For years now, politics in Brazil have been the fun-house-mirror version of those in the United States. The dynamic was never plainer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally charged the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 co-conspirators, with crimes connected to a sprawling plan to overthrow the nation’s democracy and hang on to power after losing an election in October of 2022.

That the charges against Bolsonaro sound familiar to Americans is no coincidence. Bolsonaro consulted with figures in Donald Trump’s orbit in pursuit of his election-denial strategy. But the indictment against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader went much further than Trump did, allegedly bringing high-ranking military officers into a coup plot and signing off on a plan to have prominent political opponents murdered.

In this, as in so many things, Bolsonaro comes across as a cruder, more thuggish version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, shrewdly, to try to retain his electoral viability after his January 6 defeat; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He attempted so violent a power grab that the institutional immune system tasked with protecting Brazil’s democracy was shocked into overdrive.

The distortion in the mirror is most pronounced with regard to this institutional response. While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030. Interestingly, that decision wasn’t even handed down as a consequence of the attempted coup itself, but of Bolsonaro’s abuse of official acts to promote himself as a candidate, as well as his insistence on casting doubt, without evidence, on the fairness of the election.

The U.S. might have done the same thing. In December 2023, Colorado’s secretary of state refused to allow Trump’s name on the state’s primary ballot, following the state supreme court’s judgment that his role in the events of January 6, 2021, rendered him ineligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the move, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.

My home country, Venezuela, faced a roughly analogous situation in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez moved to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution, which contained no provision for him to do so. Cowed, the supreme court allowed him to go ahead. Venezuela’s then–chief justice, Cecilia Sosa, wrote a furious resignation letter, saying that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being murdered.” The result in Venezuela was the same as that in the United States: The rule of law was dead.

I can’t help but wish that U.S. jurists had shown the nerve of their Brazilian counterparts. In their charging documents against Bolsonaro, Brazil’s prosecutors don’t mumble technicalities: They charge him with attempting a coup d’état, which is what he did. Brazilian law enforcement didn’t tie itself up in knots appointing special counsels; the attorney general, Paulo Gonet, announced the charges himself. The conspiracy “had as leaders the president of the Republic himself and his candidate for vice president, General Braga Neto. Both accepted, encouraged, and carried out acts classified in criminal statutes as attacks on the … independence of the powers and the democratic rule of law,” Gonet said.

[Anne Applebaum: What rioters in Brazil learn from Americans]

Contrast that with the proceduralism at the core of the case against President Trump. After an interminable delay that ultimately rendered the entire exercise moot, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump not for trying to overthrow the government but for “conspiring to obstruct the official proceeding” (that would lead him to lose power) as well as “conspiring to defraud the United States”—a crime so abstract that only a constitutional lawyer knows what it actually means.

In ruling Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office, Brazil’s elections court did not engage in lengthy disquisitions on 19th-century jurisprudence, as the U.S. Supreme Court did in the Colorado case: They said that he had serially abused his power, which is what he did, and which is what renders him unfit for office. This bluntness, this willingness to call a spade a spade, was something the American republic, for all its institutional sophistication, seemed unable to match.

As recently as 2014, one would have been hard-pressed to find anyone willing to forecast that Brazil’s institutions would prove more effective than those of the United States at protecting democracy from populist menace. Maybe Brazilians are just more comfortable with, and accustomed to, holding national leaders to account: The current center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, spent more than two years in prison for corruption after his last stint in power. (Lula was ultimately freed and allowed to stand for office again when courts ruled that the judge in his initial prosecution was biased.) Or maybe it was the speed of response: Rather than waiting months or years to move against the rioters who took over the country’s governing institutions, the Brazilian police started jailing them and investigating the coup conspiracy almost immediately after it took place.

But the biggest difference is that dictatorship is a much more real menace in Brazil, a country that democratized only in the 1980s, than it is in a country that’s never experienced it. Older Brazilians carry the scars, in many cases literal ones, of their fight against dictatorship. This fight for them is visceral in a way it isn’t—yet—for Americans.

Brazil has demonstrated how democracies that value themselves defend themselves. America could have done the same.

A month after the January 6 insurrection, a page appeared on the Justice Department’s website naming the defendants charged for their alleged role in the Capitol riot. The list remained in place over the next four years, ballooning as the department brought charges against hundreds of people. Then, shortly after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, it vanished.

Trump has seized on his reelection as an opportunity to rewrite the story of January 6. Just hours after he assumed the presidency, he granted pardons and commutations to the insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, calling their prosecutions a “grave national injustice.” The deletion of the Justice Department’s page on January 6 is a triumph for the insurrectionists whose crimes were erased, and for Republicans more generally, many of whom would simply rather not talk about the late unpleasantness.

But in the long term, the truth of what happened will prove difficult to bury. The roughly six hours during which rioters breached the Capitol are some of the most exhaustively documented in recent history, thanks to the many participants who filmed themselves in action and the investigative efforts of both the Justice Department and the House January 6 committee. Even Trump can’t wipe that away.

