2020FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 41–49

CURRENTS: THE RISE OF BRAZILIAN FASCISM

Hybrid warfare in Brazil

The highest stage of the military insurgency
Piero C. L E I R N E R , Federal University of São Carlos

Since 2013, Brazil has undergone various moments of political turbulence, ultimately culminating in the seizure of power by the
Far Right. The lack of clarity on how this movement has been led and the role played by the military in the political arena allows us
to ask if Brazil has been the target of a form of hybrid warfare—similar to the kind experienced by various other countries that
have undergone sudden changes in regime (such as Ukraine and Egypt, and more recently Honduras and Paraguay). This article
explores the limits and implications of applying the notion of hybrid warfare to the Brazilian case, seeking to understand how
politics came to be merged with elements adopted from military strategies and tactics. Based on my own ethnographic experience
with military personnel, I aim to show how, with the assistance of other state powers, they produced a high-impact psychological
operation that paved the way for the 2018 elections and the seizure of power by the Far Right. Following this line of analysis, I
argue that in the Brazilian case, there has been a hybrid warfare as well as an insurgency of state corporations and their networks.
Keywords: Brazil, military, hybrid war, politics, psychological operations

This article seeks to comprehend the role of the military
in the political events that have been unfolding in Brazil
since at least 2014. I propose this year as a starting point
since it was recognizably thereafter that various events
triggered a deep crisis: a cycle of mass protests, the Car
Wash operation (investigating corruption in the state oil
firm Petrobras), the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff
(former president for the Workers’ Party [PT], 2011–16),
and the imprisonment of Lula da Silva (former presi-
dent, 2003–10).1 Perhaps the biggest difficulty for any-
one seeking to comprehend the Brazilian situation is to
understand that these various aspects of the conjuncture,
which culminated in an unexpected emergency and the
seizure of power by the Far Right, are apparently inde-
pendent and involve diverse agencies. One question that
emerges is whether these different events possessed a
common thread that sought to concatenate the outcomes
in favor of groups that have today shown themselves to
1. A series of articles published in 2013 in the “hot spots” sec-
tion of Cultural Anthropology seeks to identify the main
features of the events occurring during the year in ques-
tion (see Dent and Pinheiro-Machado 2013).
be more clearly articulated. On the one hand, without
doubt, primary control of the state was taken over by
the military, members of the judiciary, and various pol-
iticians who had played a central role in the downfall of
the previous PT government; on the other hand, despite
this fact, everything appeared part of an apparently un-
coordinated and spontaneous movement. It is on this
point that I venture the hypothesis that all of these ele-
ments were mobilized through a form of hybrid warfare
(Escobar 2016; Korybko 2015).
Considering the (somewhat silent) movements of the
military since then, this hypothesis makes sense, espe-
cially after January 1, 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro (a for-
mer army captain) became president and appointed thou-
sands of military personnel to form his government.
Among this influx, his core nucleus is constituted of less
than a dozen generals who, not by chance, had occupied
strategic positions in the military movements since the
beginning of the decade. I stress that this is a process still
in progress, and indeed we can observe an increasing in-
tensification of military involvement in the government.
Moreover, and above all, the engineering of this process
followed the steps described in military manuals on

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 10, number 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/708680

