Fake News Network Enabled to Mobilize Bolsonarist Base Against Congress

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Supporters of the Bolsonaro Government have again used the tactic of spreading fake and factoid news to mobilize the hardline core of his followers against an alleged enemy. With the help of Whatsapp groups, social media pages, and far-right blogs they elected the target of the moment.

It is the National Congress, accused by a governmental minister of “blackmailing” the President. With Bolsonaro’s endorsement, who broadcast a video on the subject, the Legislature took the spotlight on the political actions called for March 15th, with an agenda that includes closing the Houses through military intervention.

Officially, neither movements nor legislators supporting the convened pro-government mobilization speak of an onslaught against Congress or military intervention. But several apocryphal materials in circulation run in this direction.

“We have to take to the streets, but asking for military intervention right now. We are tired of taking to the streets only protesting because everything remains the same. These leftist criminals only laugh at the people and continue doing even worse things against Brazil.” “The generals await the order of the people,” says one of the posters that shows pictures of reserve generals in the government, such as Vice Hamilton Mourão.

It is difficult to measure the scope of this type of message since there are hundreds of broadcasting groups linked to Bolsonorism and most of them reproduce fake content. But it is clear that this movement is gaining strength when lobbied by the President and his staff. General Augusto Heleno, Minister of the Cabinet of Institutional Security, is yet another to appear in the messages referring to the connection between the Armed Forces and the Government.

Heleno is a key player in the mobilization. He was recorded in a conversation with colleagues criticizing Congress. “We can’t have these guys blackmailing us all the time. Fuck,” he said. Angry, the officer also urged the president to “summon the people to the streets”.

Days later it was Bolsonaro’s time to deliver his message and confirm Congress as the main target for his followers. The President shared two videos to his WhatsApp contacts calling for a protest against the Legislature on March 15th, reported columnist for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo Vera Magalhães -afterwards she herself was the target of attacks by Bolsonaro’s so-called “virtual militia”.

The content of the video, a clear affront to the legislature, generated criticism from the opposition and even from Supreme Court justices. The opposition said it had already been considering petitioning for impeachment of the President.

The speech against Congress made by the President is not new: with poor political articulation in the Chamber and Senate, the Planalto and members of its first rank tend to push the theory that legislators do not allow Bolsonaro to govern. They would all be advocates of the “Give-and-take” of “old politics”.

This time the backdrop to Heleno and Bolsonaro’s speech is the federal “tax budget,” passed by Congress last November. In passing the law, legislators decided to transfer the administration of some R$30.1 billion (US$7.5 billion) of the federal government’s budget from the Executive to the Legislative. In other words, Congress would decide where and when to spend the funds.

Bolsonaro vetoed the measure and tried to reach an agreement so that Congress would uphold his version on Tuesday – although on social media, however, he retained the line that there was no negotiation with the legislature.

Throughout the day, a deal was eventually announced between legislators and the government to uphold the president’s veto. The text would be voted on in the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, but it did not happen. The reason was the insecurity of the Senate summit about the future regulation of the budget submitted by the Planalto.

What had been agreed with the Government Secretariat’s Minister Luiz Eduardo Ramos was that three draft tax budget regulations would be submitted in the morning, to be voted on later in the day. However, the texts only came in the late afternoon and raised more questions than certainties.

Two Chamber experts heard by the reporter said it was not possible to determine what the actual changes were. Thus, the President of the Senate and Congress, Davi Alcolumbre, decided to suspend the session and defer the completion of the vote to Wednesday.

Group rhetoric

If in the real life of Brasília there is a real negotiation between Congress and the Planalto, in the WhatsApp groups all that counts is Bolsonaro’s rhetoric. Last week, the president lied about his endorsement of the March 15th protests having an anti-Congress agenda.

During his live broadcast on Thursday on social media, the president stated that the video he had shared dated back to 2015, not 2020, and that it was a call for action against then-president Dilma Rousseff. “It is a video in which I urge the people to attend on March 15th, 2015, which, by coincidence, was on a Sunday”, he said.

However, the president neglected to notice that the video shows images of himself, then a presidential candidate, being stabbed in Juiz de Fora (MG), an incident that occurred in September 2018. The message was echoed in a Bolsonarist group: “Urgent! Don’t fall for the new leftist dirty move. They picked up an old video on YouTube of the then federal deputy Bolsonaro, where he urged the population to attend the March 15th demonstrations. But those demonstrations focused on Dilma’s impeachment,” a message said.

The Bolsonarist propaganda machine in WhatsApp also retrieves old texts of dubious origin and circulates them as if they were new. A message attributed to Air Force Brigadier Jaime Rodrigues Sanchez, which had already been shared in early 2019, has reemerged in this toxic virtual environment.

“He [Brigadier Sanchez] quoted a ‘two-headed anaconda,’ represented ‘by the Federal Supreme Court and the National Congress,’ which ‘plot and squeeze their lethal embrace’ around the President,” the message said. The reporter was unable to reach the reserve officer to confirm the authorship of the repeated text. About 12 percent of the electorate, according to a Datafolha poll released in January, believes that dictatorship is the best for Brazil.

The hostile atmosphere with Congress has reached such a height that even a trip by Rodrigo Maia, the Chamber president, to Spain last week gained conspiracy lines against Bolsonaro. An alleged tweet from the Spanish Embassy in Brazil on Thursday announced the deputy’s meetings with local authorities, and included in the list of topics covered: “democracy, parliamentarianism and the future of Brazil”.

The inclusion of the word “parliamentarianism” was enough for the far-right websites aligned with the President to report that Maia was “plotting a coup” against the Planalto. When questioned, the Embassy did not wish to comment on the controversy but rather said that “Rodrigo Maia’s visit had only an institutional nature. Before and after the inauguration, the Government of Jair Bolsonaro knows that it counts on the respect, friendship and full cooperation of this Embassy”.

Source: El País