More than 3 million Brazilians protest election fraud; media remain silent
Three million Brazilians took to the streets to protest election fraud Tuesday on Brazil’s Proclamation of the Republic national holiday. The holiday, held every November 15th since 1889, commemorates the day when the Republic of Brazil was proclaimed after a military coup d'état overthrew the monarchy.
As reported by America’s Frontline News, the protests were planned in honor of the holiday as Brazilians across the country urged their fellow citizens to demonstrate against what many state was a fraudulent election last month and issued a "National call for the largest protest in the history of the country” on social media.
Widespread claims of fraud in Brazil’s presidential election on October 30th, in which Left-wing ex-convict Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ousted incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, sparked large-scale protests across the country which are entering their third week.
Lula, who spent 580 days in prison for corruption, won the most votes in the country’s history, but also by the narrowest margin for a presidential election in the country’s modern history. Now many Brazilians are contesting the legitimacy of the election, citing independent analyses by the electoral authorities which found that machines that were not audited had a statistically significant difference (p=10-18) in voting outcome in favor of Lula, amounting conservatively in the 1st round to 2.4% of the votes transferred and, in the 2nd round, 3.3%.
Protests erupted across the country following the results, with hundreds of thousands of Brazilian citizens blocking roads and even surrounding army barracks as they demand military intervention in election fraud. Law enforcement personnel have reportedly joined in the protests.
Tuesday’s protests were the largest yet, with three million citizens clogging roads in the capital Brasilía alone. In Rio de Janeiro, about 500,000 protested in front of the old Ministry of Defense and demanded military intervention. Additional hundreds of thousands protested elsewhere throughout the country.
“I’m no expert on the history of protests, but I think these may be the biggest protests the world has ever seen,” Brazil expert Fernando Teles told German website Free World, according to News Treason. “People are very angry. That isn’t really like the Brazilians at all, who are usually pretty laid back.”
The protests remain ignored by mainstream media, and a Google search for “3 million Brazilians” yields irrelevant results.
Instead, Reuters gushed in an article Wednesday that Lula, who “promises to protect the Amazon,” was “greeted like a rock star” at the COP27 climate conference.
The media blackout persists even as Brazilian citizens face criminal charges for questioning the integrity of last month’s election.
Soon after the protests began, Bolsonaro opponent and Superior Electoral Court (TSE) President Alexandre de Moraes announced that anyone who questioned the election results would be treated as a criminal in the name of democracy.
"There is no way to contest the democratically obtained result with illicit, anti-democratic and criminal movements, which will be fought and held accountable. Democracy has won again in Brazil [...] This is democracy, this is alternation of power, this is a democratic state, and those who criminally are not accepting it will be treated as criminals and their responsibilities will be established," threatened Moraes, according to Brasil Sem Medo.
Moraes made good on his word when he ordered Professor Marcos Cintra, an economist with four Harvard degrees who sits on the faculty of the prestigious Fundação Getúlio Vargas institution, to report to law enforcement last week after posting his doubts about the election results online. Moraes also slapped Professor Cintra, who is not a Bolsonaro supporter, with a R$20,000 (US$3, 798) fine.
Last week, journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that two of the country’s most popular congressional candidates, both Bolsonaro allies, have been banned from social media on Moraes’ orders.
Nikolas Ferreira, who won 1.5 million votes – the most nationwide – and Brazil’s third most popular candidate, Carla Zambelli, were both suppressed due to “disinformation”.