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 Piero C. LEIRNER
hybrid warfare, especially in relation to military “psy-
chological operations.”
Obviously I do not rule out the idea that the military
(just like many other sectors) was influenced by the
“general climate” that has taken hold of the country: a
widespread dissatisfaction with certain policies adopted
by the Rousseff government and the PT. Certainly, many
were towed along by this trend, increasingly persuaded
to support the candidacy of Bolsonaro. Even so, beyond
this widespread movement, my interest resides in un-
derstanding how this group of generals at the center of
power today has articulated particular procedures, in-
stilled specific visions, and led a movement of militari-
zation as a whole. Not by coincidence, these generals
formed a select group of people who remained in close
contact over their careers: they employed Military Op-
erations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) strategies in coun-
terinsurgency operations in Haiti, in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, and later in the Law and Order Guar-
antee Operations (Operações de Garantia da Lei e da
Ordem; GLOs) in Brazil,2 especially during the FIFA
World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016) and
in the military intervention in public security in Rio de
Janeiro (2018). It is worth noting that the UN peace op-
erations, especially in Haiti, were a training ground for
a future strategy of “warfare communications” in Brazil,
when, through the GLOs, military personnel tested the
idea that a social “order” could be reestablished under
military intervention in “chaotic” environments with high
crime rates.3
These generals have high-level training in special
forces and psychological operations and, indeed, applied
their own interpretation of hybrid warfare theory to the
Brazilian context, based on US post-9/11 defense strategy.
To some extent, certain that they represented an element
of order, they paved the way for the production of chaos,
which forms a kind of script for diverse hybrid warfare
experiences (Korybko 2015). Briefly, this involves estab-
lishing information based on various semiotic “loops”
and inversions through media and social networks, aim-
ing to alter the perceptions of sectors of the state, the
elite, and the population (Boyd 1996; Ford 2010).
I will show that, in the process, there was an initial at-
tempt to leverage a “cognitive attack” within the armed
2. Operations in which armed forces are invited to act in
the domestic security of the country.
3. On the relationship between the Haiti experience and
operations in Brazil, see Neiburg (2019).
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42
forces themselves, followed by assumption of control
of the political movements surrounding the candidacy
and presidency of Bolsonaro, which involved a wide
array of social forces. I argue, therefore, that hybrid war-
fare affected both the military and the general popu-
lation. The result has been a feeling experienced day af-
ter day in Brazil: everything is conflicting and chaotic,
and the tempo of “bombastic events” has sped up and
intensified. To cite Paul Virilio (1997), this intensifica-
tion amounts to another velocity that produces a blend
of warfare and politics. It should be emphasized from
the outset that the definition of hybrid warfare involves
the elimination of the boundary between these two
planes: there is no “continuation by other means”;4 here
one represents the other’s means. This creates a paradox:
while it leads to an ever-expanding feeling that politics
has failed, we do not perceive this process as “warfare”
because the actions involved are so heterodox.
To discuss this question I divide the text into three
parts. The first shows which premises form an “attack”
in hybrid warfare, including an account of how I arrived
at this analysis ethnographically. Next, I outline the pa-
rameters of hybrid warfare and describe the theories
that define its application. Finally, I show how the ele-
ments contained in the premises of hybrid warfare come
together, resulting in the process of taking over power
through a form of ongoing warfare in Brazil.
Reverse infiltration
An ethnographic and personal note is needed to explain
how I arrived at the idea that a form of hybrid warfare
has been mobilized at various scales in Brazil—includ-
ing within the armed forces themselves—thus enabling
Bolsonaro to attain the presidency, accompanied by a
group of military figures occupying the epicenter of power.
I began carrying out ethnographic work with mili-
tary personnel in 1992, following an introductory con-
tact by a professor from my university who knew mem-
bers of the reserve forces. The latter, in turn, referred
me to the Army Command School (Escola de Comando
e Estado-Maior do Exército).5 Even at that time, their
4. As in Carl Von Clausewitz’s (2008) famous formulation
of war as “the continuation of politics by other means.”
5. An academy for training officers who become qualified
to reach the post of general, the highest in the hierarchy.
Today the title obtained by graduates is equivalent to
