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Shunammite explodes.

"

How else can you explain this?"

Sunamita, 29, has been in the most important building in Brazil, the Planalto Palace, since seven in the morning.

He was met with a sea of ​​shattered glass and all kinds of vandalism.

"There was broken glass everywhere, there was garbage, there was blood!", the operator tells EL MUNDO on a dystopian morning in the heart of the Plaza de los Tres Poderes, assaulted on Sunday by a mob of thousands of extreme Bolsonaristas .

The legislative, judicial and executive powers in the same square, designed by the architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the 50s. An idea, a vision, which paradoxically facilitated an unfeasible operation in other capitals:

.

While Sunamita and her companions cleaned the headquarters of the Government - and the same thing happened in Congress and the Federal Supreme Court - the police took control of the Bolsonaro camp in front of the Army Headquarters, some eight kilometers away.

Assault on institutions in Brazil

Latin America.

Blow to democracy in Brazil: why the country has reached this abyss

• Drafting: NURIA LOPEZ

Blow to democracy in Brazil: why the country has reached this abyss

Analysis.

From the Capitol to Brasilia: America, the largest powder keg on the planet

• Writing: DANIEL LOZANO

From the Capitol to Brasilia: America, the largest powder keg on the planet

The morning, gray, humid and barely warm, saw hundreds and hundreds of people getting on buses or their own vehicles.

A petite redheaded woman was screaming so that the police would allow her to stay there.

She even appealed to the resource of putting together a heart with her fingers, but the security personnel, friendly and temperate, were inflexible.

Offering a heart as a pledge of peace from extreme Bolsonarism

.

The wild and unapproachable polarization prevents it.

There is a former president, Jair Bolsonaro, whom Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his successor, described as "genocidal" this Sunday.

A disoriented ex-president: the more radical wing of his voters is disappointed with him and is looking for a new leader, while the moderate wing is seeking to distance himself from what Brazilian television defined as a "toxic politician."

That Bolsonaro spent some time on December 30 at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kissimmee, on the outskirts of the US city of Orlando, may seem anecdote, but in his case it is category:

With that photo at the gates of Disney World, he is seeking to set precedents that he did not attack democracy.

"Depredations and invasions of public buildings such as those that occurred today, as well as those practiced by the left in 2013 and 2017, are beyond the norm," Bolsonaro wrote on his social networks, a statement that sounds very little given the magnitude of what happened. , but that people from his party like the deputy Carla Zambelli generate indignation.

Zambelli became world famous by chasing a man with a gun in hand on the afternoon of October 30, the runoff election won by Lula by a tight 50.9 to 49.1 percent, a result that radical Bolsonarism attributes to fraud. of which there is no proof.

Weeks later, at a dinner with Bolsonaro and other leaders, Zambelli asked the still president for instructions to guide the tens of thousands of people who demonstrated in front of the military barracks chanting a very disturbingly simple slogan:

.

Bolsonaro jerked at the request.

Furious, he said that he had no instructions to give because no one had been summoned.

Belatedly, the president began to take into account the advice he had received throughout his term in ultra-secret meetings with members of

, which in Brazil has such great power that it can be said that it co-governs with the President.

Something that Brazilians owe to the Constitution sanctioned in 1988.

The STF repeatedly stopped Bolsonaro's authoritarian deviations, especially during the pandemic, when the president wanted to get the Armed Forces out into the streets.

"And you know how it starts, but not how it ends," a man at the heart of those conversations with the unpredictable president told EL MUNDO.

To understand how to deal with it, members of the STF listened to advice from former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

," the two-time Brazilian president told them.

The STF sought a rapprochement with the Armed Forces to distance them from the stigmatization of Bolsonarismo and have a hand-to-hand dialogue.

There were also multiple meetings with religious leaders of all confessions to weave a containment network in case Bolsonaro accelerated towards disaster.

"From the beginning we realized that Bolsonaro would be a president very contrary to the institutions, that he would want to crush Congress and the Justice," explained the man, who asked to remain anonymous to speak.

In those meetings, different members of the STF warned the president of the legal dangers he was running when he tried to push the limits and question the electoral system.

Those dangers continue:

. "

This Monday, Brazilian television was already analyzing the scope of the extradition treaty with the United States.

But the dangers are also enormous for Lula, who at 77 finds himself under stress as perhaps never before in his political life, even more so than during the 581 days he spent in prison for corruption.

"These cops aren't doing their job!"

, reproached, furious, the president, who has been under the pressure of extremism for weeks.

First, with the serious riots that devastated Brasilia the day he was certified as president-elect, and then, with the discovery of a truck bomb that was supposed to explode at the airport in the country's capital.

Lula today does not have an opposition leader, no matter how tough and inflexible he may be, with whom to deal.

What she has in front of her is a diffuse movement and an extreme profile at the same time.

On the day of his inauguration, January 1, he made some gesture of conciliation, some hand extended to Bolsonaro's 60 million voters, but most of the time he was very harsh with the former president and his followers.

Today he no longer has room to conciliate, and in the government there is regret for not having acted sooner against the Bolsonaro camps, which it was believed would dissolve little by little.

That implies more tension, more confrontation, more polarization.

And four years like that are four very long years.

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