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

Trump’s proclamation announcing the January 6 pardons portrays the grant of clemency as the beginning of a “process of national reconciliation,” a parody of the typical language of presidential mercy. He has demanded that the Justice Department drop all ongoing investigations into rioters not yet charged and placed the office that had carried out those prosecutions under the control of Ed Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer who himself tweeted that he was at the Capitol the day of the insurrection. Days into Trump’s second term, when the president attended a rally in Las Vegas, standing behind him was Stewart Rhodes—the leader of the Oath Keepers and a prominent presence on January 6, who had just received a commutation of his 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy.

In this upside-down version of January 6, the prosecutions were the crime, not the coup attempt. And, despite Trump’s smug assertion of “reconciliation,” his administration is now retaliating against the civil servants who played a role in prosecuting the insurrectionists. The Justice Department has fired 15 low-level prosecutors who worked on the January 6 cases, along with officials assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of Trump. Thousands of FBI employees who worked on the January 6 investigations—by many metrics, the largest investigative effort in the bureau’s history—are also waiting to discover whether they, too, will be purged.

The disappearance of the Justice Department’s page on the insurrection, which had expanded to include not just information on defendants and charges but also a growing list of convictions and criminal sentences, was a particularly blunt metaphor for this erasure of history. On January 27, the page was replaced with a “Page not found” message. “This is a huge victory for J6ers,” Brandon Straka, a pro-Trump social-media influencer who himself received a pardon for his role on January 6, wrote on X. “This site was one of countless weapons of harassment used by the federal government to make life impossible for its targets from J6.”

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

This is the politics of forgetting, and the United States is no stranger to it. David Blight, an American-history professor at Yale, has argued that January 6 is a novel twist on the “Lost Cause”—the Confederate narrative of noble sacrifice that fueled successful white resistance to multiracial democracy in the years after the Civil War. The original Lost Cause strengthened into a racist political force over decades. When I reached out to Blight to discuss the comparison, he seemed unnerved by how quickly the memory of January 6 had shifted toward revisionism. “We’re in an unusual moment where evidence doesn’t seem to make any difference,” he told me. “It’s in that world that January 6 is being processed as a historical marker.”

But that evidence does still exist. And among the dissenters to this enforced forgetting are the people who have spent the most time reviewing it: the judges. Trump’s actions “will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote, reluctantly acknowledging that she had no ability to block the Justice Department from tossing out a January 6 defendant’s case. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens.”

And it will be preserved, because those documents are not under the control of the Trump administration. PACER, the public system used by the federal courts to file legal documents, is run by the judicial branch. There is no mechanism through which a vengeful president can bar access to the thousands upon thousands of pages of court filings docketed in the hundreds and hundreds of charged January 6 cases—including the case against Trump. Days after the Justice Department deleted the database of rioters from its website, one judge in a January 6 case used his order dismissing the charges to memorialize the same resource that the department had scrubbed, attaching the almost 140-page spreadsheet as an appendix. That material is all publicly available, and it is not going away, whatever Trump says about injustice or reconciliation.

The same is true of the House January 6 committee’s work—the hours of hearings convened and broadcast as well as the nearly 900-page final report and its extensive compilation of evidence and depositions. It’s all freely accessible on the website of the Government Publishing Office, a legislative agency, and easily downloaded by anyone who wants to keep ahold of it. Outside the government, ProPublica retains an extensive database of videos posted to the defunct social-media platform Parler by rioters on January 6, documenting the siege of the Capitol minute by minute. NPR hosts a database of defendants that reproduces the information the Justice Department tried to delete.

There are more guerrilla-style efforts at archiving, too. As the NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly has documented, the January 6 investigation was shaped by the volunteer efforts of ordinary people who mobilized online to sort through video and social-media posts and send tips to the FBI. Now some of that same energy has turned toward preserving the record. I spoke with one person who participated in those early crowdsourcing projects and is now maintaining a network of bare-bones websites where visitors can access a range of January 6 material, including court documents and videos posted on social media. Another collective is working to save video evidence on Archive.org and download the full spread of court documents. At the time I reached out, this group estimated that about 50,000 pages had been preserved this way so far.

[Read: The January 6er who left Trumpism]

Struggles over historical memory are ultimately “about the power of the story and who gets to control it,” Blight told me, rather than the strength of the facts. And for those who were attacked or threatened on January 6, or who have faced attacks since for their efforts to uncover what happened and bring the perpetrators to justice, the sudden revision of the story without regard for facts has done its own damage. “I get so many messages, ‘Harry, you’re a hero.’ I don’t want to be a hero,” Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who protected Congress on January 6, told The New York Times. “I want accountability.”

Still, the existence of a robust historical record can eventually make a difference. Blight pointed to the white-supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the true violence of which was ignored for nearly a century until scholars began looking through the archive and publishing their findings. Today, it is widely recognized for what it was: a successful assault on multiracial democracy, carried out by a violent mob.

“You can almost predict that with that kind of evidence, as long as it’s not suppressed or destroyed,” historians will one day be able to tell the truth of what happened, Blight said. As the canard goes, history may be written by the victors. But in the long term—perhaps the very long term—it is also written by the people who kept the documents.