PhD level at universities.
43
hope of intensifying a kind of “exchange relation” with
the academic world was absolutely clear. They welcomed
me and guided me in military studies, while I, in ex-
change, helped develop this relationship with the ex-
plicit aim of coproducing ideas for the implementation
of a common project 6 for Brazil (Leirner 1997). In their
view—which, it should be noted, has changed little since
then—the country lacked elites capable of completing
this mission. They believed, therefore, that the only two
“hierarchical and disciplined” institutions capable of
initiating the conduction of this process were “them”
and “us.”
To some extent, this entire ethnographic process was
traversed by a political dimension, the “collateral effect”
of which was my interest in researching themes related
to hierarchy and warfare (Leirner 2013). For some time,
I reflected on the ethnographic process and its impacts
on how I came to perceive not only the military but also
politics and the world surrounding the state from their
point of view. One of the keys to understanding this pro-
cess is the friend/enemy dichotomy, the primary interest
of which is its multiscale operationality: it applies to a
person, an institution, a foreign armed force, a nation,
an ideology. I was always on the threshold of this dichot-
omy, alternating between the two positions, and by the
end of my research I understood that I had shifted from
an ambiguous to an enemy position.
Despite the apparent simplicity of this dichotomy,
it is necessary to consider that it is manipulated within
an encrypted world, where categories need to be learned
until they become naturalized. For this to occur, I was
subjected to a constant series of contradictory treatments,
furos (purposeful mismatches), inversions of combined
elements, attempts to impute me with deliberately con-
ceived mistakes. All of this was set out in my ethnogra-
phy, and, for this very reason, I understood that I had
not perceived how to behave like one of them (Leirner
2013), and that rather than dissimulating this recurrent
series of “tests” that were performed on me, I decided
to expose them as part of a process of attempting to in-
duce paranoia, persecution, and accusation (2013).
Finally, although there is no space here to explore this
process in greater detail, my attention was later drawn to
an ethnographic shift: an inversion of principles in which
the ethnographer became the research object. Indeed,
this occurred virtually all the time as I underwent innu-
merable sessions that seemed like interrogations. More
6. This was a native category, not always very clear for me.
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HYBRID WARFARE IN BRAZIL
than anything else, though, I perceived sometime later
that a standard operation had been established on a daily
basis, involving my interaction, always, with two mili-
tary personnel simultaneously: one playing a more un-
derstanding and friendly role, the other a more closed,
skeptical, and belligerent role.
This is a basic modus operandi, similar to the “good
cop/bad cop” strategy of police interrogations. And this
had consequences for how I began to understand the
contemporary movements of the military. As we are
now witnessing, the political-military process involves
the constant production of contradictions, dualities, and
ambiguities, that I unsurprisingly also found described
as “psychological operations” in military manuals. These
involve the application of a set of theories about which
anthropologists became increasingly aware after the im-
plementation in the United States of the Human Terrain
System (HTS)—a set of doctrines that became instituted
as the main framework of action for intelligence oper-
ations, drawing from studies in psychology, linguis-
tics, and anthropology. This directive was also partially
adopted by the General Staff of the Brazilian Army and,
from 2008 at least, some military personnel began to
publish and give lectures on “cultural intelligence,” cul-
minating more recently in “Brazilian theories of hybrid
warfare.”
The notorious engagement of anthropologists in mil-
itary forces, operations, and in intelligence agencies has
been debated by a series of academics from the second
half of the 2000s.7 However, the conversation was mostly
limited to the United States, and HTS was eventually
shut down in 2014. Nonetheless, after some years, the
military cultivated a degree of expertise in “ethnography”
and began to produce their own intelligence officers with
an ethnographic approach (Leirner 2016). This is what
reached Brazil and has remained, until now, a restricted
area seldom accessed outside the military. Beyond spe-
cialists in military sciences, few people have explored
the detailed content of these PSYOP-based theories,8
7. See, among others, Gusterson (2007); Price (2008, 2011);
González (2008, 2009); Network of Concerned Anthro-
pologists (2009); Leirner (2016).
8. “Psychological operations” (PSYOP) are operations to
convey selected information and indicators to audiences
to influence their emotions, motives, and objective rea-
