The scenes out of Brazil this past week have drawn comparisons to the Donald Trump–induced US Capitol riot of 2021, with hundreds of supporters of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro storming and vandalizing Brazil’s congress, supreme court, and presidential palace, convinced that left-wing president Lula da Silva didn’t really win the election.

But we should remember that January 6 wasn’t the first of the coup attempts that have sprung up in reaction to every inch forward of Latin America’s second Pink Tide. That distinction belongs, rather, to the successful Bolivian coup of 2019, which was enabled, backed, and legitimized by the same US press outlets decrying Trump and his supporters’ actions and by US-dominated institutions like the Organization of American States (OAS).

Sunday’s events followed a different course than past examples of right-wing coups in Brazil. In the most recent such case, the Brazilian right took power thanks to a legal coup, in which accusations of fiscal irresponsibility and trumped-up corruption charges were used to impeach then-sitting president Dilma Rousseff and imprison current president Lula before he could launch a second presidential campaign. In times past, the abrogation of Brazil’s democracy had been principally a matter of the military seizing power.