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From what it sounds like, the charge was that they selectively interfered with public transport in cities supporting one particular side, so unless the population is also perfectly geographically shuffled, everyone using public transport would not be sufficient protection.
That being said, I agree that if you already have the sort of corruption that allows selective interference with public transport, private vehicles are hardly safe. If anything, under Brazilian conditions, some tactical road closures that just so happen to result in the city being choked up in jams would be more deniable and even easier to get away with.
I do see an overall argument for small government so that it is less capable of terrorizing you if it becomes corrupt. My issue more broadly is that the idea of personal independence in a modern society is an illusion. Every thing you do is part of a gigantic interconnected network of various technologies operated and built by people who know neither you or each other.
The alternative to big government is not individual freedom. That is impossible because there is no way an individual citizen can be in control of everything he needs to survive. Instead the choice is between big government and big corporation. Private railways that exist to profit their owner, or government owned ones. Both have failure modes. Privately owned infrastructure is subject to profit maxing and anti-consumer practices. If the company is big enough, it basically becomes a dictatorship in its own right. Meanwhile, government owned infrastructure is vulnerable to corruption, populism, and the whims of changing administrations.
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Brazil has mandatory voting, though, so manipulating turnout seems like an unoptimal strategy.
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