent the presidential ceremony of President JK in 1956, the attempt to prevent João Goulart from assuming the presidency of the republic in 1962, until the fateful military coup of 1964, which placed these “shadows” that already “indirectly governed in the name of the USA”, in the center of the power of a military dictatorship that would last 21 years.

Needless to say, one of the first acts of such dictatorship was an immense purge of the Armed Forces themselves, enshrining the ideological hegemony of the US-aligned group [2]. From this point on, Brazil went from being a country in which the Armed Forces believed they had the right to intervene in politics, depending on their correlation of internal forces, to a country in which the Armed Forces believed they had the right to intervene, now, always in favor of an ideology that they share with North American military personnel and their thinking about the role of Latin American countries during the Cold War. Needless to say, this “exchange of information and training” by the Brazilian military lasts until today and has not ceased to occur even after the military dictatorship [3].

From redemocratization to the present day:

The re-democratization, due to a series of international and internal factors, occurred “from top to bottom”, even with intense popular mobilization, still modulated in the way that the Military and its allies preferred. In the international context of the “beginning of the end of the Cold War”, Brazilian redemocratization took place in order to preserve the military and their alliance with the landowners, setting up a new civil political system, tutored to move towards a “liberal/conservative” pro-US position.

However, the military and the Brazilian ruling class and its international allies did not count on the strength of our working class, organized into two large left-wing parties, PDT and PT, and into partyless political currents and movements that are still very influential, such as Prestism and Maoism. The Brazilian left during this period managed to carry out huge mass protests, and even though it did not have real power, it managed to modulate and transform several elements in the foundation of the New Republic, especially its myth and its ideals. This is precisely the contradiction that resulted in the initial political struggle that the New Republic experienced in its birth.

The alliance between the Armed Forces, the Landowners, still existed, plus the Industrial Bourgeoisie. Such an alliance reached, at that moment in history, a very intense level of economic and political relations with the geopolitical West, especially among the “developed countries”. In the international context of the belief in the “Fukuyama’s End of history” and “A world without borders for capital”, financial capital became increasingly prevalent in the Brazilian political environment. Despite this, the political culture so well constructed and rooted in the population’s ideals since the 1930s revolution, to the point of mixing with the Brazilian national identity itself, led the left of the South American country to position itself strongly and emphatically against neoliberalism and its practical and immediate effects as privatizations.

Exactly for this reason, former president Collor was not able to implement an extreme and right-wing version of neoliberalism in Brazil. But the ideological confusion, added to the creation of the third way, – progressive-neoliberalism, social-liberalism (like in US Democrats), let’s call it what you prefer – caught the Brazilian left unprepared and disorganized. Although the radical left protested against Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s measures, the neoliberal credo, it is true, also took root in part of the Brazilian left, especially in cosmopolitan sectors of the middle class.

Even so, the classic Brazilian left continued to have a lot of power. Even, in a complex relationship of forces, where Lula signed a letter of commitment to the market and the Brazilian establishment [4], when he was elected in 2002, his most exalted base was unequivocally against the neoliberalism, in whatever its versions. The government, however, had to adhere to the same neoliberal framework as its predecessor, relegating its economic developmentalism to just a few very specifics parts of the Brazilian economy. We must ask ourselves, which “establishment” Lula had to salute, as like Galileo Galilei, in order to assume the presidency? Of course, we are talking about: Military, Landowners, and their internal and international allies, now with an intense presence of financial capital.

About the workers’ party and its version of progressist neoliberalism (social liberalism):

Although limited and following the constraints of the economic system implemented by its predecessors, the achievements of Worker’s Party in terms of obtaining a minimal national sovereignty were undeniable, like the participation in the founding of the BRICS and the discovery of the pre-salt oil fields, a great feat in engineering.

It is unfair not to recognize that, although capitulating and weak, the Workers’ Party has been, at that time, under fire, boos, campaigns, and attacks from all over the traditional media, stoked by the oligarchies and the military, since it took power. Although the author of this text is part of a radical left that has always pointed out the limits of social liberalism, it is impossible not to mention some of its peculiarities in Brazil, due to the very desire of the Brazilian working class, whether they like it or not, the electoral base of the project.

