If $10 billion or so were removed from the national debt each time a media outlet said that Sunday’s riot in Brasilia “echoes” the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, we would be well on the way toward achieving sound public finances. As I argue over at Reason, however, if you take into account the local tradition of political mob violence, the attack against Brazilian government buildings by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro is more reminiscent of the country’s general strike in May 2017 than of the bizarre fracas in Washington two years ago.

At the time, Brazilian union leaders, the Communist Party, and current president Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva’s own Workers’ Party attempted to bring down the floundering government of Michel Temer, a left-winger who had replaced the impeached Dilma Rousseff in 2016 (Temer had been Rousseff’s vice-president). The strike’s organizers claimed that Temer was an illegitimate president with no right to implement a “neoliberal” agenda of reform—and very mild reform at that— of the country’s notoriously inflexible labor laws and its farcical pension schemes. Needless to say, the strikers’ methods, which were cheered by both Da Silva and Rousseff, were hardly peaceful.

As Reuters reported on the evening of May 24, 2017:

“Amid frequent clashes with police, demonstrators mobilized by Brazil’s main labor unions broke into several ministries, causing widespread damage and setting fire to the agriculture ministry, according to GloboNews. All ministry buildings were subsequently evacuated and civil servants sent home.”

That may sound strikingly familiar to reports coming out of Brasilia on Sunday. But I bet that, at the time, you didn’t hear much about the sword of Damocles hanging over Brazilian democracy on MSNBC.