January 8 hearings issue final report, placing blame for riots on Bolsonaro

Senator Eliziane Gama, the rapporteur of the congressional hearing committee created to investigate the January 8 riots in Brasília, presented on Tuesday the final report of the five-month investigation. 

The text contains a paradox: although it requests the police to indict one Navy admiral and eight Army generals — including two former force commanders — for several crimes related to sedition, it insists that Brazil’s Armed Forces remained loyal to the Constitution as hordes of far-right radicals stormed and ransacked government buildings in the hopes of creating chaos and laying the conditions for the military to step in and remove President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from his office.

As The Brazilian Report showed, Ms. Gama and other lawmakers friendly to the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration lost the appetite to go after the bigger fish during the hearings. Furthermore, for several months, the administration has made efforts to whitewash the military’s crucial role in plotting a coup against Lula.

The result is a report that places blame solely on former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and some of his closest public allies, a fair but vastly incomplete assessment that does not address the political protagonism of men in fatigues or their anti-democratic understanding of how government works, by which they consider themselves as a sort of moderating force in Brazilian politics.

“January 8 is the work of what we call Bolsonarism,” Ms. Gama told committee members. Unwilling to accept the result of the 2022 election, “5,000 vandals invaded, vandalized, and looted Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court.” This was not a spontaneous movement, she added, but rather a revolt that was extensively planned beforehand. 

Ms. Gama’s report refutes the far-right narrative that January 8 started as a peaceful demonstration that was derailed by infiltrated pro-government agent provocateurs. Instead, she wrote, far-right demonstrations held that day had a violent objective from the start — “a resolute coup attempt.” 

Rioters hoped that the chaos and violence created by their actions would motivate an emergency decree and eventually...