The Worker’s Party in power, as we can see in its history, always had this as its Achilles heel, always had varying degrees of relationship with the US, even if it was willing to build the BRICS. Obama said that Lula was “the guy”, and at the same time, his administration dealt a blow to Dilma Roussef and actively participated in the lawfare that wrongfully incarcerated Lula for misuse of purpose [5].

Even so, it is impossible not to recognize some important and distinct points, such as the participation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Celso Amorim, one of the greatest names in this role since the legendary Osvaldo Aranha, and the late San Tiago Dantas, who fought for the non-aligned movement. Former Minister Amorim is, recognized among all the nations fighting for a multipolar world, one of the most important names for us to reach the international inflection of tension between unipolarity and multipolarity that we see today, and will be a mastermind behind the construction of the Brazilian Foreign Policy after 2022, whether in office or not, we can be sure of that.

The start of a US “regime change” operation in Brazil and the period of intense psychological warfare against Brazilian people:

After the 2008 crisis, the alliance that controls power in Brazil found itself at an impasse. Progressist neoliberalism, which made concessions to social causes and kept the structure of labor legislation and the Brazilian electricity sector more or less intact, according to those in power and their international allies, should give way to new managers. This took place in a context in which, after the 2008 crisis, with accelerated growth in China, Western Europe and the political and dominant groups in the US would need to compensate for their inability and unproductiveness in the face of the Asian dragon exploring its notorious backyard, Latin America.

After a few years of what became known as the Pink Tide, coups and sinister political events popped up across the continent. Meanwhile, Brazil lived the hope of ascension, and had major events to host, the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, which led the Brazilian State to intensify its intelligence and surveillance activities against its own population. At the same time, some economic contradictions of progressist neoliberalism with its political base became visible.

One of the main concerns was the price and quality of public services. In June 2013, a series of protests broke out in Brazil. Initially, organic and based on the limits of neoliberalism [6].

Brazil saw the emergence of a sea of contradictions and agendas, and its dominant actors in politics, the Military, Landlords, and their political and economic allies in the central countries did not feel confident about the manager at the time, the Workers’ Party, in repressing such a wave of revolts. They saw this, however, as an opportunity to remove the representatives from power and drastically reform the Brazilian State according to the international context, expanding Brazil’s economic dependence on the Geopolitical West in such a way that an alignment with them was automatic.

Needless to say, the USA, in the Obama administration, with the effective participation of Biden, took an active part both in the ideological effort behind the demonstrations, both on the part of an evidently artificial Jacobin liberal left, and in the creation of a liberal/conservative axis in the Brazilian political system. That’s when the big conventional media, social networks, big internet players, started to participate and stimulate such demonstrations, now with a new social base, much broader, depoliticized and reacting to propaganda stimuli.

A process began, which was consolidated after 2016, of entry into operation in Brazil of foreign media, mostly from the USA and Europe, something that had never been allowed, in the name of the national monopoly of the means of telecommunications and journalism. “Social networks” were a central tool in this regard.

The demonstrations quickly acquired a reactionary/hedonist character and were appropriated as a stage for actors with a clear relationship with the US, as is the case of the “Movimento Brasil Livre”, which clearly replicates North American policy and has had shady relations there since its foundation [7]. Something previously seen in a very similar way, in the extreme right mass movements legitimizing the military dictatorship in 1964. One of the biggest names in the “Movimento Brasil Livre” at that time one of the faces of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, nowadays, is for example scandalously an interlocutor of the Japanese Embassy and the interests of Japanese political groups linked to the US in Brazilian congress.

It is also necessary to comment, the Lawfare carried out by former coup judge Sergio Moro, has explicit participation of the USA and its actors. As we can all remember, there was a scandal in which the US spied on Petrobras and President Dilma Roussef in 2013. Interestingly, an investigation was initiated by a judge who was entirely linked to the US and who used a method questionable, and obtains part of its information precisely from the USA [8].

It is scandalous that it is very likely in our faces that the trigger for “Operation Car Wash”, arose precisely from this act of espionage by the Obama/Biden administration against the Workers’ Party leader, Dilma Roussef, but foremost, against Brazilian sovereignty. It is important to note that Judge Sergio Moro, who is in Brazilian politics until today, and is currently a Senator of the Republic, is not an asset of “trumpism”, nor of the “Republican Party”, his relations extend to the North American Justice System, and the State Department, and began during the Obama/Biden administration.

