This is The Guardian.
Today, the downfall of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's far-right populist.
A week after the inauguration of Brazil's left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
A violent mob broke into the presidential palace and ransacked the Supreme Court and the Brazilian Congress.
This was January 2023, almost exactly two years since Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol.
It felt eerily familiar.
The insurrectionists were supporters of Jair Bolsonaro.
the far-right populist who'd narrowly lost to Lula in the general election.
Tom Phillips was there.
He's the Guardian's Latin America correspondent.
I remember on January the 9th going into Congress,
into the Presidential Palace and into the Supreme Court to witness those scenes of destruction,
shattered glass everywhere, furniture thrown all over the place, graffiti on the walls.
It looked like the scene of a natural disaster, like a tsunami had swept through these buildings.
Little did he know then just how close Brazil came to losing its democracy.
It was obvious that Brazil's democratic institutions had come under a very severe attack.
But what we didn't know
as we moved around those broken buildings was that that was the culmination of a plot that had begun a year and a half earlier that involved a massive disinformation campaign.
Special Forces assassins and some of the most powerful people in Brazilian politics and the armed forces trying to bring down Brazilian democracy 40 years after it was reclaimed following the dictatorship.
Now, Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.