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Bianca Tavolari
13 Februar 2023
Bianca Tavolari is a
Law Professor at
The Patriots’ Insper, researcher at

Repossession the Brazilian Center

for Analysis and
On the narratives of the Planning (Cebrap)
Bolsonaro supporters’ attack and principal
on democracy in Brazil investigator at Maria
Sibylla Merian
Alongside thousands of people dressed in
Centre - Mecila.
green and yellow who came close to the
Esplanade of the Ministries on Sunday, January
8th, Genival Fagundes was one of the self- ORCiD >>
proclaimed Brazilian „patriots“ who
livestreamed the event. An unsuccessful
candidate for Brazil’s Congress, Fagundes is a
Jonas Medeiros
member of the Liberal Party (PL), which in Jonas Medeiros is a

2022 also had former president Jair Bolsonaro social scientist and

among its ranks. His livestream displayed the researcher at the

culmination of months of camping in front of Brazilian Center for

the Army’s General Headquarters in Brasília. Analysis and

He explained to his followers that ‘people have Planning (Cebrap).

knocked down the barriers in order to carry out

the repossession, they are entering the ORCiD >>
Congress to remove the omissive members of
Congress’. And he reasoned: ‘What the people Explore posts
want is to occupy the House of the People, related to this:
they are impeaching all senators’, adding: ‘Is it Bolsonaro, Populism
vandalism to occupy your own house? No, it is
repossession.’ Other posts about
this region:
Fagundes used specific legal terminology to Brazil
characterize what amounted to invasion,
destruction of public property, and violence No Comments
against journalists and public security officers
who were in their way: ‘repossession’. Join the
discussion
Technically, repossessions are judicial
proceedings filed by those who hold an asset’s
tenure and who consider it to be under threat
or taken away. These submissions are then
sent to the judiciary – a step for the legitimate
holder to recover what is rightfully theirs.
Technically speaking, we are talking about
replevin. Tenure and property ownership are at
the heart of the matter.

‚People have knocked down the barriers in

order to carry out the repossession’: here,
Fagundes assumes that patriots are the
proprietors of the Congress, the Supreme Court
and the Presidential Offices’ buildings. Since
they are the legitimate and rightful holders of
this right, they can take concrete measures to
get back the tenure that was unfairly taken
away from them through the alleged electoral
fraud. For Fagundes, this logic justifies
knocking down barriers put in place to protect
public property: they are merely taking back
what is theirs. In his view, the barriers –not
the protestors– are out of place.  

Fagundes is a vocal spokesperson for a wider

narrative. On Twitter, hundreds of accounts
with Brazilian flags in their usernames posted
different versions of the same message: ‘It is
not invasion, it is repossession! The House
(Congress) belongs to the people!”. Francisco
Mesquita took a step further: ‘Differently from
MST [acronym for the Landless Rural Workers
Movement in Portuguese] which invade other
people’s property and take ownership of what
was conquered through others’ effort and
work, we can consider this [event] a
repossession, it is the sovereign people taking
for themselves what is rightfully theirs’.

An anthropological
gaze
There are fundamental demarcations of
meaning in this narrative. Firstly, there is an
attempt to differentiate their own acts from
what they consider to be vandalism: vandals
and criminals take ownership of other people’s
properties, unlike those who take what is
rightfully theirs.

Secondly, they understand their property claim

is supported by popular sovereignty, hence the
constant references to „the People“ – in their
perspective, this would also distinguish the
patriots’ from other illicit acts. Likewise, it
explains why so many people took photos and
recorded videos from inside the invaded
buildings, an action that seems irrational when
regarded objectively since they would
potentially be „providing evidence against
themselves“, as many local analysts have
pointed out, in a mixture of shock and disdain.
If we do not foster an anthropological gaze, we
will never be able to understand the events of
January 8th, 2023.