Furthermore, it is important to remember that at a certain point The Supreme Federal Court began to act in an absolutely political way, leaving the constitution completely aside and relying on a logic of judicial populism, basing itself on the amount of public support that measures x or y would have. Evidently, the media played an important role in this mechanism.

Far from fruitless and stupid discussions between demophobes and demophiles, there was a truly revolutionary momentum in 2013, post-crisis in a vacuum of legitimacy by the economical limits of neoliberalism, but poorly taken advantage of by a disorganized youth and still poorly formed politically, which did not know how to take advantage of such a moment, and rejected by the Workers’ Party, which adhered to the position of guardian of the system rejected by the masses.

This revolutionary movement was better used by the great actors as a moment of counter-revolutionary inflection, as we have seen in history several times, and social-liberalism was neglected by its allies and guarantors because, after all, the Workers’ Party, even adapting to the system of the elites, has always been an intruder in the club of the riches. All these events culminated in the deposition of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and the arrest of former President Lula in 2018.

About the participation of the military in the propaganda war and psychological warfare:

After 20 years in silence, operating from the shadows, the hidden “Military Party” finally finds an opportunity to reinsert itself in political life and legitimize itself in the face of a scenario of political chaos in Brazilian society. From 2014 onwards, it was common to see on television shows and political analysis in news that Brazilian society did not feel well represented neither by parliament nor by the executive branch, but by the Armed Forces and the Federal Supreme Court. It should be noted that both actors maintained high degrees of relations with the North American state bureaucracy. As we will see later, both actors from the period of 2016 cooperate and clash countless times.

The reinsertion of the military into Brazilian political life after the crisis that began in 2013 was very well documented and analyzed by the Brazilian radical left. Especially about this, the book “Carta no Coturno”, by André Ortega and Pedro Marin, was released, analyzing the movements and shocks that reintroduced the hidden military party in the political life of the country of South America. Both were, by the way, also, at the time, columnists and founders of the magazine that informed the entire Brazilian radical left about the disastrous events that occurred in Ukraine from 2014 onwards, and there is an undeniable parallelism between the militarist phenomenon in Brazil and in Ukraine post 2014 [9].

Like in Ukraine — where a tenebrous group of national history, through revisionism, returns as false martyrs of an aggressive mass movement and prone to armed uprisings — a very specific ideology arose here, of those pro-axis Brazilian Military, and it’s unfolding in time, in the terrorist military far right, like in the years Brazilian military dictatorship.Brazil is a deeply nationalist country in terms of national identity, moreover, it has always had a relevant tradition of anti-system political actors, it is not by chance that the national-popular phenomenon of the 1930s had flourished.The thing is, these anti-system actors used to be from the nationalist, anti-imperialist left, not the extreme right, which has always been the establishment’s most aggressive watchdog.

In the new political system, since the hegemonic representative of the left while in government, the Workers’ Party, adhered to a vacillating and conciliatory position, it abdicated from capitalizing on anti-system rhetoric, on the contrary, it was prone to receive criticism from an anti-system rhetoric. This was a perfect opportunity for actors like the “Movimento Brasil Livre”, to sell their views as anti-system, but no actor knew how to take advantage of this space as well as the scammer propaganda apparatus of the Armed Forces and its internal economic allies.

Naturally, the Brazilian armed forces, in contact with the US armed forces, including in UN peacekeeping operations, had already come into contact with the assumptions of a “Regime Change” operation, and with the way to make a regime change commonly known as the “Color Revolution”. In an environment of intense debate, despite a certain technological gap, even the reservists debated on such topics, something that can be seen in public forums for debate between the category.

Armed with a personalized propaganda profile for the same people whose military dictatorship had educated between 1964 and 1985, with the support of the landlords, the armed forces managed to take advantage of this whole environment to create the unthinkable for the foolish Brazilian left. , a new political movement that exists with the sole purpose of legitimizing and calling for military intervention in politics. Here we need to remember what characterized the doctrine of the Brazilian armed forces, the notion of applying a counter-revolution, simulating it to be a revolution, to maintain order and suppress any change in the Status-Quo that represents the initial alliance of the Republic, between landlords and military, and their allies.

