American politics-watchers tend to look across the Atlantic, to Europe, for analogies to our own history. But the better analogy has never been to the US’s east, but to our south, in the Latin American democracies. It is those countries – our hemispheric neighbors – that share more of the US’s foundational pathologies.

Like us, they were founded on early violence that casts long shadows over our subsequent attempts at equality and pluralism: chattel slavery and the dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. Like us, they are host to racially and religiously heterogenous populations, aspiring to national projects based not so much in shared ethnic identity as in shared ideals. And like us, these Latin American nations have an authoritarian streak, one that has historically been encouraged, both tacitly and explicitly, by the US itself.

So in one sense, you can mark the events of Sunday, 8 January, in the Brazilian capital of Brasília, as another instance in our nations’ grim twinning: as far-right supporters of Brazil’s ousted ex-president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the main buildings of the federal government’s three branches – smashing windows, stealing and vandalizing – it seemed that Brazil has had its own January 6 insurrection.

And the would-be beneficiary of the botched coup, the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, is in the US himself, shacking up in Orlando at the behest of the man who inspired January 6, former US president Donald Trump. On Monday, the day after the riot, Bolsonaro reportedly checked into a Florida hospital, supposedly complaining of stomach pains.

Information about the nature of the Brazilian putsch, and the extent to which rightwing Brazilian elites were involved, is still emerging. It’s not clear, for instance, how much Bolsonaro himself knew about the violence ahead of time; it’s not clear how much the rioters were in communication with Bolsonaro, either before the former president fled the country last month, or in the weeks since, from his station in Florida. It’s not clear whether Bolsonaro had allies in the legal establishment, as Trump did, who were willing to bend the law or help form post-hoc justifications for a coup. It’s not clear, as it isn’t clear in the United States, how much coordination there was between the booted thugs and their ringleaders, who did the rioting on Sunday, and the suit-wearing snakes in Bolsonaro’s camp. It’s clear that there was a riot and it’s clear that it was meant to restore a far-right leader to power after an election that he lost fair and square. It’s not clear just how much plausible deniability the Florida man now has.

Bolsonaro has long reminded American observers of Trump, and not only for his far-right politics and indifference to democratic checks on his own power. When he was sworn in in 2019, after a corruption scandal and heated partisan impeachment swept his leftwing predecessor out of office, Bolsonaro offended Brazilians as much with his policy positions as with his foul mouth.

He seemed perpetually on, always inciting anger and hatred at outsiders, but also always trying to shock and titillate his cadres of frighteningly loyal fans – something like a cross between Mussolini and Howard Stern. After an unremarkable career as a legislator, when he ascended into national prominence, he was suddenly churning out scandalous little soundbites. He said, “I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son.” He declared a female political rival “not worth raping”. He praised the military dictatorship, called for the torture of drug dealers and encouraged violence from the police forces. “A policeman who doesn’t kill”, he once said, “isn’t a policeman.” In pictures with his fans, Donald Trump flashes a gleaming grin and shoots the camera a thumbs-up. Bolsonaro likes to pose for pictures making a gesture like he’s holding a machine gun.

The violence, too, had some uncanny similarities. The rioters in Brasília stormed the government buildings after camping outside military headquarters, evidently hoping to encourage a coup. When the army failed to join them, they marched to the presidential, congressional and supreme court buildings, carrying Brazilian flags, many of them decked out in the far-right’s colors of yellow and green.

While the January 6 rioters had a particular procedure they were trying to disrupt, and a particular person – Mike Pence – they were attempting to intimidate and persuade, the Brazilian rioters seem to have been less direct in their violence, perhaps hoping to force a transfer of power by the mere force of their presence. Like their American counterparts, they trashed the buildings and pissed on the floor; the Guardian’s Tom Phillips reported that members of the mob defecated in the presidential press room, perhaps in a signal of Bolsonaro’s attitude toward the media. And like the Americans, they seem to have had at least tacit support from the police. If the American mob was disproportionately full of cops and veterans, the Brazilian mob was met with conspicuously little resistance from the federal district’s security forces. The governor of Brasília, a Bolsonaro ally, has been suspended from his office by the supreme court over his suspected role in aiding the riot.

But one massive difference is in how the Brazilians have responded to this threat to their democracy. In the aftermath of the January 6 violence, the Biden administration reportedly balked at pursuing an actual impeachment of Donald Trump, stymying Democrats in the House who wanted to pursue an aggressive accountability strategy; in the years since, the Department of Justice has repeatedly dragged its feet, passed the buck, and seemed unable or unwilling to do anything other than passively allow Trump and his inner circle to sabotage the democratic process with impunity.

Not so with the Brazilians. The new leftist president, Lula de Silva, immediately denounced the mob as “neo-fascists,” and was willing, with clarity and candor that would be unthinkable in an American politician, to honestly tell his countrymen that they cannot trust all of the police forces. By Monday, photos were being published that purported to show the Brazilian rioters in police custody in a huge warehouse. The federal Brazilian forces, said David Adler of Progressive International, were “interrogating insurrectionists one by one and drawing up charges for their crimes”. The show of police force against rightwing violence, and the promise of legal accountability for the crimes of conservatives, served as a stark reminder: there are lots of ways that Brazil is nothing like America at all.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist