Brazil’s Independence Day has become the moment for the country’s nationalist, right-wing movement to take to the streets, protest the left and hoist the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag.
This year, it carried a new banner.
An American flag the size of a basketball court unfurled over several lanes of São Paulo’s main avenue on Sunday, with demonstrators holding the flag aloft as they protested the expected conviction this week of former President Jair Bolsonaro on charges of planning a coup.
The flag was a message of thanks to President Trump for trying to intervene in Mr. Bolsonaro’s case. It became the defining image of the day’s enormous protests, plastered across social media and newspaper front pages. And it may soon be at the center of a police investigation that could involve the National Football League. (More on that later.)
It was also a sign of the U.S. flag’s shifting global image as Mr. Trump transforms how America is seen abroad.
This year, right-wing demonstrators in South Korea waved American flags when protesting what they believed was a rigged election, echoing cries of “Stop the Steal” as Mr. Trump’s supporters did after the 2020 election. After Mr. Trump won last year’s election, conservative Israelis excited about stronger U.S. support for the war in Gaza hung American flags from their windows and wore red-white-and-blue skullcaps.
At the same time, in the United States, some protesters demonstrating against the Trump administration’s mass deportations have burned American flags and adopted the Mexican flag instead. That prompted Mr. Trump to sign an executive order urging the prosecution of U.S. flag burners “to the fullest extent permissible.”
But Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters and the right-wing movement in Brazil have adopted the stars and stripes with particular zeal. In cities across the nation on Sunday, right-wing protesters draped themselves in the U.S. flag, painted their faces red, white and blue and waved modified versions that combined the Brazilian and American flags.
Many vendors also sold Israeli flags. At smaller protests on the left, protesters waved Palestinian flags and banners with communist symbols.
However, it was the roughly 5,000-square-foot U.S. flag in São Paulo that commanded by far the most attention and controversy. Brazil had just begun the final week of Mr. Bolsonaro’s criminal trial, yet the national debate on Monday was in large part about that enormous flag’s starring role on a day meant to celebrate Brazil’s independence.
Amid the debate, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva posted photos on Sunday of a large Brazilian flag being carried at an Independence Day parade, writing, “Our flag is Brazil and the Brazilian people.”
Some on the right saw a conspiracy. Silas Malafaia, an evangelical pastor and right-wing political leader who called for the São Paulo protest, criticized the news media for focusing on the flag and introduced the idea, without evidence, that it was planted by left-wing activists. “Who’s going to tell me it wasn’t the left-wing group there that unfurled it?” he told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. “This whole thing was a huge coincidence.”
Yet Mr. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, embraced the image, saying it was a symbol of gratitude to Mr. Trump. “We are an educated people who know how to thank those who help us in the war to reclaim our freedoms and democracy,” he wrote on X. Eduardo Bolsonaro, a Brazilian congressman, recently moved to Texas and has made repeated trips to the White House to lobby for Mr. Trump’s intervention.
Now the giant flag could be the subject of an investigation. Two congressional leaders in Brazil on Monday formally asked the nation’s federal police to investigate the flag’s origins, noting that it appeared to be the same size of a large American flag used on the field during a National Football League game in São Paulo about 36 hours earlier.
“There are strong indications that this is the same artifact: the length-to-width proportions are practically identical, the color tones are similar” and the location and timing align, said the request by Lindbergh Farias and Pedro Campos, two leftist members of Congress. “Given the complex and costly logistics of transporting a flag of such size, there is a concrete likelihood that the same piece was reused.”
The politicians claimed that if the flag was given to supporters by the N.F.L. or another international company, it would violate Brazilian laws against the participation of foreign entities in politics in Brazil. They asked the police to analyze images of the flag and depose N.F.L. officials.
Brazil’s federal police and an N.F.L. spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Jack Nicas is The Times’s Mexico City bureau chief, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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