Inside a pro-Bolsonaro putschist camp

For locals, Brasília has only two seasons: one when you wish it would rain, and another when you’d do anything to make the rain stop. Between March and September, Brasília goes through a desert-like dry season, sometimes enduring over 100 days without rain. But, as they say, when it rains, it pours.

On Thursday, as Brazil debuted in the 2022 World Cup with a win against Serbia, the capital city saw one of these biblical rainstorms. 

A woman, standing in front of the Army headquarters, wearing a simple raincoat and holding a Brazil flag, steadfastly tried to resist the deluge. Behind her sat a large campsite, filled with thousands of people and tents — a protest against the October presidential election that saw the defeat of current far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

Underneath the tarpaulin, other people dressed in yellow and green took pictures and praised the soaked woman’s courage. When the rain stopped, however, she abandoned her vigil in front of the military headquarters. Her courage, it seemed, was being staged for social media.

Though originally much smaller, the protest camp was built on October 31, the day after the election runoff which saw Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva win 50.9 percent of the votes and get a third non-consecutive spell as president. 

The hardcore pro-Bolsonaro protest is not one of dissatisfaction with the result. It is, in fact, wholly anti-democratic. Their demands involve calling upon the Armed Forces to launch a coup, canceling the election’s outcome (which they claim was rigged), and keeping Mr. Bolsonaro in office.

They offer no concrete evidence to back up their fraud claims, relying solely on poorly-constructed conspiracy theories. Some of these inaccurate reports don’t even try hard to appear true, with one instance involving former pornographic actress Mia Khalifa and pop star Lady Gaga as members of the International Court of Justice.

The Brasília camp is part of a series of pro-Bolsonaro demonstrations around the country seeking to prevent Lula’s January 1 inauguration. Some have employed tactics “akin to terrorism,” a police report said.

As the days passed after the election, the structure and size of the Brasília protest camp gradually increased. Almost a month after its creation, it already resembles a small town, with trade of food and drink, medical care, and...