And another important information to understand this whole story is: even before “Bolsonarism” existed, there was a group called “Interventionists”, whose ultimate goal is to ask for “Military Intervention”, evidently, nostalgic people with very specific memories regarding the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Who operated the propaganda apparatus responsible for this? The entire Brazilian media establishment, and even left-wing politicians, were committed to saying, against all historical experience, “Our military has changed, now they are legalists!”. The resolution and elucidation of this issue was left for later.

The emergence of the bizarre political phenomenon called Jair Bolsonaro, is significantly after the creation of a militarist far right wing field in Brazil in the post-2013 period [10]. We can say that Jair Bolsonaro was the greatest representative of this trend in institutional politics, but that would not say much, since precisely, he ended up in this position only as a figurehead for figures that could not occupy power without breaking the constitution by force of law, the military.

Bolsonaro before this whole process was a low-ranking politician from the underworld of Rio de Janeiro. It grew because it was associated with the image of the Armed Forces, as was the intention, representing a much more aggressive fraction of the liberal/conservative field created by the North American operation in Brazilian politics, a new field that is proper and representative of the Armed Forces. In this new field, personalities like Olavo de Carvalho found space to become its organic intellectuals and carry out a cultural battle.

At this point we have something interesting that justifies the growth of Olavism in this political field, the Armed Forces deliberately chose the cosmopolitan left-liberal, with a practice similar to that of the Democratic Party or liberal left parties in western European countries, that has connections with a certain “progressist” part of the international financial capital, a.k.a., pink money, as a “scapegoat” and preferred enemy to attack while accumulating support and power, even though allying contingently with other liberal/conservative forces, they aim to dispute power and become hegemonic in Brazilian political life with an aggressive and artificial mass movement. It is important to understand that at a time when identity politics dominated the Brazilian political struggle, left and right, the military also created its own identity as vulgar criticism.

As we will see below, there are some key events to understand what happened on Sunday, January 8, 2023, in Brasília, which explain and clarify much more about what happened than the event that took place in the US Capitol. It is significant, however, before any more complex consideration, to understand that Brazil is a country that has been going through an intense propaganda war, cultural war, ideological war, and psychological war, directed at specific groups of our society, for about 10 years. The giant stress and immense social tension in this rare example where the Brazilian working class suffers one of the greatest targeted attacks in human history, with the aim of plundering all lucrative public goods and the rest of the national sovereignty of the Latin American country, with the consent of the military, landowners, financial capital and all its allies in the geopolitical West, should not be disregarded.

God is Dead — Who Can You Trust Now? About the 2016 coup and a new period of dispute for the hegemony of power in the post-coup period:

The 2016 coup against President Dilma Roussef was legitimized in the apparent binomial: media + artificial Mass Movements. But it would be a lie not to point out that the participation of the Armed Forces and the Federal Supreme Court was wide open in this sense.There was no more constitution, there was no more law, there was only force and power, and this was measured in the number of people that each actor managed to take to the streets, and how radicalized they were.

The 2016 coup brought Michel Temer to power, and with him an agenda that was much more friendly to the US and NATO, and terribly hostile towards Latin America, and economically opportunistic towards the BRICS. The 2016 coup was legitimized directly in the US by senators from the opposition party that most emphatically called for the coup, which went into a deep crisis after what happened in 2016. None of us, Brazilians or international policy analysts, can forget that bizarre orgy that constituted the vote on the impeachment of President Dilma Roussef. Already at that moment, all the actors involved in the coup in Brazil were already moving towards the battle for hegemony of power in the post-coup period.

After the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Michel Temer changed laws and norms to create an anti-constitution under the rubble of the 1988 constitution, very similar to what the Military Dictatorship did to give an air of legitimacy to its brutality. After that, everything until now has always been a question of power, moral legitimacy and hegemony in Brazilian society, expressed through mass movements.

The liberal conservative US puppet’s movement , “Movimento Brasil Livre”, lost much of its raison d’être, some of its cadres entered official politics from that period onwards, but it declined profoundly as a mass movement. The car wash followers, whose greatest symbolic representative was judge Sergio Moro, continued to exist and were a relevant political force, but as a mass movement, they ended up declining, like the US puppet’s liberal/conservative youth trend, and falling under the umbrella of the ideological trend created by the Armed Forces.