soning, and ultimately the behavior of governments,
organizations, groups, and individuals. . . . PSYOP can
 Piero C. LEIRNER
which, in turn, form the basis of so-called hybrid war-
fare. Below I provide a synthesis of what these involve.
Blitzkrieg and attack
Before proceeding, it is necessary to point out that the-
ories of warfare, incorporated into military doctrines,
are widely dispersed among different armed forces all
over the world. It is not simply a question of “borrow-
ings,” but more precisely of the “positionings” that these
forces are compelled to adopt in relation to one another,
as well as to any other kind of force posing a threat to
their existence. As one colonel explained to me when
discussing military exercises in other countries, it is nat-
ural for any army to “adopt a position vis-à-vis the most
powerful, and that’s where the USA stands out, incorpo-
rating its codes and problems, since that is what they are
going to use.” It is a question, therefore, of thinking of
warfare as a set of opposed forces in articulation. Con-
nected to this point, in hybrid warfare, any certainty
concerning the boundaries between inside and outside,
state and nonstate, is also lost since the boundaries be-
tween politics and war dissolve.9
It was around the mid-2000s, basically during and
after the US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, that
the term hybrid warfare began to appear in military
documents. The first broader systemization is Frank
Hoffman’s Conflict in the 21st century (2007). In his
definition, hybrid warfare is similar to “primitive” wars,
mixing the capabilities of “conventional warfare with ir-
regular formations and tactics,” and even terrorist and
criminal techniques (2007: 29). His central point is the
blurring of state and nonstate wars, which “generalizes”
conflict: there is no longer any boundary between “war
and peace,” “civilians and military” (2007: 27), and ba-
sically it is possible to be at war without perceiving the
encourage popular discontent with the opposition’s lead-
ership and by combining persuasion with a credible threat,
degrade an adversary’s ability to conduct or sustain military
operations. They can also disrupt, confuse, and protract
the adversary’s decision-making process, undermining com-
mand and control.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho
logical_operations_(United_States).
9. Which may also lead us to other models that think of
the “hybrid,” as in the natural/social (in)distinctions
(Latour and Woolgar 1979), or even in the “cyborg” of
Donna Haraway (1991).
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44
fact. All of this points to the surpassing of a widely ac-
cepted schema (in military environments), outlined by
William Lind (2001), of fourth generation war, or irreg-
ular, asymmetric, and nonconventional war. Hybrid is
described as either a development of these or a “jump”
to the fifth generation, depending on the author.10
These notions are fundamental for understanding
what comes later—namely, the turning point in US mil-
itary doctrine, which eventually shifted from a matrix
previously based on Carl Von Clausewitz to another
based on Sun-Tzu. In short, the predominant idea is in-
fluencing the “will of the enemy,” dissuading them from
fighting until their surrender. The military apparatus
now acts in conjunction with, or even as a function of,
a “cognitive offensive” against the enemy. This is the
central point of the operations manuals: the Field Man-
uals (FM) that prescribed operations in nonconven-
tional wars, counterinsurgency, MOUT strategies, psy-
chological operations, special forces, and intelligence
and counterintelligence in asymmetric conflicts. We should
not forget that all this doctrinal paraphernalia is openly
applied in fronts constituted in the “strategic areas” sur-
rounding the major powers—that is, in the geopolitical
complexes that form areas under the indirect influence
of the so-called centers of gravity of global power.
This is an “art of war” created precisely through con-
flicts that developed from the 1960s onward—Korea,
Vietnam, the European Balkans, the Middle East, and
Central America. A crucial element contained in the
conceptual framework of the manuals is a theory, based
on the experiences and interpretations of these con-
flicts, developed by John Boyd, a former colonel of the
United States Air Force (USAF), viewed in the military
10. More schematically, I would say that for Lind the first
generation is “mass,” typical of post-Westphalian war,
with “columns” of people (for example, the Napoleonic
Wars); the second is “fire power,” rifles, machine guns
(the prototype being the First World War); the third is
mechanized, “maneuvering,” whose central axis is the
“combat vehicle” (as in the Second World War). The
fourth is computerized, involving systems known as
C3I (Command, Control, Computation and Intelligence).
For this reason, some people associate “hybrid” with the
latter (I return to this later); however, other people also
speak of “hybrid” in other terms, because it combines
computation with the “indirect approach,” “dissimula-
tion,” and so on, as well as the use of artificial intelligence
