These are the events and images often recalled when we talk about what is called, correctly, Brazil’s “military coup,” or “golpe militar.” Often forgotten, though, is that a huge part of Brazil’s political and economic elite supported the golpe at the time. Even before the First Institutional Act, the Congress declared the presidency “vacant” while Goulart was still in the country, in clear violation of the Constitution. Then, after forty of their colleagues had been expelled by the putschists, 361 of the remaining representatives voted to install Marshall Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco—who had been plotting with generals, the United States, and some politicians to remove a legitimate president—as leader of the country. The US ambassador in Rio was certain that Brazil could become “the China of the 1960s” (in other words, turn communist), and wanted Jango out. All the major Brazilian newspapers except one supported the coup. Hundreds of thousands of mostly well-heeled Brazilians, suffering from an economic recession and believing Goulart was too left-wing, had already made known their preference for his removal in a series of marches “of the Family with God for Liberty.” Many of them believed rumors, intentionally spread by conservatives, that it was actually the president who was planning his own, communist coup d’état.[...]
“The Brazilian dictatorship’s body count is relatively low when compared to Chile or Argentina, but it was abroad that it had the most devastating impact,” wrote Tanya Harmer, a historian at the London School of Economics, in a 2012 journal article. “Both through its example, its interference in other countries, and its support for counter-revolutionary coups.” Most notably, Brazil’s military dictatorship helped devise the infamous Operation Condor, an international network of terror and extermination across South America. Born of a fanatical anti-communism, the regimes under Condor murdered political opponents by the tens of thousands. [...]
Bolsonaro’s ideology is best understood as Operation Condor plus the Internet. Recent international reporting has compared him to Donald Trump or seized on his contempt for identity politics, pointing out his record of sexist, racist, and homophobic statements, but these characterizations are insufficient. What Bolsonaro offers is an explicit return to the values that underpinned Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. Bolsonaro did not need to be “red-pilled” to believe that political correctness had gone too far in today’s Brazil; he has been consistent in his views for a long time. [...]
Support for Bolsonaro is highest among rich white Brazilians (especially rich white Brazilian men) and Evangelical Christians, but it’s impossible to win 49 million votes without backing from lots of regular people, too. On Sunday, carwash operator Julio Cesar Alves, thirty-seven, explained why he voted for Bolsonaro, even though he had happily voted twice for Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, Rousseff’s predecessor as leader of the Workers’ Party.
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