RIO DE JANEIRO The tanks began to roll into Rio de Janeiro on the morning of April 1, 1964, some of them from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, others from So Paulo. The Brazilian capital had moved to Braslia, the new planned city in the countrys interior, a few years prior, but Rio remained the effective center of power, and somewhere in the city, President Joo Goulart was clinging to power.

Goulart, a leftist who became president in 1961, had spent the days prior on the phone with a top military officer, Gen. Amaury Kruel. The general was hoping to prevent the collapse of Brazils government by urging Jango, as Goulart was known to Brazilians, to fire prominent leftist officials and institute a slate of reforms that would please both the military and the centrist establishment in Congress that opposed Goularts shifts to the left.

Goulart refused. The military marched.

By the next morning, Goulart had fled to Porto Alegre. A few days later, he was in Uruguay. Brazils democracy had collapsed.

Five decades later, on the evening of Oct. 28, 2018, members of the Brazilian military were parading through the streets of Rio again. Green Army jeeps honked their horns and flashed their lights; soldiers stood atop them as flag-waving crowds cheered their arrival.

This time, though, the military was not coming to depose a president; it was rolling through celebrations of a new one. Jair Bolsonaro , a federal congressman and former Army captain, had just won the election to become Brazils 38th president . (The military later denied it was a parade , saying the soldiers were returning from a mission meant to guarantee the election; a video shot by a journalist depicted, lets call it, a festive procession.)

What a nightmare, Argentine journalist Diego Iglesias tweeted in Spanish of the scene.

Bolsonaro, whose presidency will begin with a New Years Day inaugural ceremony in Braslia, has routinely praised Brazils military dictatorship , which gave way to the return of democratic governance in 1985. And his rise to power shares many similarities with the military regimes: Bolsonaro has seized on widespread discontent and fatigue with an incapable and corrupt political establishment, on fervid opposition to a leftist party that had spent more than a decade in power, on an economic collapse that Brazil has only slowly begun to escape, and on rising levels of violent crime.

And while he has pitched his surge to power as the result of a populist revolt, his base of support mirrors that of the old coup masters: wealthy financial elites , segments of the population willing to trade the rights and lives of the poor and marginalized for their own safety and economic prosperity, and traditional parties and politicians who refuse to acknowledge their own roles in creating the monster before folding themselves into his arms.