The “Jacobin” liberal left, along the lines of the US Democratic Party, which survives through a curious relationship with a very specific fraction of national and international financial capital, did not become the subversive agent that it could have become in a country with conservative governmental hegemony. Nor did this alien tendency to our political system manage to form its own political party. The biggest undertaking of this line, however, was to try to infiltrate already constituted political parties of the Brazilian left and shift their line of thought and ideology to a more friendly position to the continental interests of the US and its cosmovision of economic policy.

A very remarkable event in national politics was the election of a series of parliamentarians financed by billionaires and “electoral renewal foundations” financed by hidden funds, which, in fact, were supra-party associations whose interest was to subvert consolidated parties from the inside out [11]. A symbol of this was Tábata Amaral, a parliamentarian from one of these organizations, elected under a mild labor discourse in a traditional left-wing party, who voted in favor of all the appalling measures of the Temer government against Brazil and the Workers [12]. A classic case of internal sabotage, something that we will probably face a lot of in the current Lula administration.

Throughout this period, the traditional Brazilian left, nationalist, and anti-imperialist, protested and suffered from a wave of police repression never seen in recent Brazilian history [13]. During the Michel Temer government, the police apparatus and the Armed Forces were used against the population without the slightest consideration for hiding it. There is the famous Balta Nunes case, where the army intelligence agent was spying on leftist militants and arranging meetings via Tinder APP to infiltrate demonstrations and arrest militants who were protesting during the period of the Olympics, during the Temer administration [14].

Many people forget, but much of the Michel Temer government was marked by an intense use of the military. As, for example, on the occasion of the use of the Guarantee of Law and Order in the City of Rio de Janeiro. Under very questionable pretexts, such use of military force, by law itself, prevented any constitutional change from being voted on, and prevented Temer from losing some votes that could reverse his reforms at that time.
At the same time, the state’s law enforcement agencies were benevolent towards right-wing extremists.

Proof of this is that in 2016 there was an invasion, promoted by the same social base that committed the acts of vandalism on Sunday, January 8, 2023, in Brasília. They invaded the chamber of deputies, with the help of security, attacked some parliamentarians and took over the board of directors of the federal chamber. A lady participating in the savagery at the time said:

“Your security is bad. We will come back one day.” [15]

All this conspired for the mass movement of the radical left, which has been hegemonic in Brazilian streets throughout its history, to be overcome by the “green and yellow” group, carefully created by establishment forces as a “Brazilian response” to the problems and social chaos situation that the country has been going through since 2013, boosted by this same establishment. All of this allowed and legitimized by the Federal Supreme Court and by all the actors of power in the Republic, especially by the media.

However, there was a political figure in Brazil capable of scaring the Military and its mass movement. That person, and even we, his critics like the author of this text, have to admit it, was Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Not because Lula is radical, not because he is revolutionary, none of that. But, because they know that Lula is the biggest political phenomenon in Brazil’s recent history and the only politician currently able to emulate the traditional Brazilian politics of personalities and charisma, and bring millions of people to the streets in his defense if he wants to. Even with all this scenario described above, Lula continued to win Bolsonaro, and all the actors who, in fact, were under the cloth.

Precisely for this reason, Lula was unfairly arrested and removed from the game in 2018. Imperialism rejects Lula, even though it theatrically embraces him to take pictures. Because, even if Lula is a conciliator, his exacerbated international prestige can become a diplomatic problem, above all because it can provoke unity in the countries of Latin America, at a time when the US and Western Europe intended to plunder this region and still pose as good guys civilizing barbarians.

Without Lula in the running, with the Workers’ Party having chosen a weak candidate, Fernando Haddad, and with Ciro Gomes, from the PDT, having little room to grow, Bolsonaro appeared with force in those elections. Representing a coalition of all those movements under the umbrella of the militarist axis, it ended up winning the elections.
It is necessary to highlight an unprecedented use in the history of Brazil of illegal mass-directed personalized advertising, as well as the creation of a completely parallel axis of the Brazilian reality.

It is very unlikely that our Armed Forces have nothing to do with this. Likewise, it is also important to remember that the Armed Forces supervised all judicial votes regarding Lula’s arrest, giving their opinion, to effectively threaten the judiciary to comply with their wish. This kind of clash and arm wrestling has been the keynote of the military’s participation in politics since its reintroduction.

Jair Bolsonaro, a problem for some of its creators, a blessing to others:

The military, the landowners, the financial capital and corporations, and foreign powers were, deep down, planners of all that is. Still, they are the biggest candidates to remain in power if Lula didn’t solve this problem quickly.

