Jair Bolsonaro celebrates an unprecedented 10-minute military parade in Brasilia

A war tank passes in front of the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, during a parade ordered by Bolsonaro on Tuesday.Eraldo Peres / AP

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tried to turn a formal military action into a political act on Tuesday.

Together with ministers and commanders of the Armed Forces, he participated in the parade of a few dozen tanks and armored vehicles in front of the Planalto Palace, the government headquarters in Brasilia.

There were less than 50 cars in total.

Officially, the information was that the military parade would serve to deliver an invitation to Bolsonaro to accompany the training of 2,500 soldiers in Formosa, in the state of Goiás, 82 kilometers from Brasilia.

The operation has been carried out annually since 1988. Officials are often invited to the event, but this was the first time that a president received the document in front of a small military parade.

The order for it to be carried out was Bolsonaro himself.

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The parade, however, lasted less than ten minutes.

Many residents of Brasilia did not even know that there would be military tanks on the street.

The absence of his vice president, retired General Hamilton Mourão, was also felt.

He and Bolsonaro, both former Army graduates, have a strained relationship and have shown differences of.

In recent weeks, the president and his deputy have hardly met.

The event was broadcast on Bolsonaro's social networks and was accompanied by around 100 protesters who stood in the Três Poderes square, in front of the Meseta.

Many of them shouted slogans, such as our "flag will never be red", alluding to the Brazilian left parties, such as the PT.

The act coincided with the vote in the Chamber of Deputies on a proposal for a constitutional amendment that reinstates a printed vote, one of Bolsonaro's flagships. The chances of approval of the project are almost nil. For this reason, the president's political blitzkrieg, who often refers to the forces as "my army," was seen as a provocation. "The Armed Forces can never be used to intimidate their population, their adversaries, attack the legitimately constituted opposition," said the president of the Parliamentary Investigation Commission of the Pandemic, Senator Omar Aziz. The commission has become the scourge of Bolsonaro's strategy against covid-19.

The last time that the troops lined up in Brasilia outside of commemorative dates, such as the Independence of Brazil or the Proclamation of the Republic, was in 1984. On that occasion, vehicles and military personnel occupied the surroundings of the National Congress before the vote of the amendment of Diretas Já, which requested the return of the direct vote to the Presidency of the Republic.

The order had been given by the president, general and dictator João Figueiredo.

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Brasilia, which receives protests and political events almost every day, barely noticed the military convoy.

Most of the vehicles and professionals involved in the training came from Rio de Janeiro.

The passage through the capital was not in the initial itinerary, since the shortest route between Rio, on the southeast coast, and the city of Goiás, in the Midwest, does not pass there.

Opposition parties even filed a petition in the Supreme Court for the military event to be banned, but it was rejected.

On the ramp, along with Bolsonaro, were his main ministers, such as Walter Braga Netto (Defense), Carlos França (Foreign Relations), Paulo Guedes (Economy) and Marcelo Queiroga (Health).

After the event, Bolsonaro held a ministerial meeting.

Meanwhile, a few kilometers from the Planalto, in the Chamber, the deputies were preparing to vote the Proposal for the Reform of the Constitution (PEC) by printed vote.

The bill, drafted by government deputy Bia Kicis, has already been rejected by the Special Commission that analyzed the issue.

Even so, the president of the Chamber, Arthur Lira, took it to the plenary session because he understood that it needed to be analyzed by all the parliamentarians.

The chances of approval are reduced, since it needs 308 votes from 513 deputies and 15 of the 24 parties represented in the Legislature have already expressed themselves against the proposal.

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