In Brazil, where thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed three important institutions on Sunday, a Supreme Court judge ordered the arrest of two influential officials held more or less directly responsible for what happened: according to the judge Alexandre de Moraes not only would not have prevented the assault, considered foreseeable, but they would have favored it.
The first is Anderson Torres, secretary of security for the federal district of Brasilia, the city where the attack took place. Torres had already been fired on Sunday by federal district governor Ibaneis Rocha, and his arrest was requested the same day by the Brazilian attorney general.
The second is Fabio Augusto Vieira, the head of the military police of the federal district of Brasilia. The military police is one of Brazil’s main police forces and the one responsible for protecting the institutions stormed on Sunday: the parliament, the Supreme Court and the president’s office. It is precisely the military police that are being hotly contested these days for the role that according to various authorities and analysts they played in the attack. Among other things, his agents were caught filming him, rather than preventing him.
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According to de Moraes, Torres and Vieira have not adequately guaranteed security around the institutions. Among other things, de Moraes mentioned the authorization given by them to over 100 busloads of rioters to enter Brasilia, already much contested these days. For weeks, in fact, Bolsonaro’s supporters had made it clear that they intended to violently occupy the seats of the institutions, as a gesture of protest against what they defined without any evidence as unfair elections (Bolsonaro had lost them last October against the candidate left Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva).
De Moraes also accused the two officials of failing to dismantle the many camps that the rioters had set up in Brasilia, one of which was in front of the main army headquarters, at the beginning of the monumental axis, the Brasilia street in where many important government buildings and diplomatic offices are located, and about 7 kilometers from the three buildings attacked. About 1,500 people have been arrested so far for the assault on Brazilian institutions.
On Wednesday, de Moraes also introduced a ban on disrupting traffic by organizing demonstrations: anyone who violates the rules is expected to be arrested, as well as fines of the equivalent of thousands of euros for anyone who offers logistical and economic support to this type of demonstration.