They have always been in a condition that Sun Tzu would describe as the ideal in his books, one where defeat is precluded by a win-win condition. Likewise, they put a “scapegoat”, like Bolsonaro, they stay away and protect him. If he followed what they wanted, great, if he didn’t, they would press him, and they would appear as saviors. This happened with Bolsonaro, but has the same logic with the events of the Sunday events in Brasília, as some people in Brazilian media already claim, proudly, that the military has proven its loyalty in that date….

The biggest flaw of such a plan was forgetting that the puppet has a mind of its own, has few followers, and is insane. And once he realized his own insignificance, he tried to do anything crazy before leaving power, since chaos always interested him. Deep down, he wanted to grow an organic base that surpassed the influence of the Armed Forces themselves in the “green and yellow” mass movement, which happened on several occasions, but was not something easy. Bolsonaro knew he would take all the blame himself, as we see, materialize today, and he didn’t want to suffer the consequences.

The problem was that, while the military, landowners and international capital would like a representative like a “new Michel Temer”. Someone who could pass ultra-liberal economic reforms, align Brazil with the US, someone who would use force to repress protests if necessary, but maintaining a degree of theatrics that would not make it so blatant that Brazil was living in an exceptional period. An example of this was the accession of the ultra-liberal, linked to financial capital, Paulo Guedes as Bolsonaro’s economy minister. Evidently a point of contact between Bolsonaro and the market, as well as with the mainstream media, that has always praised the sociopath Guedes as a “genius of private initiative”.

That person wished by the Brazilian upper class, sadly for then, was never Jair Bolsonaro, a complete elephant in the glass room. However much they supported him, he was always insufficient and incompetent for the project of the Brazilian establishment. Bolsonaro, and especially the Olavist elements in the government, shocked these expectations. On the one hand, the armed forces managed to consolidate their return to public life, placing themselves as less absurd actors than Bolsonarismo and Olavismo, on the other hand, the exaggeration of the latter caused a split of strategies in the political bloc of the ruling class.

This became evident in Bolsonaro’s conduct of international politics, not because of his submission, as was this necessary to the realization of the neoliberal project, but because of his inability to go unnoticed, always making himself an easy target in the hands of bigger foxes, making oligarchies loose money and international influence.

Olavism and Bolsonarism chose a tacit alliance with Trumpism, even adhering to an aggressive posture against China. Other elements, mainly linked to financial capital, the media, and more moderate elements of Brazilian politics linked to the US, had a posture more linked to the Democratic Party in that period. The Supreme Court took an unequivocally anti-Trump stance, and our military, as usual, was willing to have good menial relations with the US, whoever it was, even if they had some friendliness for Trump’s rhetoric.

In a short time, many elements that supported Bolsonaro election, split with him and the military and even abandoned the government, as in the case of Sergio Moro. But it should be noted that the car wash ideology represented by Moro, as well as the US puppet movement “Movimento Brasil Livre”, had already been swallowed, cannibalized, by Bolsonarism and by the militarists as a mass movement. Their opposition to Bolsonaro and the military, albeit small at a certain point, only demonstrates how irrelevant they have become in the dispute for power.

With that, an intense division was already being drawn in the power bloc in Brazil and in its international allies. The pandemic, however, was a turning point in all of this. The management of the Bolsonaro government, with direct action by the military, was a key point so that on the one hand we had:

Armed Forces, Landowners, Mining Oligarchs, a fraction of the Brazilian ruling class that lives off the overexploitation of labor and the Brazilian soil, rivers, and forests, and the most predatory international capital, represented by the “green and yellow” mass movement hegemonized by its radical militarist wing.

And on the other side had:

A Federal Supreme Court very frightened by its lack of real powers, part of the “progressive” financial capital, national and international media outlets, oligarchs linked to international capital, cosmopolitan sectors of high level public administration, which were not represented by any mass movement.

However, even with all the repression, efforts to disarticulate, psychological warfare, propaganda warfare, revision of social security and labor legislation, anti-leftism and anti-communism, imprisonment of its greatest leaders, the Brazilian left and its “red” mass movement continued to be the only mass movement capable of defeat the “green and yellow” movement. And, of course, Lula, even in prison, continued to be a political animal of the greatest magnitude, even if he never ceased to be vacillating and conciliatory even while unjustly imprisoned.

