On the Sunday of the Bolsonaro insurrection in Brasilia, many middle and high-ranking officials of the new government of Lula da Silva they were in their houses, preparing family meals without any other worriesthey commented in confidence to this envoy.
They celebrated that the PT leader had finally taken office on January 1, and contrary to all fears, there had been no incidents despite previous fears for the Bolsonaro furies and their coup militants who had even prepared a explosive attack which deactivated the police.
Three hundred thousand people crowded that day in the esplanda two ministriesin the political nerve center of the city and celebrated throughout the day completely normal.
Lula had walked no sniper fears in the legendary black Rolls Royce with his wife and the vice president. had arrived the moment of relaxation after an intense week.
“Invite the in-laws and some friends. She was cooking, away from the news. A friend came and told me that he had passed through the Planalto area, saw many people and few policebut I didn’t listen carefully,” he tells Clarion an official who is certainly not from the security area.
But he recounts that day with some guilt for the need everyone had to disconnect and free yourself from the pressures.
“We were oblivious”
“We were all that way. Even when I began to perceive that things could get complicated, I called some ministers and other officials, and they told me Heyyy! hi how are you?!, Come home and we’ll have a drink and eat something”.
“We were oblivious,” he explained. And he added that there had been previous information that something was being put together, with calls through the networks, “but was one more, another one of these crazy people but it was not given much importance. The camps in front of the barracks were disarming, all that seemed to have faded away. Somehow we let our guard down.”
During lunch, the friend who had observed what was happening in the square with a bit of astonishment, was there the whole time pinned to his cell phone. Little by little, I was pulling information that I read on the networks, it said that more and more people camethat there was no repression, recalls the official.
things got worse
At first it was kind of annoying, at the table they didn’t want to hear it, but later it was clear that things were getting worse and Sunday was no longer the quiet day they had imagined. It was then that the official who recounts that day picked up the phone and began to call his colleagues and He also found a lot of disbelief on the other side.
Part of that tranquility and remoteness had other antecedents, even well justified ones. During the elections, in the first round last October, the truckers union, radically aligned with Bolsonaro, had threatened to picket in the avenues of the capital and its suburbs.
They supported the slogans of the then president that the elections were going to be rigged, a version without evidence, but which became the motto of the riots and the demands for a coup. If the results came very tight against the ruling party, These protests were to multiply.
But the Esplanade area was closed and would remain so to avoid incidents by order of justice. The governor of Brasilia, Ibaneis Rocha, had received multiplied pressure from Bolsonaro’s head of Justice, Anderson Torres, to clear the area to allow the entry of trucks.
Rocha, they tell this envoy, told him that “in no way would he give that permission.” The other warned him in a bad way that then the Army would do it. “Well, Let the Army come, do what you want.” the president responded. But the Army did not come.
Rocha seemed a factor of security and confidence. But now the governor has been temporarily removed, initially for three months, by order of the Supreme Court, suspected of having done the opposite of that serious gesture October.
That has been, allow anti-petista protests on the apparent assumption or promise that would have been made that it would only be a calm march
There is something worse, Rocha joined his cabinet as head of district security at the same Anderson Torres that he pressured him and that he is now in the US, in the same city as his former boss Bolsonaro and if he returns he will go to jail charged with terrorist conspiracy.
But it happens that Bolsonarism is majority in Brasilia and the governor, with those reckless gestures, made his greedy electoral calculations without measuring the risks.
In his defense, the president maintains that they “sabotaged” his security system. And he affirmed in a surprising judicial presentation that the information that he received that day indicated that “everything was going on absolutely calm and peaceful”. Sunday lunch with the family.
Brasilia. Special delivery
ap