Finally, tenure had to go back to the legitimate

owners. In this view, the Executive, the
Legislative and the Judiciary branches exert
their power illegally and illegitimately, thus
requiring their forceful removal. One of its best
representations was the phrase ‘you lost,
schmuck’ [perdeu, mané] tagged by a rioter on
a statue of Lady Justice and on parts of the
buildings’ glass façade: it is a way to re-signify
the original remark made by Supreme Court
Justice Luís Barroso when accosted by a
Bolsonaro supporter in New York after the
elections.

Some displacements of meaning are necessary

to understand how the patriotic justification
for legitimizing the January 8th antidemocratic
acts works. Their claim that the House belongs
to the people does not hold a public sense of
‘us’. On the contrary: ‘us’ here is restricted to
the patriots themselves, whose motherland is
conceived as a ‘land promised by God’ to a
religiously homogeneous, Christian people –
not to the Brazilian society in all its
heterogeneity.

Property is outlined as private property. Such is

the case that the supposed repossession is no
longer a matter of judicial proceeding and thus
bypasses any institutional mediation. The
patriotic repossession is carried out by their
own hands. After 70 days of passively waiting
in front of military headquarters, the Armed
Forces had still not met the patriots’ requests
for military intervention. Thus, the direct
action of repossession was the solution,
similarly to the private owner who can use
their own force as means to avoid the threat to
or the actual loss of their tenure. It is not only
a matter of seeing a public asset as private: the
‘privatization’ is done in the name of the
people after all the other frustrated
antidemocratic attempts by these patriots.
Yet, if they actually believe in the property
narrative, what would explain the damage to
the buildings’ structure, furniture, artwork,
equipment and documents? If the House
belongs to the people, shouldn’t its patrimony
be preserved?

In a video recorded during the Congress’

invasion, a woman tries to alert her invading
partners: ‘No breaking! Do not break
[anything]! This is ours now! No breaking! The
house is ours! It is our country! Come on,
Brazil!’. Here, the public justification
encounters important limits, as demonstrated
by adopting a parallel narrative claiming the
damage would have been done by ‘infiltrated
lefties.’

These were not only material and impalpable

damages, condemned as unjustifiable by
national and international authorities. They
were acts of profanation. Here, the ‘property’
line of argument can help devise some
hypotheses, among which is the idea that
property is seen as omnipotence. If property is
sacred – and there is a connection between,
on the one hand, the patriots‘ sense of divine
mission and, on the other, the centuries of
associating property to an absolute right,
which can no longer be sustained in any
democratic legal system – then its owners can
dispose of it as they wish to.

And, if the representatives from the three

branches of government are illegitimately
using the buildings, then looting, theft and
damages are not only authorized but
understood to be a moral and legal duty. If it is
yours, then it is not damage – this would only
be characterized if done to someone else’s
property. It is not by chance that the woman’s
appeals for ‘No breaking!’ are disregarded and
that she readily gives up her stance once
noticing she is the misplaced one in a sea of
unrestrained depredation.

A sense of
omnipotence
The references to private property and the
feeling of omnipotence are not just found
among those seeking to justify a coup. The fact
is that patriots have not encountered a defense
of public assets’ property on the other side of
the political contention. The camps in front of
military headquarters were set in public
property, the roadblocks happened in public
highways and roads – owned by federal and
state governments, whose concession had
been either granted to private companies or
not.

Only on January 8th, 2023, did the Attorney

General’s Office announce it would file legal
actions for repossession of public buildings
and injunctions to prevent new invasions from
happening. In addition to not being contained
nor suppressed by the police force, the self-
proclaimed patriots were not indicted in
repossession lawsuits that could have been
filed by the State in order to recover the
invaded public assets.

There was an exception in Belo Horizonte,

capital of the state of Minas Gerais, but the
patriots were the ones seeking the Judiciary on
behalf of their right to demonstrate after the
Municipal government and its guard tried to
remove them. Initially a lower court judge
granted them the permission to stay, which
was then revoked by Supreme Court Justice
Alexandre de Moraes. These so-called patriots
then claimed for themselves the role of
property upholders, displacing themselves
from invaders to property owners and
defenders. 