This base had not been able to free Lula, but to tell the truth, they put pressure on the establishment and denounced the illegality of his arrest all the time. Even managing to gather evidence in a leakage, which proves the farce of Judge Sergio Moro and put the Federal Supreme Court in great embarrassment. The Brazilian left also played a major role during the pandemic, defending aid for families and other measures, something that was appropriated later by Bolsonaro, that was against all time.

Release the Kraken — Lula is free again:

This group of the Brazilian ruling class, clearly aligned in values and links with the US Democratic Party and a progressive establishment of international finance capital, realized that, in the absence of real power, i.e, weapons, and a mass movement to call of yours, would need to make a risky operation. Release Lula and lift him against their common opponents.

Of course, that would be embarrassing. The main elements of this group sustained the entire judicial farce that pursued and imprisoned Lula, as well as elements from the US, from the Democratic Party, participated and initiated this entire process of chaos and madness in Brazilian public life for about 10 years, always against the left. This bizarre coalition is exactly the broad front that elected Lula to the presidency of Brazil in 2022 against Bolsonaro. And, everyone knows, from north to south, it is prone to coup and betrayal against President Lula.

From Lula, that fraction of the ruling class only needed its prestige with the popular classes to defeat the other fraction of the ruling class that relied on the artificial mass movement, operated by the Armed Forces, which had Jair Bolsonaro as a major figure.

Finally, answering Mr Andrew Korybko:

After this contextualization, both of Brazilian military history and of Brazilian political life since 2013, it becomes simpler to analyze Mr. Andrew Korybko’s statements, highlighted at the beginning of this text. When Mr Korybko says that:

“Far from being a failed so-called “fascist and terrorist coup” attempt, it convincingly appears as though Sunday’s sequence of events was artificially manufactured via collusion between the American and Brazilian “deep states” in order to advance their shared ideological agendas.”

He is committing at least 3 mistakes due to lack of some information:

1: The use of the term “deep state” in this case is a rhetorical way out to explain something much more complex and can certainly lead us to a misinterpretation of the situation. As explained earlier, there are factions and groups in the Brazilian ruling class in a clear dispute, even though both major blocs have high degrees of relationship with the US.

The ruling class group that had to ally themselves with Lula, however, don’t have a mass movement to call their own and still hasn’t managed to steal any. It lives like a parasite, and, however much it may have an internal political agenda that shares some values with Biden’s US agenda, it still has to respond to the desires and stimuli of the radical left-wing electoral base and their mass movement.

2: There was a long-term coup attempt, being operated, the objective was not only take over Brasília, it was just a ruse. The aim was to demonstrate how weak the government is and to start a period of insurgency against it by aggressively raising the “green and yellow” mass movement against the government. If you join any militarist/Bolsonarist propaganda group, you will see that they propagate that they intend to “Ukranize” Brazil.

It is important to know that Lula did not choose his defense minister, he was imposed by the military. At some point during the crisis, the Armed Forces sent the Defense Minister with a suggestion that the government should apply a Guarantee of Law and Order. This would give effective power over the capital to the military and prematurely end Lula’s government.

3: The sequence of events seems to have been manufactured because they were fully facilitated by the military, one of its main operators, although not the only. With that, they finally get rid of Bolsonaro, who will take the whole blame alone, and, simultaneously, put the government against the wall, incite a mass movement against the government, while trying to sew a realignment with other sectors of the Brazilian ruling class and international allies that isolated then, and, at the same time, they now can start looking for a new representative more competent than Bolsonaro for their political and mass movement.

As much as there was intelligence information about what happened, and an entire plan to avoid any damage, the Security Forces refused to follow the government plan and to a certain extent supported the vandals. The same practice has previously been seen in police riots across Brazil. With that, they tried to show who has the real power in the Republic.

The ubiquitous comparison to the Capitol event in US, present in the analysis of the mainstream media and in the analysis of Mr Korybko itself, ellipses and eludes about the invasion of the Brazilian congress in 2016 by militarists and other events in the Brazilian reality that were a preparation for the type of operation that we observed on Sunday 01/08/2023. Such a comparison puts Bolsonaro and his relationship with Trump in evidence, and conveniently exempts and amnesty Brazilian Armed Forces.

