Guilherme Ferreira & Tomas Castanheira
Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) indicted fascistic former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other members of his government on Thursday, November 21, for the crimes of violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d’état, and criminal organization for the attempted coup of January 8, 2023.
The nearly 900-page PF report has been sent to the minister in charge of the case at the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Alexandre de Moraes, and remains confidential. It will be sent in the next few days to the Attorney General, Paulo Gonet, who is expected to file charges against those indicted next year.
The PF revelations come 60 years after the US-backed 1964 military coup which inaugurated a bloody 21-year regime that Bolsonaro and his military entourage vindicate. They show that Brazil was close to a new coup and the establishment of a dictatorship after Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party - PT) at the end of 2022.
Military personnel were heavily involved in the coup plot. Of the 37 indicted by the PF, 25 were active or reserve military personnel, including Bolsonaro, a former army captain, seven colonels, six lieutenant colonels, eight army generals, and the former commander of the Navy in the Bolsonaro government, Adm. Almir Garnier Santos.
The military officers indicted include Gen. Walter Braga Netto, former Defense Minister and Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential candidate in 2022; Gen. Augusto Heleno, former chief of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), Brazil’s national security and intelligence agency; Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, former Defense Minister and previously Army Commander; and Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp who last year entered a plea bargain with the Federal Police.
Among the civilians indicted are the president of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), Valdemar Costa Neto, and the former Minister of Justice of the Bolsonaro government, Anderson Torres, with whom the Federal Police found the first “coup minutes” in January 2023. Torres was the Secretary of Public Security of the Federal District on the day of the attempted coup and was arrested shortly after for omission and connivance in the attack by the fascist mob on the headquarters of the Three Powers on January 8, 2023.
The Federal Police also indicted journalist Paulo Figueiredo, grandson of the last president of the military dictatorship in Brazil, and Filipe Martins, the Bolsonaro government’s former special advisor for international affairs. Along with one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo, who was in the US during the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and for Donald Trump’s election this year. Figueiredo and Martins have close ties to the fascist layers linked to President-elect Trump in the US.
The PF report indicting the former president and members of his fascist entourage was sent to the Supreme Court two days after the launch of “Operation Countercoup,” which revealed the existence of an advanced plan to assassinate President Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Minister Moraes. Four Army officers and a federal police officer were preventively arrested on Tuesday as part of the operation.
The information released by “Operation Countercoup” added a new sinister layer of facts to the already abundant evidence of the conspiracy of the former president and a substantial sector of the military high command to carry out a coup d’état and establish a fascist dictatorship in Brazil.
The operation was launched after the PF recovered documents deleted from Lt. Col. Mauro Cid’s electronic devices, which were added to other data retrieved from a group of Special Forces (FE) military personnel, known as the “Black Kids.”
The most prominent among the active military officers arrested this week, reserve general Mario Fernandes, former executive secretary of the General Secretariat of the Presidency in the Bolsonaro government, was identified as one of the main architects of the plan to assassinate Lula, Alckmin, and Moraes.
The assassination plan and its methods, which included the possibility of shootings, the use of explosive devices, or poisoning, are openly described in the document entitled “Green and Yellow Dagger,” which the PF found to be authored by Fernandes and to have been printed by him inside the Planalto presidential palace for the first time on November 9, 2022. According to the PF, the plan was presented to and approved by General Braga Netto in a meeting at his own home on November 12, 2022.
Much of the document that supported “Operation Countercoup” describes an aborted attempt to carry out the plan to assassinate Moraes on December 15, 2022, two days after Lula’s inauguration ceremony. The PF report concludes that the assassination would serve as a trigger for the establishment of an “Institutional Crisis Management Office,” on December 16, 2022, after the coup d’état, composed mostly of military personnel, under the command of Generals Augusto Heleno and Braga Netto, with the participation of Gen. Mario Fernandes and Filipe Martins.”
General Fernandes was also one of the people who orchestrated the support of the Army’s high command for the coup plan. According to the PF’s official document on “Operation Countercoup,” Fernandes wrote on November 4, 2022 to Gen. Luiz Eduardo Ramos, former Minister-Chief of the General Secretariat of the Bolsonaro government:
You have to force the High Command, man. With General Freire Gomes [then commander of the Army], with General Paulo Sérgio, damn it ... It’s obvious that there was fraud [in the elections], damn it. .... And another thing, even if it’s just to spread the word and get the masses excited. So that they stay in the streets and then, yes, maybe that’s what the High Command, what the Defense wants. The popular outcry, like it was in [19]64. Because as you said, a good part of the High Command, at least in the Army, isn’t very willing, right? Or they won’t start the intervention, unless, well, the start is made by society. Come on, general, reinforce that. I’m doing my job with the Brigade [of Special Forces] and the division personnel [generals] from my class [from 1986, from Agulhas Negras, Brazil’s military academy].
One of the most important documents revealed by the PF, seized from Lt. Col. Hélio Ferreira Lima, is described by investigators as “a detailed spreadsheet that condenses information about the strategic planning of the coup d’état.”
The document presents a plan with detailed steps, starting with the annulment of the democratic elections based on a fabricated accusation of electoral fraud. The next steps involved the issuance of “arrest warrants against those involved in ... irregularities in the electoral process” and the neutralizing of opponents in command of the powers of State; the establishment of a new regime based on a presidential decree by Bolsonaro and its sanctioning by Congress (controlled by his allies); and the launching of a massive information campaign to legitimize the coup domestically and internationally.
The document presents as “critical requirements” for the transfer of power to the new dictatorial regime the creation of a “central crisis office” and the “preparation of a robust legal framework in coordination with the STM [Supreme Military Court] ... to establish a decree that supports military actions.”
Bolsonaro actively participated in this entire plan. According to the Federal Police, it was introduced to Bolsonaro by Filipe Martins, and Bolsonaro later discussed the plan with the heads of the Armed Forces. In a statement to the Federal Police in March of this year, the then commanders of the Army, General Freire Gomes, and of the Air Force, Brig. Baptista Júnior, confirmed that Bolsonaro discussed the plan with them. Also present at the meeting was the former commander of the Navy, Admiral Garnier Santos, who is said to have agreed to the coup and is the only one indicted by the Federal Police.
The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) last year declared Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office until 2030 due to his unfounded attacks on Brazil’s electronic voting system that paved the way for an attempted coup. This year Bolsonaro had already been indicted by the Federal Police for the illegal sale of jewelry abroad and the forgery of COVID-19 vaccination cards. Both indictments are also linked to the attempted coup.
Bolsonaro and his political circle responded to the latest indictment by attacking Minister Moraes. In an interview yesterday with the Metrópole website, Bolsonaro said that Moraes “conducts the entire investigation, adjusts statements, arrests without charges, fishes for evidence, and has a very creative advisory team. He does everything that the law does not allow.”
The indictment of Bolsonaro and high-ranking military officials far from signals an end to the greatest crisis of Brazilian democracy since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. The origin of this crisis lies in the enormous crisis of the world capitalist system that is normalizing the threat of nuclear world war and the broad shift of the world’s ruling elite towards authoritarian forms of government, with explosive consequences for Brazil, one of the most unequal countries on the planet.
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