They arrived in crowded buses from all over Brazil, joining others camped outside army barracks before taking to the streets in protest.
Wearing shirts in the green and yellow of the country's flag, the crowd of thousands shouted "the time has come" as they marched on congress.
What unfolded next was an eerily familiar spectacle that has drawn comparisons to the January 6 attack on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
Protesters tore down security barricades that had been set up just a day prior along Brasilia's main boulevard, scaled the dome of a state building and set up camp on the roof.
They broke into the Supreme Court and the presidential palace, rifling through drawers, smashing windows, splintering furniture and destroying priceless artwork.
Acting like a "horde of zombies", they moved with one goal in mind: to protest Brazil's October election results, which delivered victory for the left's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
There were demands for military intervention to either restore former populist president Jair Bolsonaro to power or oust his rival from the top job.
But those calls fell on deaf ears.
Though it took hours —the capital's security forces face allegations of collusion with the crowd — the chaos inside the country's seat of power was eventually brought under control by riot police.
The Bolsonaristas were flushed out, detained and arrested, their actions condemned worldwide as an assault on democracy.
Officials have vowed to deliver justice, but several questions remain, including how protesters were able to break into the country's seat of power and run riot.
As investigations continue, Brazil's President has pointed the finger at "fascist fanatics" and one man who has been stoking the flames of rebellion for months.
Brazil's divisions laid bare
Jair Bolsonaro built his career off being a firebrand politician who defied political convention, riding a wave of far-right populism to clinch the top job in 2018.
His seven terms in congress were marked by divisiveness and offensive broadsides against women as well as Brazil's LGBTIQ, Black and Indigenous communities.
He railed against political correctness, expressed support for the use of torture, called for looser gun laws and built a platform based primarily on military policies.
Bolsonaro has long had an uneasy attitude toward democracy.
"Elections won't change anything in this country. It will only change on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn't do: killing 30,000," he said in a television interview in 1999.
But his anti-corruption message and outsider status resonated at a time when the world appeared to be shifting further to the right, earning him the moniker "Trump of the Tropics".
After launching his presidential campaign in 2018, he swiftly rose in popularity, receiving global attention after he was stabbed in the abdomen at a rally just a month before the election.
He survived and went on to win the vote, serving just one term before Brazilians kicked him out in October 2022, losing on 49.1 per cent to Lula's 50.9 per cent.
It was the first time since democracy was restored in Brazil in 1980 that an incumbent president had lost a re-election bid.
For Bolsonaro's longtime rival, it was the political comeback of a lifetime.
Lula, a lion of the Latin American left, helped found Brazil's Workers' Party in 1980, and ran for office three times before being elected in 2002 and serving two terms as president.
As leader, he was praised for transforming the debt-riddled nation into the world's eighth-largest economy, and pulling millions of people out of poverty through social welfare.
When he left office in 2010, after serving the maximum amount of time allowed under the country's constitution, he had an approval rating above 80 per cent.
Barack Obama called him "the most popular politician on earth," with his popularity helping to fuel the election of his protege Dilma Rousseff.
His hopes of a third term in 2018 were thrown into chaos when he was embroiled in a corruption crackdown known as Operation Car Wash — the same scandal that ultimately led to his successor's demise.
Lula was convicted of accepting $US1.2 million worth of bribes in the form of upgrades to his beachfront condo, in exchange for lucrative state contracts.
Sentenced to more than a decade in prison, the former leader was banned from running for office, putting an immediate halt to his campaign.
Despite Lula maintaining his innocence, several courts upheld the sentence, until it emerged in 2019 that Operation Car Wash had been tinged with its own stain of corruption.
The judge who decided Lula's original case, Sergio Moro, had conspired with the lead prosecutor to convict Lula and prevent him from running for office.
Brazil's Supreme Court threw out the charges and Lula walked free on his 580th day in prison.
In 2022, vindicated by his new-found freedom, Lula announced he would run against Bolsonaro, on an ambitious platform to fix the economy, end poverty, and save the Amazon.
While Lula was seen as a hero of the left, particularly popular among Brazil's poor and marginalised communities, hatred on the right had risen to astronomical levels.
How the seeds of insurrection were sown
With polls suggesting he would lose the 2022 election, Bolsonaro took a page out of the Trump playbook, casting doubt on the result before votes were even cast.
"I'll hand over the presidential sash to whoever wins the election cleanly. Not with fraud," he wrote on social media in July 2021.
Throughout his time in office, he repeatedly stated that Brazil's electronic voting system was vulnerable to attack, and that hackers had tried to steal the 2018 election from him — claims that were immediately refuted by election officials and fact-checking agencies.
He also frequently butted heads with the Supreme Court over its expanding powers, rallying thousands of his supporters to demonstrations calling for the impeachment or resignation of the chief justice.
The fight inspired a dedicated group of Bolsonaro's fans to stage highway blockades, causing intermittent traffic chaos and disrupting the economy until the president asked them to stand down.
By 2022, Bolsonaro had ramped up his rhetoric while his supporters targeted Lula rallies, throwing urine and excrement at the leftist candidate's followers and threatening violence.
A Workers' Party official was shot dead at his own birthday party in July, and in September, a Lula supporter was stabbed to death during a political argument with his colleague.
When it became clear that one of Bolsonaro's supporters was responsible for the shooting, he reposted a statement from 2018 "refusing support from those who practise violence against opponents" and asking these people "to change sides and support the left".
In the final weeks of the campaign, Lula reinforced his security detail with snipers, after identifying 'Bolsonarista' threats, while the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed concerns over continuing attacks against democratic institutions.