Furthermore, the convergence between Biden and Lula, spoken by Mr Korybko, is questionable. As much as the scene game is done, neither of them forgot everything that happened in the past. Lula knows very well that all elements linked to the democrats and financial capital will try to betray him. We might think he’s anything but dumb and inexperienced.

Precisely for this reason, it is particularly uncomfortable for Lula to know that “the coup didn’t happen because the US didn’t want to”, while he knows very well that the real planners of the coup attempt will be here in Brazil, for the next 4 years. Because that implies knowing that if the US government changes its mind, such a coup would happen. This sounds, as Mr Korybko can see, much more like a threat than an offer of possible future alignment in internal level. Isn’t it?

Most of what we could believe to be such a convergence is more superficial than real, just look at the kind of ally Biden has striking in Latin America at the moment. The coup government in Peru is killing a lot of people, in the same way the coup government that raged in Bolivia for some time, with the consent of the US, was also brutal and violent. Evo Morales, recently beaten by the US, when he went to talk about what happened in Brasília, he was direct. He said he was sure it was something operated by the US, against Lula, to undermine Latin American unity.

Why that? Because even if there is a superficial convergence between Biden and Lula in a supportive fight against Trumpism and Bolsonarism in domestic politics, at the end of the day, Biden still wants, like any US leader, to recolonize Latin America. At the end of the day, with all the ideological spiel, who would help the Biden administration more to overthrow Maduro, Bolsonaro or Lula?

Mr. Korybko is correct in pointing out the great power accumulated by Alexandre de Moraes, but even so, he is only half right in his thoughts. Alexandre de Moraes is certainly using more power than he should or could. But this becomes more or less obvious as all this power was used for about 10 years against the left, and now it is used for a course correction, when the establishment realized that it would self-destruct. As it was explained in this text earlier, there has been no law since 2016. What shocks Brazilians is not the amount of power invested by Alexandre de Moraes, but against whom, for the first time, it is used: a correct target. Although, we all know. Yes, he will use all that power against us again as soon as he can.

In the meantime, while the military, landowners, international capital, the judiciary, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are reorganizing their interests in Brazil, an opportunity arises for Lula and the government. This possibility, was not considered by Mr. Korybko, but is the one pursued by the Brazilian left.

The possibility that Lula takes on the role of Alexandre de Moraes and the Supreme Court as the leader and the face of the public “anti-bolsonaro” movement, and use this against his internal political opponents, and do it legitimately. In recent days Lula has already made statements to the effect that he knows that the military participated and urging their punishment. Something like a Bonapartism executed in Brazilian history previously by Getúlio Vargas, precisely after the failed integralist coup of 1938, conceived, planned and organized by the military, and executed on a third-party basis by fascists.

If Lula rises to this position, with the support of (and pushed by) a solid mass movement, he will finally be able to start a purge in the Armed Forces. This would be fundamental to rescue Brazilian sovereignty. With that, Lula and the government would also have power to defuse the bomb gestated in the judiciary and in the Supreme Court, and could manage to pass his 4 years alive without suffering a coup d’état and without having to lower his head to the USA, even if the interest of the majority of those political actors who elected him is to betray Lula and take the power.

As we can see throughout the text, everything depends on how strong the mass movements in favor of Lula will be able to position themselves from now on and If the government will have the courage to make the popular reforms that Brazilian economy and society needs. We know that this is not Lula’s profile. But it is no longer a question of personal taste, but of survival.

Bibliography:

Moniz Bandeira — “Presença dos EUA no Brasil.”

Moniz Bandeira — “Trabalhismo e Socialismo no Brasil.”

Moniz Bandeira — “Desordem Mundial.”

Moniz Bandeira — “A Segunda Guerra Fria.”

Moniz Bandeira — “Formação do Império Americano.”

André Ortega e Pedro Marin — “Carta no Coturno.”

Journalistic Sources:
1:https://grabois.org.br/2018/07/23/a-rebeliao-integralista-de-1938-entrevista-com-marly-vianna/

2:https://memoriasdaditadura.org.br/militares-que-disseram-nao/

3:https://www.forte.jor.br/2019/02/13/comando-sul-southcom-dos-eua-tera-general-brasileiro/

4:https://www.infoescola.com/historia/carta-ao-povo-brasileiro/

5:https://www.conjur.com.br/2021-abr-10/jornal-frances-mostra-eua-usaram-moro-lava-jato