Judicial documents show the leaders refused to participate and warned Jair Bolsonaro they would arrest him if he tried it.
SAO PAULO (AP) — Two top Brazilian military leaders declared to police that former President Jair Bolsonaro presented them a plan for him to remain in power after the 2022 election he lost, but both refused and warned him they would arrest him if he tried it, according to judicial documents released Friday.
The testimonies of Bolsonaro’s former Army and Air Force commanders to police, and released by the Supreme Court, include the first direct mentions of the right-wing leader as actively participating in a conspiracy to ignore the results of the October 2022 election won by his rival, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The statements by military commanders during Bolsonaro’s term add to his legal woes as prosecutors seek to find links between the far-right leader and the Jan. 8, 2023 riots that trashed government buildings in the capital Brasilia one week after Lula’s inauguration.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a frequent target of Bolsonaro and the chairman of the investigation, authorized the release of the documents.
I assume from your comment that you're not Brazilian?
Bolsonaro supporters knew "military backed coup" was the plan since day 0 and had been actively asking for it. "coup" might carry a bad stigma elsewhere, but for Brazilian right wingers and boomers in general?
The "good old days" for them have a name and that name is "the military dictatorship years. Particularly the 70s which were the most repressive years of the dictatorship". When saying anything slightly to the left of Hitler would get you disappeared and tortured to death.
(thanks for funding that, America!)
Bolsonaro's entire brand was built on nostalgia for the dictatorship, his big call to fame was that during Dilma's impeachment trial he made a salute to a dictatorship era officer that was known for being particularly psychotic on his victims
There wasn't a single Bolsonaro supporter who didn't know this was the plan, or that didn't enthusiastically desire a coup.
Also also when Bolsonaro left the country in a feeble attempt to escape the consequences of his actions (he was forced to return a few months later) his fandom took to camping outside military bases, hoping the military would go ahead with the coup, Bolsonaro or no Bolsonaro. :3c
You shouldn't considering Bolsonaro from the start has copied literally every single action from Trump's playbook, and it's not even a secret since his mentor, Olavo de Carvalho, was a batshit crazy fascist based in the US and taking notes on all the abhorrent things Republicans were doing the past two decades.
Oh and not to mention the CIA and FBI were in cahoots with his government no less, because of course they were.
In March 2020, the Intercept reported that Brazilian prosecutors had secretly collaborated with the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in a manner "that may have violated international legal treaties and Brazilian law". The Brazilian Ministry of Justice had not been informed; making this collaboration illegal. They also found that money paid by Brazilian companies in the US were funnelled back into Brazil; chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol said he would use part of this sum to set up an "independent fund to fight corruption". This attempt was then deemed unconstitutional by Brazil's Supreme Court. It was reported that Mr. Dallagnol had called Lula da Silva's arrest “a gift from the CIA”. Leslie Backschies, the head of the US FBI's international corruption unit, alluded to this incident when discussing the sensitivity of anti-corruption investigations in a 2019 interview with AP news saying “We saw presidents toppled in Brazil”.
At this point I'd be surprised if the US actually wasn't involved in an attempt to coup a government, not just in South America but any part of the globe. It's like their second favorite past time, just behind getting involved in as many wars as they can.
This is very interesting, at least for me as a Latin American but not from Brazil. I wonder whether the Army and Air Force want to distance themselves from politics in general, or if they have an issue with Bolsorano (or maybe the Navy)?
SAO PAULO (AP) — Two top Brazilian military leaders declared to police that former President Jair Bolsonaro presented them a plan for him to remain in power after the 2022 election he lost, but both refused and warned him they would arrest him if he tried it, according to judicial documents released Friday.
The testimonies of Bolsonaro’s former Army and Air Force commanders to police, and released by the Supreme Court, include the first direct mentions of the right-wing leader as actively participating in a conspiracy to ignore the results of the October 2022 election won by his rival, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The statements by military commanders during Bolsonaro’s term add to his legal woes as prosecutors seek to find links between the far-right leader and the Jan. 8, 2023 riots that trashed government buildings in the capital Brasilia one week after Lula’s inauguration.
A federal police report said former army commander Marco Antônio Freire Gomes testified that he and other top military leaders attended several last-minute and unscheduled meetings at the presidential palace after the second round of the elections “in which then-President Jair Bolsonaro offered possibilities of using legal tools... regarding the electoral process.”
Baptista Jr. also told the federal police that Fleet Admiral Almir Garnier, the former commander of Brazil’s Navy, “said he would put his troops at Jair Bolsonaro’s disposal,” according to the document.
“It’s one of the first big signs that Bolsonaro is going to stand alone and lose much of the military support he had,” said Sérgio Praça, a political scientist from the Rio de Janeiro-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank and university.
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