Many details remain to be clarified in the reconstruction of the attack which ended the author’s life on Wednesday night at the Three Powers Square from Brasilia. Francisco Wanderley Luiz59, was a blacksmith in the state of Santa Catarina, in the south of the country. According to his ex-wife, the man had come to Brasilia because he wanted to kill the judge of the Supreme Federal Court (STF), Alexandre de Moraes. It is the one that continues the trial for the invasion on January 8, 2023 of the institutional buildings of Brasilia by supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro.
The attacker in 2020 had run unsuccessfully for the position of municipal councilor in his city Rio do Sul for Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) and had participated in Bolsonarist rallies that contested Bolsonaro’s victory. Lula. Before attacking the statue located in front of the Supreme Federal Court building with two bombs, he had left delirious messages on his social networks. In one of them he addressed the “dear brothers, chosen by God”. “I have good news. In your requests and praises for the coming of Jesus Christ, you have been answered!“, wrote. In another he addressed Lula and Bolsonaro. “Bolsonaro and Lula, if you love Brazil, stay away from public life! Enough polarization, this is the time to show who they are. The town is one“, reads the text. At the time of the attack, the man was wearing dark pants with red hearts, and before exploding along with the second bomb, he had posted a video with strobe effects on TikTok in which he appeared posing for a toast with a glass of red wine in his hand. .
Once the shock has passed, while the investigations continue, the debate is now opening in Brazil on this matter. Francisco Wanderley Luiz, Was he just an unstable person or a political terrorist? And if he was just an unstable person, how much responsibility does Bolsonaro’s right have in inflaming polarization? The same question had arisen with the attempted attack against Bolsonaro in Juiz de Fora, state of Minas Gerais, during his electoral campaign in 2018. In that case, the person who stabbed the man who would later be elected president of Brazil was Adélio Bispo de Oliveiraat the time an unemployed 40-year-old who had previously worked as a bricklayer’s assistant. Before the attack, the man had published several posts against Bolsonaro on his social networks. “It disgusts me to hear that the dictatorship should have killed some 30,000 communists,” he had written. According to the Juiz de Fora court that tried him, the man suffers from a persistent delusional disorder and is not imputable, that is, he cannot be criminally punished, and was sentenced to the judicial asylum.
For a long time, the Bolsonaro wing had politically exploited the attack. The accusation was that it had been financed by those who wanted to prevent Bolsonaro’s victory. The fact that in June of this year Bispo de Oliveira’s lawyer was involved in a police operation against the main criminal group in the country, the First Capital Command (PCC), contributed to further inflaming the debate. A similar situation now occurs with the case of Francisco Wanderley Luiz. Former president Jair Bolsonaro distanced himself immediately after the events. On the website Metropolises He called the terrorist “crazy” and said he had never met him or heard of him. Later, on his social networks, the former president spoke of ‘pacification’. “The time has come for Brazil to once again cultivate an environment suitable for different ideas to be peacefully confronted and for the strength of arguments to be worth more than the argument of force. “The defense of democracy and freedom will not be successful until the possibility of dialogue between all the forces of the nation is reestablished in our country,” he wrote. Bolsonaro then appealed to “all political currents and the leaders of national institutions to take the necessary measures to advance national pacification in this moment of tragedy. Who will benefit will not be one or another party, leader or political faction. It will be Brazil.”
The STF judges have a different opinion. For Gilmar Mendes, hatred and fanaticism have been stimulated by the Bolsonaro government. “Symbols and national holidays have been hijacked for electoral purposes to the point that in 2021, the commemoration of Brazil’s independence, on September 7, has been used to threaten the STF, inciting citizens to not respect judicial rulings.” Mendes said.
