Brasilia, Brazil.- Brazilian police were questioning about 1,000 protesters at a packed gym in the capital after anti-government mobs looted public buildings over the weekend and as the country’s new government sought to overcome the crisis.
Many of the protesters, supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, were detained yesterday when soldiers dismantled a camp in Brasilia where crowds gathered on Sunday before storming Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential Palace.
Demonstrators in the camp outside the army headquarters were demanding a military coup to annul the result of the October election in which leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated Bolsonaro, who made unfounded claims that the election was fraudulent.
Federal Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who is in charge of investigations into “anti-democratic” protests, promised in a speech to fight “terrorists” who vandalized and occupied public buildings in Brasilia.
“Democracy will prevail and Brazilian institutions will not give in,” Moraes said at the swearing in of the new head of the Federal Police.
However, it was difficult to carry out such a huge criminal investigation into a loosely organized protest movement in the first weeks of a new government.
Approximately 1,000 arrestees from the protest camp were held for questioning in a police gym, where they slept on the floor, some wrapped in Brazilian flags, and complained to a Reuters journalist that they were being held indefinitely and poorly fed.
They sang and took selfies with their phones, a video posted on social media showed.
Around 200 other protesters were under arrest and awaiting the reading of charges against them in a penitentiary center for their role in the riots on Sunday, which destroyed some of the most emblematic buildings of the capital, in the worst attack against Brazilian democracy. in decades.
Lula, who took office on January 1, met last night with the head of the Federal Supreme Court, congressional leaders and state governors in a show of national unity to condemn the riots. They visited the looted building of the Court, which was the most damaged site.
Bolsonaro foresees shortening his stay in the US
Meanwhile, the ex-President of the extreme right was admitted yesterday to a hospital in Florida, in the United States, where he flew 48 hours before the end of his term.
Bolsonaro told CNN Brazil that he could shorten his stay in the country due to his medical problems and return to Brazil before the end of the month.