In the first vote on October 3, Lula led by about five percentage points, but narrowly missed the majority required to secure government in Brazil's two-race system.
When voters went back to the polls on October 30, Bolsonaro lost by about 2 million votes.
Bolsonaro's son Flávio declared his father had been "knifed for a second time", describing the poll as "the greatest election fraud ever seen".
The senior Bolsonaro fell silent. For 44 hours, he said nothing.
In a brief appearance on November 1, he did not concede defeat nor congratulate his opponent, telling reporters "our dreams are more alive than ever" and welcoming "peaceful protests".
His most ardent supporters demonstrated outside army bases around the country and tried to enter police headquarters, calling for a military coup to prevent Lula from taking office.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro's Liberal party challenged the results, submitting a 33-page complaint claiming votes from some machines should be "invalidated".
Election authorities dismissed the complaint and fined the party for "acting in bad faith", having failed to provide any supporting evidence.
However, conspiracy theories questioning the results and alleging wrongdoing continued to rapidly spread on social media.
On December 10, Bolsonaro stepped out to address the angry hordes, telling them:
"Who decides where I go are you. Who decides which way the armed forces go are you."
Tensions escalated, with police foiling an alleged bomb plot on Christmas Eve by a man who told them the outgoing president had inspired him to build an arsenal of guns and explosives.
Two days before Lula's inauguration, Bolsonaro delivered a teary message to his supporters before jetting off to Florida, denouncing the bomb plot as a "terrorist act" without justification.
By then it was too late.
On January 8, a week after Lula was sworn in, furious Bolsonaro supporters invaded the presidential palace, congress, and Supreme Court in a chilling re-creation of the January 6 insurrection.
Striking similarities between the Brazil assault and January 6
Guilherme Casarões, an international relations and comparative politics professor at the São Paulo School of Business, says the January 6 insurrection directly inspired what happened in Brasilia.
"The parallels between the two riots, almost exactly two years apart, are uncanny," he said.
"An enraged mob of supporters of the losing right-wing incumbent candidate at a presidential election push past security forces to take control of the centre of democracy."
Professor Casarões said it was "the natural outcome" of the past four years, during which Brazil served as "a laboratory for extremist ideas and tactics, most of which mimic and emulate the American far-right".
He noted several similarities between the two countries including alt-right conspiracy theorists particularly in mainstream media, evangelical Christianity, arguments for freedom of speech, and gun ownership.
Michele Prado, a researcher into Brazil's far-right movement, says inspiration drawn from America flowed down from the highest office.
"The very top of the Bolsonaro government has direct contact with figures of the American far-right such as [Steve] Bannon, Jason Miller and the Trump family," she said.
Bolsonaro has made no secret of his admiration of Donald Trump — and vice versa.
Before their first meeting as presidents in 2019, Bolsonaro had been singing Trump's praises, supporting the Mexican border wall and echoing the Make America Great Again catch-cry.
In return, Trump gave his Brazilian counterpart a warm reception at Mar-a-Lago, describing him as "a great leader", and reflecting that the diplomatic friendship was "probably stronger now than it's ever been".
"Jair Bolsonaro had followed the road map of Donald Trump closely. Their rhetoric was similar as they railed against common foes like political correctness and China," Professor Casarões said.
"Like Trump, Bolsonaro had repeatedly questioned the mechanics of how his country carried out elections."
Research group the Soufan Center noted Bolsonaro "emulated Trump" with election rigging claims and those narratives were dominant in the lead up to last year's poll.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, Bolsonaro claimed, "I have my sources of information that there really was a lot of fraud there", adding that he was "holding back" on recognising Joe Biden's victory.
Two years later, Trump endorsed Bolsonaro, telling the people of Brazil: "You have a great opportunity to re-elect a fantastic leader, a fantastic man, one of the great presidents of any country in the world."
In the same vein, followers of Trump and Bolsonaro appear to have been supportive of each other, with figures involved in the January 6 insurrection encouraging "patriots of Brazil" this week.
More than 70 progressive US and Brazilian politicians have condemned the collaboration between the Bolsonaro family and Trumpists in the US, which they say was aimed at overturning elections in both countries, the Guardian reports.
Some members of the January 6 committee have also engaged in early talks to cooperate with Brazilian politicians looking to investigate the storming of the capital.
The potential for such an attack had been well canvassed by many observers over a long period, but Professor Casarões said the timing was unexpected.
One man under scrutiny
The attack on Brazil's branches of power took place on a Sunday, during a recess of congress when government offices are usually empty.
It also occurred more than a week after Lula was sworn into office, with Bolsonaro out of the country and the new president already moved into the presidential palace.
"The danger period in Brazil was thought to be between when the election was held at the end of October and January 1, when power was due to be handed over," Professor Casarões said.
Given the strange timing, Professor Casarões believes the Brazilians who rioted were hell-bent on destruction, driven by a desire to demonstrate their power rather than achieve meaningful change.
And while Bolsonaro himself never personally called on his followers in the same way Trump did on January 6, observers say many of the Brazilians who stormed their democratic institutions did so in his name.
His responsibility "is total" says Ms Prado, who has accused the former president of peddling in "conspiracy theories" and of an "uninterrupted attack on democratic institutions".
"The conspiracy narrative of electoral fraud has been disseminated from Bolsonaro himself for many years, reinforcing people's distrust in the democratic process and in liberal democracy itself," she said.
The former president condemned his supporters' violent methods on January 8, but is yet to explicitly concede his election loss.
Bolsonaro has "never really been fond" of democracy, democratic institutions and checks and balances, Professor Casarões says.
"So these protesters felt that Bolsonaro was somehow authorising them to do what they ended up doing."
