President Lula has struggled with the Armed Forces since the 8th of January

After the terrorist attack on Brasilia, the response of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and the resilience of the Brazilian institutions proved to be stronger than the attempts of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters against them. The events of the 8th of January were harmful to Brazilian democracy, as they created a crisis between the government and the Armed Forces, did not stop Bolsonaro supporters from future attempts, and have been stealing the attention of the government to the several social and economic issues Brazil faces.

An experienced and skilled politician arrested by the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964 – 1985), President Lula avoided an escalation of the coup attempt by avoiding measures like declaring a state of emergency that would increase the power of the Armed Forces. As the week following the attack went on, a series of evidence came to the surface showing the involvement of former president Bolsonaro and the Army in the preparation and protection of the terrorists, which shows the Armed Forces' difficulty in accepting the elected government, and implicates Bolsonaro on more crimes.

After the attacks, as the police tried to arrest the terrorists, it was released footage of an Army colonel stopping police officers from taking the terrorists as prisoners gathered at the National Congress. On the night of the 8th, the police went to the terrorists' camping site in front of an Army base; the Army blocked the street with two armored vehicles, claiming to be their jurisdiction. They agreed that the police would be allowed to come in the morning to make the arrests.

The police found a document for federal intervention in the elections of 2022 during a search at the house of the Secretary of Security of the Federal District during the terrorist attack and former Minister of Justice of Bolsonaro's administration. Arrested in Brazil, the former Minister was in the USA in the same city as Bolsonaro during the episode in Brasilia.

Monday the 9th had started with a series of more minor attempts around Brazil to close down highways and threats to oil refineries. The police quickly solved those, and President Lula met with all 27 State Governors to display unity, even with Governors allied with President Bolsonaro. A minority of congress members and senators that remain aligned with Bolsonaro, as a former judge and now senator Sergio Moro and former vice-president and now senator Gen. Hamilton Mour?o, have criticized the government's response to the coup attempt and the arrest of the terrorists as exaggerated.

Despite those scattered critiques, the Brazilian government's main institutions at every level have condemned the attacks and civil society, companies, and institutions across the country. It shows that this was an unwanted movement, but the absence of position from the Armed Forces and the open precedent exists.

The Armed Forces have yet to position themselves against the attack, adding to the unease between them and Lula's administration. Noticeably, this is an issue that goes beyond Lula's administration and its Defence Ministry. The military now composes the Defence Ministry, the Institutional Security Cabinet responsible for the Presidential Security and the Brazilian Intelligence Agency, and the nearly two thousand military personnel in different functions of the Executive left by the previous administration.

Over the past two weeks, Lula's administration has been exonerating from those functions of the military personnel of unrelated activities to its original positions. There has been a burdensome climate between the Defence Minister, the heads of Armed Forces, and president Lula, culminating in President Lula's dismissal of the Army Commander less than two weeks after the attack due to the defense of the terrorists on the night of the 8th of January by the Army.

The Defence Minister said that several relatives of military personnel and his relatives were also present in the camping site from where the attack on Brasilia originated, including the wife of General Villas-Boas was one of the camp organizers. This General was a primary supporter of Bolsonaro and had, through Twitter, threatened the Supreme Court in case president Lula was not arrested in 2018, taking him out of the presidential dispute that put Bolsonaro in power.

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President Lula had personally said on more than one occasion that the members of security forces in Brasilia during the 8th of January that were complacent with the attack by not repressing it would be punished. He, other members of his administration, and members of Congress have also affirmed that there are several indications of people with military instruction and knowledge of the buildings among the terrorists.

Since the 8th of January, Brasilia has had a general feeling of distrust from the elected forces towards the Armed Forces; since the latter has never fully submitted to the former. Another suspicion falls over the control of the troops, as significant numbers are strong Bolsonaro supporters. This support could lead to a mutiny similar to the one in 2021 in the state of Ceará carried out by police officers who favored Bolsonaro and received the then President's sympathy.

Bolsonaro supporters or bolsonaristas have remained, and their movement has continued. Despite the frustrated coup attempt and incarceration of several involved, the series of other attacks following the main one in Brasilia show that this movement still leaves on with the same radical ideas. It is impossible now to separate the support for Bolsonaro from a disregard and willingness to attempt against democracy.

A series of analyses discuss how the terrorist attack began months ago. The camping site asking for military intervention started after the defeat of Bolsonaro in the 2022 elections in October of that year. I believe this movement began years before with Bolsonaro attempting to go against democracy and attacking those institutions with discourse and displays of power as the 7th of September Parade of 2021 and the constant attacks on public speeches of Bolsonaro in 2020. Going further from Bolsonaro, there is also the tweet from General Villas-Boas threatening the Supreme Court in 2018 or the impeachment of former president Dilma Roussef based on a technicality much less severe than anything Bolsonaro committed on repeated occasions during his mandate.

Over the past couple of weeks, Brazil gained the world's attention, and there are efforts on a national and international scale to deal with this far-right attempt against democracy. This movement is positive and necessary, but if the attacked institutions had braked those previous attempts against democracy from many actors, likely, this movement would not have built such strength that draws the world's attention.

The Brazilian government cannot avoid bolsonaristas spreading fake news in the face of any action from the government, such as that the detention centers for the terrorists are concentration camps, despite having much better conditions than Brazilian prisons. Politicians aligned with Bolsonaro are trying to win the support of this movement. The most significant was the governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema, whose critics of President Lula show that the image of a union between the President and governors will most likely not last.

Brazil should see a government focused on solving its many internal issues, like the 33 million affected by hunger in Brazil, the unemployment record, and slow economic growth. Instead, the attention was on a radical movement and actions of the Armed Forces that did not understand they are a piece of the state bureaucracy.?