Can Lula Rein In Brazil’s Military?

The Jan. 8 attack on Brazil’s Congress, presidential palace, and Supreme Court by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro has understandably drawn parallels to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection launched by backers of then-U.S. President Donald Trump. There are many similarities between the two cases. Both were incited by populist right-wing presidents who failed to win reelection and subsequently spread disinformation about supposed voter fraud to mobilize their most radical followers. The U.S. and Brazilian extreme right have also become increasingly enmeshed in recent years—conspiring on messaging and strategy and sharing key advisors such as Steve Bannon.

But the rush to view Brazil’s attack through a U.S. lens minimizes its threat to Latin America’s largest democracy. There is a key difference between the Brazilian and U.S. insurrections. Unlike the U.S. riots—which seem to have been led mostly by radicalized citizens—there is strong evidence that Brazil’s iteration was a result of the armed forces’ connivance. Decades after the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, civilians still do not fully control the country’s security establishment. This is the biggest weakness Brazil’s democracy faces today.

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Bolsonaro—a former army captain backed by Brazil’s military and police forces—exacerbated this problem by militarizing government. He appointed more than 6,000 military officers to positions in his administration and blurred the lines between the armed forces and civilian government. By the time of Brazil’s election last October, military officers occupied numerous executive positions in state-owned companies and weighed in on the electoral process.

Now, with the armed forces temporarily on the defensive, newly inaugurated President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has a historic opportunity to reassert civilian control over Brazil’s military. If Lula fails to rein the military back in now, the process of Brazilian democratization will remain incomplete—and subject to the vagaries of those in uniform for years to come.

New evidence leaves little doubt that parts of Brazil’s armed forces and the capital’s military police—the latter of which is overseen by Brasília Gov. Ibaneis Rocha, a Bolsonaro ally—actively supported and facilitated the rioters. The Supreme Court has now suspended Rocha from office for 90 days, pending an investigation into his role in the attacks. Anderson Torres, Rocha’s secretary for public security who previously served as Bolsonaro’s justice minister, has been detained for allegedly dismissing the command in charge of protecting the Three Powers Plaza before traveling to the United States in advance of the attacks. Police also discovered a draft decree annulling the result of the 2022 election while searching Torres’s home, and he was taken into custody upon returning to Brazil on Jan. 14.

One week later, Lula sacked Gen. Júlio César de Arruda, the head of the Brazilian Army, over his reluctance to detain Bolsonaro-supporting rioters who had camped out in front of military headquarters in Brasília after the Jan. 8 attacks. Critics argue that Arruda’s opposition to Justice Minister Flávio Dino’s request to move into the camp the night of the attacks allowed numerous Bolsonaro supporters to flee. (The camp was disbanded the next morning.)

In an effort to de-Bolsonarize the police, Lula also fired 26 of 27 state chiefs of the Federal Highway Police—which had become more powerful under Bolsonaro—and 18 of its superintendents. Forty percent of police officers in Brazil consider the Jan. 8 attackers’ agendas to be “legitimate,” according to a Jan. 30 poll by Brazil’s Forum of Public Security. “How can I have a person outside my office who might shoot me?” Lula asked after dismissing more than 50 military service members responsible for presidential security.

In the coming weeks and months, much of the focus in Brazil will be on the prosecution of those responsible for the Jan. 8 riots. Hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters currently sit in jail, while many others have been released as they await trial. The trials of Torres, Rocha, and others responsible for security in Brasília will raise the question of whether Bolsonaro himself—currently self-exiled in Florida—would similarly face justice if he were to return to Brazil.

Yet while necessary, punishing those responsible for the wanton destruction of public property that occurred on Jan. 8—including by military and police officers—will not be enough. Those trials will do little to address Brazil’s structural problem of civilian-security relations that goes far beyond the attacks—and even Bolsonaro.

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Brazil has experienced several military coups since then, most recently in 1964. While generals in other post-dictatorship Latin American countries such as Argentina and Chile left power in disgrace—and later faced transitional justice—Brazil’s generals were able to largely set the terms of the country’s re-democratization in the 1980s. By granting themselves broad amnesty, the generals assured the transition to civilian rule would be gradual and that the new government would not revoke the military’s numerous perks and privileges—such as generous pensions and access to exclusive hospitals and schools.

The military’s impunity after democratization allowed it to propagate myths about its role in Brazilian society. These include the idea that the members of the armed forces are more patriotic than civilian leaders. Security forces also continue to brand themselves as a “moderating power”: an independent center of political power able to stabilize the country in moments of tension or volatility.

Memory of Brazil’s dictatorship remains contested. The military establishment has pursued what historian Lucas Pedretti has called the “imposition of amnesia” to avoid identifying those responsible for human rights abuses during the dictatorship and delegitimize its victims in the name of reconciliation. Though the government of Lula ally Dilma Rousseff created a truth commission that in 2012 began to investigate the military’s dictatorship-era crimes, it did not have the power to prosecute alleged offenders and was rejected by leading generals as “revanchism” and “cowardice.” In office, Bolsonaro sought to move dictatorship nostalgia into the mainstream by publicly celebrating the anniversary of the 1964 coup and stressing the armed forces’ role in “pacifying the country.”