(Korybko 2015).
45
sciences as something of a genius, just like Heisenberg
was for physics with his uncertainty principle (Coram
2002). Ultimately, we could say that Boyd invented a
“cognitive map” that seeks to provide the “key” to induc-
ing chaos and uncertainty in the perception of enemies.11
The most astounding aspect is that the theory sets out
from a simple diagram, which became, perhaps, the most
important diagram for an entire series of practices and
actions that changed the “American way of war” (see
fig. 1). This is not something that I shall be able to dis-
cuss in detail here (but see Coram 2002; Ford 2010;
Osinga 2005; Richards 2012), but is still worth repro-
ducing the diagram.
The central point that emerges from this diagram is
the idea that the first two elements of the cycle should be
attacked: the enemy’s “observation and orientation.” The
aim is to introduce fractures in the latter and thereby
produce “cognitive dissonances,” enabling the attacker
to control the enemy’s decisions and attacks without
them being aware of it. In Boyd’s view, this entails a de-
velopment of two strategies and their respective tac-
tics: blitzkrieg (inspired by the German strategy in the
1940 Battle of France, using the “pincer envelopment”),
and “infiltration” (see Ford 2010: 31–36), both possible
thanks to a set of actions that produce an environment
of dissimulation, confusion, contradiction, and “con-
trolled chaos.”12 Something like this approach was tested
with some success by Israeli forces in Lebanon, in what
Eyal Weizman (2007; cited in Ssorin-Chaikov 2018) called
“rhizomatic warfare,” referencing the Deleuzian concept.
Its origin actually resides in the guerrilla movement
for the independence of Israel (Ben-Ari 1998; Leirner
2001) and, for Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, already signals
an operational matrix of hybridism: “A mixture of civil-
ian and military clothes, confusions, ambushes, codifi-
cations” at multiple levels (2018: 260).
11. A more finely detailed analysis of Boyd (who, as it hap-
pens, never wrote a book, and almost everything on him
was based on annotations, slides, presentations, and in-
terviews) can be encountered in Coram (2002); Ford
(2010); Osinga (2005); Richards (2012), as well as Boyd’s
own slides and papers.
12. I would say that there is something reminiscent of the
kind of “complementary schismogenesis” observed in the
role inversions in Naven (Bateson 1958), only deliberately
induced to produce a sensation of chaos and conflict.
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HYBRID WARFARE IN BRAZIL
The dissimulated nature demanded by these opera-
tions cannot be “passed on from end-to-end” by a chain
of command: it needs to operate at cell level to ensure
the efficacy of its encryption. Furthermore, according
to Boyd’s precepts, “speed” is a fundamental factor—
any disruptive action needs to unfold more rapidly than
the enemy’s OODA cycle for it to be successfully infil-
trated.13 At the same time, achieving this objective means
avoiding the employment of units or devices whose
speed is limited by the bureaucracy of a chain of com-
mand. For this same reason, attack on the enemy’s
OODA should be undertaken rapidly with various over-
lapping codes (in order to ensure a cover or cryptogra-
phy that does not reveal that an attack and an attacker
are at work) and in multiple directions, achieved primar-
ily through decentralized cells.
Dissimulation and overlapping are, therefore, two
central aspects of the confusion between war and peace
found at the core of hybrid warfare.14 All kinds of
“blends” thus become part of a strategic development
whose main characteristic is the production of an envi-
ronment contaminated by a “total spectrum” of disso-
nant information. Consequently, the advantage always
lies with the combatant possessing the “cryptographic
key” of the “semiotic bombs” that are launched. The end-
less contradictions perhaps correspond to the tip of a
broader strategy of multilevel interventions where the
initial source of the attack “disappears” due to the es-
tablishment of a series of operators that act “by proxy.”
These are proxies who subcontract other proxies and
so on, instituting a proxy war (Korybko 2015; Maya and
Leirner 2019). In summary, the ideal form of hybrid
warfare is one in which, theoretically, people do not even
realize that they are in the middle of a war. According
to Andrew Korybko, developing the theory of the other
USAF colonel, Richard Szafranski, this amounts to an
evolution from “full spectrum psychological war” to
13. If the reader is wondering whether or how this is con-
nected to the avalanche of events being experienced
in Brazil, where each day something new appears set
to turn the world upside down, I would argue that per-
haps something has affected the Brazilian “OODA cy-
cle” and produced a “cognitive dissonance.” It is inter-
esting to note that Virilio also saw speed as the crucial
element of modern warfare (Virilio 1997; Virilio and
Lotringer [1983] 2003).
14. Ssorin-Chaikov (2018) even uses the concept of hybrid
peace.
 Piero C. LEIRNER 46

