The scenes of the invasion of the Presidential Palace of Planalto, the Supreme Court and the seat of Congress, on January 8 in Brasília (Brazil), seemed unreal. Convinced that Lula had stolen the presidential election through massive electoral fraud, hundreds of supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent president, ransacked the offices of key democratic institutions. Most applauded the soldiers dispatched to the scene, convinced that they were going to take power in order to put an end to the chaos they had just created. But it was sometimes handcuffed that the rioters were evacuated, looking incredulous. Since then, about forty of them have been charged.
If this break with reality may seem extravaganteven incomprehensible seen from abroad, the situation reveals the undermining work undertaken by the far right for years, taking advantage of the conspiracy theories which proliferate on social networks by creating “echo chambers”, explains Kenneth Rochel de Camargo, professor at the Institute of Social Medicine of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, who does not exclude that the situation will degenerate in the future.
L’Express: Was the invasion of Brasília the consequence of “electoral conspiracy” and where does this theory come from?
Camargo’s Kenneth Rochel: From the start of the presidential campaign, Jair Bolsonaro repeated almost every day that it was easy to manipulate the electoral mechanism. And when Lula won the election [50,9 % contre 49,1 %, NDLR], his advisers claimed that the latter had been stolen through fraud. There is obviously no evidence to support this theory, nor is there any evidence that Lula is a communist and is going to ban religion in Brazil.
But these theories have given rise, among some Bolsonarists, to the project of plunging the country into chaos so that the army takes power. This idea is based on a completely erroneous interpretation of article 142 of our Constitution, which would allow, according to them, to give full powers to the military in the event of a crisis. The first stage of this project took place immediately after the election, with the blocking of the country’s main roads. Then Bolsonaro supporters camped outside military barracks for weeks, crying out for help. Eventually, they invaded the institutions of Brasília.
How could such a climate of mistrust develop?
Brazilian classical political parties have been eroding for years. The causes are multiple, but among them are the six large conservative Brazilian groups that control a large part of the media. Each has television channels, radio stations, press titles and websites. They have a great influence on public opinion. However, for years they have carried out a very critical campaign against the left, taking advantage of its mistakes – such as inflation -, the dismissal of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 or the imprisonment of Lula in 2018. Dilma Roussef was accused of falsified public accounts, but the tribunal responsible for judging their legality recently approved them. As for Lula, the Supreme Court reversed its judgment in 2020, after finding that the judge in charge of the investigation, Sérgio Moro, was biased and that the accusations were false, which the UN human rights committee has confirmed. But their reputation remains tarnished.
Be that as it may, these various events have propagated great mistrust in the population, and in particular the idea that all politicians are corrupt. The conservatives probably did not expect it, but it gave space to the extreme right of Jair Bolsonaro, who moreover imposed himself by presenting himself as an “outsider”, when he was an MP for thirty years.
His election in 2018 changed a lot of things. Many controversial people have gained influence. Judge Sérgio Moro, for example, became Minister of Justice (and is now a senator from the conservative state of Paraná). And a person like Olavo de Carvalho [décédé en 2022, NDLR]long relegated to the status of a caricatural thinker of the extreme right and Brazilian neoconservatism, has become the “philosopher of Bolsonaro” and even recommended him the Ministers of Foreign Affairs (Ernest Araújo) and Education (Ricardo Vélez Rodriguez) . His extremist ideas – a rigorous Catholicism that does not recognize the Second Vatican Council, a medievalism based on the rejection of everything modern, including democracy, and all sorts of conspiracy and antivax theories – disseminated in endless courses on YouTube -, are have become very popular. All of this has created fertile ground for conspiracy theories, theories of which have spread massively on the Internet, especially via WhatsApp.
Why WhatsApp in particular?
Here, the telephone plans are too expensive for a large part of the population. But some operators offer free access, which has made the application very popular. Politicians, and in particular the extreme right, have also invested it. However, it is also by WhatsApp that many conspiracy theories are exchanged.
How did the far right exploit this situation?
You are probably already familiar with “filter bubbles”, a phenomenon that is caused by social media platforms whose algorithms present us with content that corresponds to our profile and our history in priority – which we have already “liked ” or watched -, and which limits our exposure to other information.
But there are two other mechanisms, particularly at work in the spread of conspiracy theories, called “epistemic bubble” and “echo chamber”. They are described in particular in a scientific study, published in Cambridge University Press in 2018which explains that “epistemic bubbles” are social structures in which other relevant voices have been excluded, sometimes “by chance” [parce que des utilisateurs ont été bloqués, que des personnes ont quitté la conversation, ou parce que l’utilisateur s’abonne uniquement aux médias confirmant ses croyances. Ces bulles se créent plus facilement quand l’utilisateur n’a pas accès à un large éventail d’informations, comme sur WhatsApp, NDLR]. Echo chambers are social structures where other voices are actively excluded, because users systematically discredit external sources of information that contradict them. And that’s exactly what the far right did on WhatsApp.
Other studies show that people who already believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to be exposed to and believe in other similar theories. It is easy to manipulate them by telling them that other sources – such as the press or health and political authorities – are not reliable. What the extreme right does not hesitate to do. For example, she claims today that the people who caused damage during the invasion of the presidential palace are undercover agents. And some believe it. Once extreme beliefs develop, they are very difficult to fight against.
Have you drawn up a composite portrait of the rioters?
It’s hard to say, because the profiles are varied. But there is one that comes up often, which we jokingly call “the WhatsApp uncle or aunt”. He is an idle, middle-aged man or woman with profound political ignorance, but solid convictions in various conspiracy theories and convinced that the State and the Church are threatened and that he must defend them.
Religion is very present in Brazil, did it play a role in these events?
It should be remembered that the military seized power in Brazil from 1964 to 1986. Originally, the Brazilian Catholic Church supported this coup. Then she denounced the torture and the disappearances. It created the Basic Ecclesial Communities, which are partly at the origin of the Workers’ Party [dont Lula est issu, NDLR], in order to combat this situation. Later, Pope John Paul II discredited them, fearing that they would be exploited by the communists.
Many Brazilian intellectuals believe that this has created a breath of fresh air for fundamentalist and conservative churches, some of which are linked to the United States. Today, the neo-Pentecostalism movement, which is a current of evangelical Christianity, has become very important. The Worldwide Church of the Kingdom of God, which is one of the six major groups I mentioned earlier, has a large media empire and provides considerable support to the extreme right.
Can we fear a return to power of the military?
The Brazilian army has an interventionist tradition in politics. But for the moment, I do not believe that the risk of a coup d’etat is very great, in particular because the United States is firmly opposed to it. But all the coups that have taken place in Latin America have been with the support of the United States.
Still, the events in Brasília will leave their mark. And Jair Bolsonaro retains support among the military. Even though he was discharged from the army in 1988 after participating in a scheme to detonate low-power bombs in barracks toilets in order to obtain salary increases, he still appeals to the nostalgic radical fringe of the dictatorship.