In retrospect, it now seems clear that the period of relative political stability Brazil enjoyed between 1995 and 2013 lulled many observers into believing that the issue of civilian-military relations had been settled once and for all. The 18-year spell of progress not only stabilized Brazil’s economy but also saw the creation of the Ministry of Defense in 1999, a move opposed by the generals. (The heads of the three branches of the military previously sat in the presidential cabinet.) While the civilian ministers were initially weak, Lula during his second term in office in 2007 appointed a politically powerful civilian and former president of the Supreme Court to serve as minister of defense and—for a time—was able to centralize civilian power over military affairs. “The barracks are no longer a threat to democracy in Brazil,” Brazilian political scientist Octavio Amorim Neto declared in 2014.

Yet in the years after 2013, as political stability and economic growth gave way to instability and stagnation, the armed forces moved closer to the political arena. In February 2018, embattled then-President Michel Temer ended two decades of civilian leadership in the Ministry of Defense by appointing a general to its top job. Temer, who took office following Rousseff’s controversial 2016 impeachment, saw his presidency marked by instability and approval ratings that sunk into the single digits, and he occasionally employed the army to address domestic problems such as urban crime. The political and economic precarity of that time made voters more susceptible to the strongman rhetoric of candidate Bolsonaro, who promised—and then implemented—a militarization of the Brazilian government.

Under Bolsonaro, military leaders often cited Article 142 of Brazil’s Constitution—which states that “the Armed Forces … under the supreme authority of the President of the Republic, and are intended for defense of the Country, for the guarantee of the constitutional powers (the executive, legislative, and judicial) and, on the initiative of any of these, law and order”—to promote the narrative that they were political arbiters. A more extreme interpretation of this article, defended by some Bolsonaro allies, offered a legal basis for a military coup.

Generals have meddled in politics on numerous occasions in recent years. In 2018, for example, the then-army chief seemed to publicly threaten the Supreme Court on Twitter a day before its deliberation about Lula’s habeas corpus request. The justices, by a 6-5 decision, sent Lula to jail. Military police have also conducted illegal labor strikes—which usually lead to spikes in crime and murder—to undermine the authority of state governors; at times, these have taken the form of violent mutinies.

While pollsters peg the Brazilian public’s trust in the armed forces at around 30 percent—not particularly high—it is still the country’s second-most-trusted institution, behind the churches but ahead of the presidency, Congress, judiciary, and media. Bolsonaro’s radicalism as president allowed the armed forces to project themselves as technocratic adults in the room capable of controlling the mercurial former leader.

Lula could start by asking his defense minister to reform the curriculum at military academies so that it explicitly rejects any dictatorship nostalgia as well as the notion that the army is more competent than civilian leadership in running Brazil; governors could do the same at police academies.

Lula could also institute a zero-tolerance policy for members of the military who share their political views publicly and participate in political rallies, enforcing a law that has been often ignored in the past. In 2021, a military court not only acquitted Bolsonaro’s minister of health, Eduardo Pazuello, an active-duty general, after he joined a pro-Bolsonaro rally, but also put a seal on the documents surrounding the case—blocking them from public view.

Here, Lula might place particular emphasis on keeping officers from sharing anti-democratic ideas or glorifying the dictatorship, as rose-tinted accounts of Brazilian military rule are still shared widely by military and police officers in pro-Bolsonaro social media groups. The president might also consider proposing a rule banning active-duty military from occupying positions in government.

Additionally, the Lula government should strip the military of the domestic responsibilities it was granted under Temer and Bolsonaro. Patrolling favelas and fighting organized crime and deforestation should not involve the armed forces—these can be managed instead by other responsible authorities. Bolsonaro’s initiative expanding so-called civic-military schools, partially managed by military officers, should also be reversed. Finally, Lula should consider training a cadre of civilian experts in defense and security so that they can populate the Brazilian federal and state bureaucracy, particularly the Ministry of Defense. This effort should involve government-financed scholarships for Brazilian bureaucrats to study security policy at schools around the world.

No future Brazilian president is likely to encounter a more hospitable international environment for bold action than the one Lula faces today. In recent months, high-ranking members of the Brazilian military, such as Bolsonaro’s vice president, Hamilton Mourão, publicly signaled that they opposed a Bolsonaro coup because the global reaction would be negative. Paradoxically, Bolsonaro’s decision to strengthen military ties with the United States during the Trump presidency has also increased U.S. President Joe Biden’s leverage over the Brazilian armed forces. Military leaders surely noticed how quickly world leaders rushed to congratulate Lula for his victory over Bolsonaro on Oct. 30—and all rallied behind the new Brazilian president on Jan. 8.

Critics may accuse Lula of conducting a witch hunt against the military should he pursue the above reforms. Others will rightly point out that the widespread rosy views of Brazil’s armed forces will not go away overnight. But Lula’s window to address one of the major weaknesses of Brazil’s democracy may close in just a few months’ time, once the public debate moves beyond Jan. 8, so he must take advantage of this moment while he can.

As the Brazilian military historian Francisco Teixeira recently told Valor Econômico, “If you’re unwilling to provoke [the generals], you accept military tutelage.” There is reason to believe that unless Lula articulates a swift answer to the current crisis in civilian-military relations, Brazil’s generals may feel even more emboldened in the years to come.

This article appears in the Spring 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Subscribe now to support our journalism.