Figure 1: OODA Loop (Boyd 1996: 3). Attribution: Patrick Edwin Moran/CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by
/3.0). The image can be found at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OODA.Boyd.svg#file

“neocortical war”: the infiltration of the population’s ple began to say, back in 2016, that Brazil was at the
cognitive apparatus.15 “epicenter of a hybrid war”:

In the Hybrid Warfare manual, the perception of the

Back to Brazil
As I stated above, none of these theories came to me by
accident. In a way, they were not just theories I read
during my years of field research with military person-
nel; they in fact produced “effects of dissonance” in my
own experience (Leirner 2013). In other words, I al-
ready knew something about this literature when peo-
15. “Neocortical warfare is warfare that strives to control or
shape the behavior of enemy organisms, but without de-
stroying the organisms. It does this by influencing, even
to the point of regulating, the consciousness, perceptions
and will of the adversary’s leadership: the enemy’s neo-
cortical system. In simple ways, neocortical warfare at-
tempts to penetrate adversaries’ recurring and simulta-
neous cycles of ‘observation, orientation, decision and
action.’ In complex ways, it strives to present the adver-
sary’s leaders—its collective brain—with perceptions, sen-
sory and cognitive data designed to result in a narrow
and controlled (or an overwhelmingly large and disori-
enting) range of calculations and evaluations. The product
of these evaluations and calculations are adversary choices
that correspond to our desired choices and the outcomes
we desire. Influencing leaders to not fight is Paramount”
(Szafranski 1994, quoted in Korybko 2015: 36).
influence of a vast “unengaged middle class” is essential
to achieving success, such that this class sooner or later
turns against its own political leaders. The process
includes everything from “support of the insurgency”
(as in Syria) to “amplification of discontent through
propaganda and political and psychological efforts to
discredit the government” (as in Brazil). And as in-
surrection grows, so too does the “intensification of
propaganda; and the psychological preparation of the
population for rebellion.” This, in sum, has been the
Brazilian case. (Escobar 2016)
Although no consensus exists on the idea of a hybrid
war in Brazil (though the term is increasingly used), I
think the appropriation of this entire military parapher-
nalia and its domestic application has indeed occurred,
particularly through its regular use in Bolsonaro’s elec-
toral campaign. The constant contradictions tirelessly
emitted during the latter were a clear signal for me of
the use of techniques described in the military psycho-
logical operations manuals.16 To better understand how
components of hybrid warfare were employed in Brazil,
16. I spoke about this in two interviews, one for the Folha
de São Paulo (https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder
/2018/10/comunicacao-de-bolsonaro-usa-tatica-militar

