Bannon to Bolsonaro: misinformation and Brazil’s coup attempt

October 2022 was a busy month for Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, the third-eldest son of Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. After the first round of the general elections, in which the young Bolsonaro managed to secure his own re-election, he hit the road.

On October 12, he embarked on an “official mission” to Argentina, sponsored by political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, founder of the right-wing website La Derecha Diario. During Eduardo’s time in Argentina, Mr. Cerimedo organized dinner parties with local far-right politicians, including Javier Milei, the Argentinian far-right presidential favorite, whose presidential campaign he is now coordinating.

Just two weeks later, Eduardo set off again, this time to the U.S., to meet with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort. His father had just lost the presidential elections by a narrow margin of less than 2 percent and refused to accept defeat. According to the Washington Post, while in the U.S., Eduardo met with other Trump advisers, such as his campaign adviser and founder of the social media platform Gettr, Jason Miller, and had phone conversations with political strategist Steve Bannon.

Both of these trips played a pivotal role in what came next: a coordinated transnational effort to discredit the legitimate outcome of the 2022 Brazilian elections by means of a disinformation campaign unlike anything ever seen in the continent.

This disinformation campaign was orchestrated from abroad as a way to circumvent the strategies adopted by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court to tackle election disinformation and hinder some of its main promoters, including congressmen and women from the Bolsonaro camp.

For the past five years, Eduardo Bolsonaro managed to build important alliances within far-right circles of both the U.S. and Latin America. In 2019, the Brazilian congressman was appointed as the South American representative of The Movement, a coalition founded by Mr. Bannon to “support populist nationalism and reject the influence of globalism.” This helped him become a central link between political groups that don’t hesitate to use cyber-mercenaries to get to power or to hold on to it.

An investigation by Agência Pública and Uol, in collaboration with 22 Latin American outlets and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), found that since 2018, Eduardo has taken part in 125 meetings with far-right leaders from Latin American countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Colombia — as well as the U.S.

Some of these encounters have led to enduring alliances that would prove useful at several points in the attempt to instigate a coup in Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s putschism: a timeline

Cross-border disinformation

Only four days after Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat, Argentinian political marketeer Fernando Cerimedo held a live broadcast on La Derecha Diario’s YouTube channel to present a dossier he had obtained from “private individuals” in Brazil, that allegedly revealed anomalies in the voting process which had resulted in the “change of election results” in the country. He wore a concerned expression and stood next to a projector screen showing a PowerPoint presentation with the Brazilian flag.

“I am Fernando Cerimedo, I am in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, and for reasons I will explain, it falls upon me to present this report,” he said. “I am personally aware of the risks to our legal, personal, and physical safety that come with the decision...