The dearth of
repression
The lack of enforcement by police and security
forces has not only bolstered the invasions’
legitimacy but also indicated it was a different
type of ‘protest’, deserving a different kind of
treatment. High schoolers that occupied public
schools against the closedown of schools in
São Paulo in 2015 and in several states in
2016 to protest against reforming the upper
secondary education were not as lucky. These
students encountered state officials that
upheld public property and were willing to
remove teenagers at any costs, including
violence and police force.

At that time, the São Paulo State Court of

Justice issued favorable rulings to the students,
understanding the occupation of schools as
part of the right to demonstrate. Alexandre de
Moraes, then São Paulo’s Secretary of Security,
requested that repossessions involving public
tenure would not be taken to the judiciary,
allowing them to be conducted directly
through the public administration. Moraes’s
argument sought to equate the state with a
private owner: if a private individual can use
their own efforts – either with their own hands
or armed – to avoid invasions, why couldn’t
the State?

In the students’ case, public authorities from

the State Executive worked to supply the State
with institutional ways to directly wield force
in defense of its patrimony, without any
institutional intermediation. No such thing was
employed to deal with acts and invasions that
have open and outrightly proclaimed their
goal: a coup. In a curious and surprising
reversal of roles, it was a ruling by Alexandre
de Moraes, now a Supreme Court Justice –
thus with intermediation from the Judicial
sphere –, that cracked the laxness,
complacency and/or sympathy through which
security forces regarded the patriots’ collective
actions. Only then has the removal of camps
from headquarters in all Brazilian cities and
towns begun.

The fact that repossession proceedings were

not systematically employed to deal with
roadblocks that have started right after the
elections’ 2nd round or even to recover the
areas in front of military headquarters is
symptomatic. The patriots’ acts indicate a
turning point: until then, democratic protests
had been quelled or cracked down through
actions for protecting tenure and property,
either with legal recourse or even with bypass
attempts.

What happened to students in 2015 and 2016

happened to truck drivers striking, unions
occupying companies’ headquarters, social
movements occupying public offices, ministries
and legislative chambers in several types of
pacific protests. Even during the Covid-19
pandemic families that had occupied public
land because they had nowhere else to live
faced brutal repossessions. This tells us quite a
bit about politically motivated property
damage and especially the highly selective
fashion the police use to protect property:
when push comes to shove, it all depends on
who is occupying them.

After Justice Moraes’s ruling, local media

outlets have reported curious cases. On the
morning on January 9th, the state of
Tocantins’s Military Police Force had issued a
statement affirming the camp in front of the
Palmas Battalion was ‘peaceful’ and in the
Army’s jurisdiction; a second statement, later
that day, announced a different position and
the Police’s commitment to ‘comply with all
judicial decisions against which no arguments
or challenges are possible.’ In the state of Mato
Grosso, the state’s Public Prosecutor’s Office
had to warn the governor it would hold him
accountable if the Military Police was not sent
to demobilize a camp. Finally, in the state of
Amazonas, a federal judge had to rule for the
removal of a camp by use of police force. That
is, intermediaries had to reinforce Moraes’s
ruling in face of local authorities and security
forces’ stance to not comply with it.

If we are to rebuild and strengthen Brazilian

democracy, the ‘de-Bolsonarization’ of
Brasília’s bureaucratic establishment – until
recently militarized and ideologized in extreme
authoritarianism – and of security forces
throughout the country is an essential step.
This might seem like a distant utopia, yet it
remains very much needed. After all,
dismantling the ‘patriotic’ camps does not
mean dismantling their coordination, their
shared beliefs and values – a worldview in
which they are not only good citizens doing
good deeds, but owners with the right to
recoup their rightfully owned property through
force, omnipotents in their destruction.
•
Translated by Marília Ramos

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SUGGESTED CITATION  Tavolari, Bianca;

Medeiros, Jonas: The Patriots’ Repossession: On
the narratives of the Bolsonaro supporters’ attack
on democracy in Brazil, VerfBlog, 2023/2/13,
https://verfassungsblog.de/the-patriots-
repossession/.

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