For another judge, Alexandre de Moraes“what happened is not something isolated from the context, and the context goes back much further, when the notorious hate cabinet began to spread hate narratives,” in reference to the often violent propaganda created by Bolsonaro’s entourage, starting with their children. “The situation has continued to escalate with the criminal use of freedom of expression,” said Moraes, who we remember was also the judge who for more than a month last September in a tug-of-war with Elon Musk banned the use of the X platform. throughout Brazil. Moraes also implied in his speech that there is no possibility of amnesty for Bolsonaro and the Bolsonaro supporters who ended up prosecuted. “The amnestied criminal is an unpunished criminal and impunity generates more aggression. “People believe they can come to Brasilia and try to blow up the STF because they were instigated by several people, even high-ranking people in the Republic,” the judge said.
In fact, an amnesty project, initially proposed by former PL deputy Vitor Hugo, is being discussed in the Brazilian Congress. The text was later modified in the Constitution and Justice Commission (CCJ) of the Chamber of Deputies. The amendments provide amnesty for all those involved in lawsuits for political or electoral reasons, from donations and logistical support to social media posts made between January 8, 2023 and the date of entry into force of the law. In addition, the revised version of the bill also extends the amnesty to participants in acts related to the attacks, before or after January 8. Prior to Wednesday’s attack, it was planned that a special commission would be formed for a more in-depth debate, as announced by the president of the Chamber, Arthur Liraof the Progressive Party (PP). But the future of this bill, in light of the attack, is now unknown. The amnesty mainly serves Bolsonaro so that he can be eligible again. He has currently lost his eligibility until 2030 by decision of the electoral justice. According to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, after Wednesday’s attack, some Bolsonaro deputies discussed among themselves on a messaging network the impact of the incident on the amnesty law. Some of them spoke of his “burial.” Meanwhile, at the same time, Brazilian Joelton Gusmão de Oliveira was arrested in La Plata, Argentina. He had been sentenced to 17 years in prison by the Brazilian authorities for attempted coup d’état. Oliveira had participated in the depredations of January 8, 2023. On June 10, Brazil had reported that it had asked Argentina for help to locate the possible presence in its territory of more than 140 fugitives involved in the events of January 2023. In total, the Argentine justice system has so far issued arrest warrants against 61 of them.
Furthermore, there is another possible political consequence of the Brasilia bombs: regulation of social networks. Andrei Rodrigues, general director of the Brazilian Federal Police, the body investigating the case, has also intervened on this topic in the last few hours. According to him, the attack is related to other investigations, such as that of the alleged coup on January 8. «The seriousness of the case demonstrates the need for regulation and clear rules for social networks. It is not possible to live with this type of actions,” Rodrigues declared at a press conference. The regulation of social networks is one of the recurring topics on Lula’s agenda, who had gone so far as to propose a new law, which was later paralyzed due to his numerous criticisms, including the fact that it would be controlled by people chosen by the government.
However, Brazil already has a law, the so-called ‘Internet Framework’which can be used to block hate speech. On Thursday, an influencer who had said in a video on TikTok that she wanted to kidnap “a PL deputy” and who had incited her followers to put a “gun to the head” of deputies who had not signed an amendment proposal constitutional (PEC), saw his video removed after the intervention of the San Pablo Justice Department. The jurist André Marsiglia, an expert in digital law, writes in Metrópoles that in Brazil “without votes and without people, the left survives thanks to a media and cultural ecosystem that, every time its candidates are defeated in the elections, creates the boring narrative that democracy is at risk and extremism will destroy the world. Naturally, this narrative becomes increasingly well known and it is at this point that censorship becomes an integral electoral tool.” In the coming weeks and months, therefore, it is likely, according to experts, that the regulation of social networks will once again be on the government’s agenda.
Finally, the attack also opened a debate about security. In the video recorded by the cameras, when the terrorist stops in front of the statue that is next to the access ramp to the STF, after about 20 seconds a guard comes out to meet him, but the reinforcements only arrive for a minute and half later, enough time for the man to detonate the two devices without being prevented. For a country preparing to host the earth’s powers at the G20 meeting next week in Rio de Janeiro, this may be a problem. Especially because just a week ago another serious incident occurred that revealed all the vulnerability of strategic places such as, for example, airports. In broad daylight, a PCC informant was murdered by a commando in the outer dock of the arrivals section of Latin America’s main airport, São Paulo-Guarulhos, in which an innocent Uber driver also lost his life.
