Sônia Guajajara should have been making history last Tuesday afternoon, being sworn in as the head of Brazil’s first ministry for Indigenous peoples at a ceremony at the presidential palace in Brasília.
Instead, with that building wrecked last Sunday by thousands of far-right extremists, she sat in her office overlooking Brazil’s similarly ransacked congress, reflecting on the stunning attempt to overthrow one of the world’s biggest democracies.
“It was truly frightening … such insanity,” said the 48-year-old politician who hails from the Amazon and worked as a cleaner and nanny before becoming a leading Indigenous activist.
“They say they are patriots who are fighting for Brazil … [but] this is terrorism … and this was engineered by people with economic and political power,” Guajajara said, as her government battled to identify those behind the most serious outbreak of political violence since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.
In the days since the insurrection – which came just a week after the leftist veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office as president – the scale of the alleged plot to overthrow Brazil’s democracy has become clear.
Lula’s administration has accused hardcore supporters of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, of attempting to stage a coup by storming the presidency, congress and supreme court. They believe that was aimed at encouraging security forces to rise up, allowing Bolsonaro to return from the US – where he has been since the eve of Lula’s 1 January inauguration – to retake power.
On Thursday, federal police reportedly found a document in the wardrobe of Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, Anderson Torres, which allegedly outlined a plan for the former president to seize control of the supreme electoral court to overturn October’s election, in which Lula won by more than 2m votes.
“Brazilian democracy has been unquestionably tarnished and is at risk,” the commentator Mauro Paulino warned on the GloboNews television network.
On Friday night, the supreme court announced Bolsonaro would be investigated as part of the inquiry into the alleged attempt to topple the country’s new government. Bolsonaro’s lawyer denied wrongdoing, calling the former president a “defender of democracy”.
Torres, who was security chief in Brasília at the time of the attacks, was arrested on Saturday morning after flying back to Brazil from the US – where he was purportedly on holiday when the rebellion took place. The former justice minister, whose arrest was ordered for alleged acts of omission, has denied involvement, claiming he planned to shred a document that had been taken “out of context”.
“Deep down, I think we have so many good intentions that we didn’t believe something like this might happen,” said Celso Amorim, one of Lula’s closest aides, in his office in the presidential palace on Wednesday afternoon, with hundreds of troops and an armoured vehicle stationed outside to prevent a repeat invasion.
Amorim, who was Brazil’s foreign minister during Lula’s 2003-2010 administration, said he hoped the uprising had been nipped in the bud. “But I can’t rule out attempts, here and there, that will need to be prevented if possible, and repressed if necessary,” he said.
“We need to be really vigilant,” Amorim said. “We can’t just think it was something that happened and is over and that’s it.”
Many fear Brazil’s moment of danger is far from over given the support for Bolsonaro within the security apparatus, notably the armed forces and military police. Many believe such support partly explains the security failure that allowed extremists to run riot through Brazil’s capital.
Polls show an overwhelming majority oppose the turmoil. But 58 million voters backed Bolsonaro in the 2022 election, many of whom have embraced baseless social media claims that the vote was rigged in Lula’s favour.
In his first extended interview since taking office, Lula hinted at such nervousness, promising a “thorough screening” of those employed in the presidential palace because of suspicions that “hardcore Bolsonarista” staff and military officials had helped insurrectionists storm the building.
On Friday, Lula’s foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, told the Observer he believed the government now had “absolute control” over the situation, after making more than 1,800 arrests. “My impression is that the manner in which the government reacted will discourage any kind of new adventure because the punishments will be increasingly severe,” he said.
But details of last weekend’s rampage give a sense of the rightwing rage that have gripped parts of Brazilian society since Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 – and which will not disappear overnight.
Amorim said his office had emerged relatively unscathed when hundreds of extremists blitzed the building at about 3pm on Sunday, after surging through police lines. Lula’s official photographer and aide, Ricardo Stuckert, was less fortunate. His office was ransacked. Rioters ripped open computers and stole the camera Stuckert had used to document Lula’s 2022 campaign.
“They didn’t leave a thing,” said Stuckert who stayed in the palace until Monday to chronicle the destruction in a viral video. He remembered his shock on arriving back at the sacked palace with Lula at about 8pm on Sunday. Sitting in the palace by a masterpiece by the painter Di Cavalcanti, which had been slashed seven times, he said: “The feeling I have is that we are going to have to really fight so that our children and grandchildren are able to live in a country without violence.
“I think many of the people who came here to destroy the palace didn’t even know what they were doing to democracy,” he said. “It’s those who are behind all this that we have to worry about – the people who are bankrolling those people to do what they did.”
Nearly a week after the Bolsonarista mutiny, details of the identities of the alleged orchestrators are beginning to emerge. Speaking to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, the environment minister Marina Silva said part of the “enraged mob” hailed from the Amazon and included pro-Bolsonaro militants with links to illegal deforestation, mining, land-grabbing and fishing. Their anger was based on frustration that Bolsonaro’s era of “guaranteed impunity” was over, Silva said.
Other criminals hailed from south and southeastern states such as Paraná, Minas Gerais and São Paulo, where Bolsonaro also enjoys strong support.
Several pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers have been accused of inciting the violence on social media, and Brasília’s suspended pro-Bolsonaro governor, Ibaneis Rocha, has been questioned by federal police over his role in the security failure. Rocha has denied wrongdoing.
Guajajara will represent Brazil’s 307 Indigenous groups in her new job. “This is also an attack on our very presence in the government,” she said of Lula’s decision to bring Indigenous, black and female officials into his administration, to the frustration of Bolsonaro’s largely white, male movement. “It’s an attack on diversity – an attack on a democracy which has broadened, bringing us inside.”
Guajajara returned to the palace 24 hours after her cancelled swearing-in to take up her historic job. She took to the podium to address ministers and Indigenous leaders, including Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa.
“We are here today, for this ceremony of courage, to show that destroying the presidential palace, the supreme court and congress will not destroy our democracy,” said Guajajara, flanked by the black favela activist Anielle Franco, who was being sworn in as racial equality minister. “Never again will we allow our country to suffer a coup.”
The audience applauded as Guajajara spoke, but outside, the heart of Brazilian democracy had been flooded with fire engines, police cavalry and special forces amid fears over fresh violence.
“The coup attempt is not over,” said one government insider. “It is still very much on.”