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47
I will synthesize the military movements as three points
that appear closely interconnected:
1. The first action occurred within the armed forces
themselves, which had been targeted for campaign
by Bolsonaro since 2014, with authorization of the
military command. For four years, a group of gen-
erals began to publish and give lectures in military
establishments, convincing their peers that Brazil
had become the target of a hybrid warfare con-
ducted by the Dilma Rousseff government itself.
After her impeachment, the war allegedly continued
to intensify, waged by the Workers’ Party, along
with NGOs, the UN, and popular and social orga-
nizations (indigenous, maroons, unions, churches).
This point connects to the next two, but it is neces-
sary to be attentive here to the fact that it involves
a process that generated a degree of “contagion”
in other state powers (especially in the judiciary)
and organizations (think tanks, the press, some uni-
versity sectors). At the base of this process is a
large “role reversal” (as the following points de-
scribe) in which military figures began to launch
“semiotic bombs” whose message was based on the
idea that Lula and the Workers’ Party were conduct-
ing a war and that they represented a “solution of
pacification.” We can observe the constant emission
of contradictory signals along with preplanned reso-
lutions. Even during the electoral campaign proper,
the candidates for president and vice president
launched mutually contradictory visions on many
issues, like political party organizations, the consti-
tution, human rights, foreign relations, the army’s
roles—that is, a series of central points for un-
derstanding the role of the state. The dissonances
produced a huge smokescreen, contradictions piled
on top of other contradictions, and in the end all
sight of who controls the process is lost. First and
foremost, the element of camouflage is introduced
here. Nobody perceived that there were military per-
sonnel acting to provoke this set of dissonances.
Among other things, this apparent chaos was attri-
buted to a rudimentary politics and absence of co-
17. “A false flag is a covert operation designed to deceive;
-de-ponta-diz-especialista.shtml), and the other for El
País (Brasil) (https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2018/10
/24/politica/1540408647_371089.html), both in Octo-
ber 2018.
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HYBRID WARFARE IN BRAZIL
ordination, one collateral effect being the idea that it
involved a legitimate campaign with no funding.
2. For these “semiotic bombs” to have an effect, so-
cial networks like WhatsApp were used as relay
stations for fake news and the production of false
flags.17 The networks are decentralized, meaning
that if one falls, others continue to function. Clas-
sically, this technique originates from commando,
special forces, and cell operations. The model in-
volves intense replication through groups with lit-
tle structure and no evident connections. This was
the main instrument for “contagion”—that is, the
replication of the aforementioned model of agency
beyond specific coteries, attaining first specific groups
and later the general public. Here, the essence is
the cryptography of form so that one never knows
who the precipitating agent of the discourse ac-
tually is. Once the first military stimulus has pro-
vided a directive, the cells begin to function alone.
Consequently, no one was able to perceive how
the military were involved from the beginning, both
in the attacks on the Workers’ Party and in polit-
ical support for Bolsonaro (and, unsurprisingly,
even now, as part of the government, these military
figures are seen as supposedly neutral agents). So
many semiotic bombs were detonated that a very
important notion in the sequence of events in Brazil
has been lost: the perception that the military acted
in the process that links the fight against a “public
enemy” to a candidacy that they themselves manip-
ulated. It is, therefore, a form of camouflage. This
was how responsibility for the perceived political
and social chaos in Brazil was channeled to their
adversaries, passing on the idea that Bolsonaro was
an “outsider” who had nothing to do with the con-
flicts that were increasingly intensifying, since he
was backed by “neutral” actors.
3. Having taken this step, the military and Bolsonaro
assumed control of the proxy wars strategy of hy-
brid warfare. They operated through other agents
in society, ranging from middle-class movements
to the so-called market. Ideas that emerged much
the deception creates the appearance of a particular
party, group, or nation being responsible for some ac-
tivity, disguising the actual source of responsibility”;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag#References.
 Piero C. LEIRNER
earlier within the barracks—that the Workers’ Party
“introduced the race, class, and gender struggles”
and “broke Brazil”—were eventually voiced by nu-
merous actors. The military achieved this effect
by infiltrating, from at least 2011, other sectors of
the state, business organizations, and the media.18
Thereafter, with greater visibility in 2016, these
ideas became consolidated and began to be repli-
cated autonomously by various agents connected
through networks in swarm-like forms (Korybko
2015). The messages began to attain a high degree
of autonomy, meaning that it became absolutely im-
possible to map either their source or their veracity,
thus establishing a cryptographic mechanism that
could only be broken from “end-to-end,” inducing
part of the population to establish an atavistic rela-
tionship with Bolsonarism. In effect, at the height
of the campaign, the language of war intensified. Al-
though very real, the cryptographic strategies made
them appear merely metaphoric. This, then, is the
essence of the hybrid warfare taking place now:
dissimulation.
Obviously, many other factors, groups, and interests
have been involved in the political and electoral process
in Brazil from 2014 to the present. However, the clear
repetition of techniques described in psychological war
and nonconventional war manuals tends to show that
from the beginning military groups unleashed a hybrid
warfare, aiming to take over the government. In Brazil,
therefore, insurgency began within the state with the
military. But what is their objective? A general question
that may be very simply answered: to win power in or-
der to promote a transformation of society through
self-replication. In this operation of “reversal” we can
see what they themselves use as the grounds for the at-
tack on the Left: ideological control and warfare.
It is important to note that this is not a schema used
in Brazil only. Prior to this case there were various
other interventions that we could call hybrid wars—as,
for example, in the so-called “springs” and “color revo-
lutions” (see Korybko 2015). However, Brazil seems to
have become a laboratory for a new modality: it set
out from the most central bodies of the state itself to
overthrow the previous government and gain power.
This has led many people in the country to use the term
coup to define the events of the last six or seven years;
18. Thus concretizing the project of the 1990s, mentioned
previously.
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48
however, a question always remains in relation to this
idea since apparently the electoral processes and institu-
tions have been “functioning normally” (citing here an
expression that became highly common). As a conse-
quence, in Brazilian hybrid warfare, insurgency was ini-
tiated precisely from those sectors of the state with the
potential to thwart it, thus setting the stage for a kind
of full-spectrum domination.
What we see as the final outcome of this process
seems, in fact, to be a hybrid form containing diverse el-
ements: today, for example, other South American coun-
tries have undergone similar processes (the most recent
case was Bolivia, preceded by Ecuador and Paraguay).
In the midst of these processes we find various elements
very familiar to Americans and Europeans: the War on
Terror, the Patriot Act, the leading role of agencies that
belong to the deep state (military, security, and intelli-
gence agencies). It is not just today, of course, that they
act in the world at large; however, hybrid warfare makes
use of nontrivial elements of knowledge of the social
and human sciences to achieve their main objective: to
force the defeat of the enemy without any apparent
war—or “without a coup”—by acting on people’s minds
and wills.
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Piero LEIRNER is Full Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the Federal University of São Carlos, and holds
a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo (2001). His work is focused on the anthropology of
war, military, and hierarchy, areas where he has published books and articles.
Piero C. Leirner
Department of Social Sciences/PPGAS
Federal University of São Carlos
Via Washington Luis KM 235
São Carlos SP
Brasil
pierolei@gmail.com

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