Erdoğan and Putin read Brazil’s protests as Western destabilization plots.

Evidence

TURKISH PRESIDENT RECEP TAYYIP ERDOĞAN placed a phone call to President Dilma Rousseff. Brazil, especially under the Workers’ Party, sought to maintain good relations with all other countries in the “developing” world, and she knew him well after a visit to Istanbul in 2011. She took the call, of course. He wanted to warn her. He believed that something very strange was happening with these digitally coordinated mass protests, and he suspected that both countries—Turkey and Brazil—were the target of some kind of destabilization program. This could be a coup attempt, organized by foreign elements, perhaps in concert with the local deep state or some other shadowy forces. Dilma did not agree. Her theory was that once you deliver citizenship and some of its associated social benefits to a previously oppressed population, they ask for even more. That was only natural. She came up in this country as a dissident, and she was not going to be an anti-protest president. Later, Russian president Vladimir Putin shared a similar message with Dilma. By now, he was convinced that the West had coordinated “color revolutions” in a bid to shake vulnerable nations to the core and expand US hegemony. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 422

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch11’s claim that the Libya intervention pushed Putin back toward anti-Western doctrine. — connects to: Distant commentators applied wrong foreign frames to Brazil’s protests. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 416
• QUESTION: Why did autocrats converge on a destabilization narrative rather than seeing material grievances? Pattern of ‘colored revolution’ discourse across Turkey, Russia.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source