Laís Martins, a Brazilian freelance journalist, was on vacation. She had been covering a sharply contested presidential election, followed by tense protests and unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.

On Sunday, she started to get text messages: Supporters of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro had attacked government buildings in Brasília, the country’s capital, destroying property and vandalizing art and offices of legislators, the presidency and the Supreme Court, demanding that Bolsonaro be reinstated.

When Martins got the first text, “I was a bit surprised,” she said.

“My second thought is that we can’t say this is surprising because we have seen this movement building up since the elections and more broadly for the past four years when Bolsonaro was in power,” she added.

READ MORE: Brazilians demand retribution, ‘no amnesty’ against Bolsonaro supporters

The riot in Brazil immediately drew comparisons to the Jan. 6 attack in the United States. Bolsonaro and former President Donald Trump had each contested their electoral defeats, amplifying unsupported conspiracy theories of voter fraud. In the U.S., Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes and overturn the 2020 election.

The Brasília riot was not simply a repeat of the events in the U.S., experts say – it was different in important ways that are unique to Brazil. However, it also illuminates how far-right movements may be influencing politics and culture across borders.

What is different about the Brazil attack?

Starting with a coup in 1964, Brazil was under military dictatorship for more than two decades before democracy was restored. Bolsonaro has been at the forefront of a movement to re-cast the military government as benevolent and necessary to save the country from communism.

In Brazil, “democracy is relatively young,” said Andre Pagliarini, a history professor at Hampden-Sydney College. “This makes the threat of an incident [like the Brasília riot] feel more dangerous, from my perspective, because there is a living memory of military intervention in a way there simply isn’t in the U.S.”

Martins agrees, and said the Brasília attack may be more serious for that country than Jan. 6 was for the U.S.

“I would say the attack in Brazil was worse because they attacked all three of the biggest democratic institutions. So it wasn’t only an attack on the Capitol like in the U.S. It was kind of a message that they don’t believe in any of the democratic institutions that control our country.”

While Bolsonaro was in power, he weakened protections for indigenous and LGBTQ people, attacked the courts, threatened elections and praised the country’s past military dictatorship. Pagliarini argued that the Brasília riot shows that the “anti-democratic wave” that grew under the former president’s rule has now “transcended” him.

READ MORE: Brazilian authorities vow to protect democracy, punish pro-Bolsonaro rioters

The riot “wasn’t about forestalling a[n election] certification, a swearing-in ceremony or anything like that because it’s already done. It was more about signaling a rejection of a democratic outcome they abhor,” Pagliarini said.

While the experts who spoke with PBS NewsHour said the risk to democracy had in some ways been greater for Brazil, their government’s response in the immediate aftermath was actually more robust than in the U.S., due to who was in charge of the country at the time – Bolsonaro’s leftist successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“The most important difference is that Lula is in power,” says Pagliarini.

Whereas the Jan. 6 attack had flowed from a Trump rally where the president in power continued to urge the overturning of the election, many of the Brasília rioters were demanding the military intervene to re-install Bolsonaro, who had already left the country for a stay in Florida.

“Jan. 6 occurred in a strange sort of limbo in which Trump was in power as a lame duck, disinterested in really investigating what happened, whereas in Brazil, the Lula administration immediately launched a coordinated response to the invasions. Hundreds of arrests were made on the day, for example, which will likely benefit ongoing investigations,” Pagliarini said.

Are there connections between the Brazilian and American attacks?

Similarities between right-wing movements that led to Jan. 6 and the Brasília attack do exist, and they go beyond the two countries.

“The attack on the [U.S.] Capitol is a point of inspiration, and the Brazilian extreme right, as well as the global extreme right, is very attentive to Trumpism and the alt-right,” said Odilon Caldeira Neto, a history professor at Brazil’s Federal University of Juiz de Fora.

Caldeira Neto also cited the influence of former Trump adviser and media personality Steve Bannon on Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far right.

When Trump and Bolsonaro were in office, the two were close allies. Bolsonaro was dubbed by some as the “Trump of the tropics” for the way his rhetoric and policies lined up with the former American president. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, both Trump and Bolsonaro expressed disdain and opposed restrictions such as lockdowns.

Eduardo, Bolsonaro’s son who’s a member of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, has supported Bannon’s international populist movement. Bannon, too, has prominently amplified Trump’s election lies in 2020 and Bolsonaro’s claims about rigged voting machines. After Sunday’s rioting in Brasília, Bannon called the protesters “Brazilian freedom fighters” in a video on social media.

“Steve Bannon is one of the inspirations of the Brazilian extreme right, especially Bolsonarism,” Caldeira Neto said. “Bannon’s nods to Brazil, and the notion that something ‘revolutionary’ was occurring, is a strong indication of this relationship.”

The relationship between the Brazilian and American right goes beyond individuals; it is also an exchange of ideas. Pagliarini cautioned that much is unknown about whether there was “some formal coordination happening” between the Brasília riot and right-wing figures in the U.S., though he believes the connection to be “mostly aesthetic.”

In her reporting, Martins has explored the increasing interest in guns in Brazil, something that has not historically been part of the culture but was encouraged by Bolsonaro.

She said that only five years ago, only a handful of Brazilians believed in firearm ownership, mostly for sport shooting or hunting. There was a national consensus that guns and public safety were “a monopoly of the public security forces.”

But Bolsonaro “was campaigning on this idea of giving guns to people for their self-defense and their own choice. I think this is already kind of reproducing the idea you have in the U.S. that people are allowed to own guns,” Martins said, adding that it has become mainstream there now to go to the shooting range on the weekend.

READ MORE: Bolsonaro supporters storm Brazil’s presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court

These links are not exclusive to the United States and Brazil. Experts have observed that conspiracy theories and violent extremism on the far right in the U.S. have found their way into the discourse of other countries. Last year, authorities arrested more than a dozen far-right extremists in Germany for plotting to overthrow the government. They were in part inspired by QAnon — an unfounded conspiracy theory embraced by Trump that alleges the country is run by satanic pedophiles and child sex traffickers.

Extremists in the U.S. have also been influenced by ideas from abroad. A photo of Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, showed the white supremacist wearing the flags of apartheid South Africa and white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, which is now known as Zimbabwe.

Martins said that after Brazil’s election passed and Lula took office that perhaps people let down their guard despite everything leading up to the attack. “It goes to show that we can’t stop thinking about extremism, especially far-right extremism,” she said.