Brazil: 22 properties belonging to businessmen linked to Bolsonaro were raided | Federal Police operation against those accused of financing the attempted coup

2023-05-12 05:01:00

The Brazilian Federal Police carried out this Thursday a new operation against the ultra-right sectors that on January 8 assaulted the headquarters of the three powers in an attempt to force a coup against the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The operation was concentrated in the states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná, where 22 raids on homes of people whose identities were not revealed and part of whose assets were blocked by the courts, according to a statement from the Federal Police itself in the framework of the Lesa Patria operation.

“There were people with double identities”

According to the police report, the blocking of assets is for a value of up to 40 million reais (about eight million dollars). The Minister of Justice, Flavio Dino, said in an interview with the Globonews channel, without giving many details, that “the operation shows that there were people with a double identity: a rural producer and one who finances criminal acts.”

Dino indicated that the investigations into the events of January 8 “do not have a closing date” and gave the example of the assault on the United States Capitol in January 2021, a case in which “two years later there are still operations underway.” . According to the Brazilian press, one of the businessmen investigated is Geraldo Killer, a ruralist that financed part of the campaign for the failed re-election of Jair Bolsonaro and that of Senator Marcos Pontes, the astronaut who was Bolsonaro’s Minister of Science and Technology.

The police seized an arsenal of five weapons and dozens of ammunition at the home of another businessman investigated for financing the coup acts. The seizure was made in Maracaju, a city of 48,000 inhabitants in Mato Grosso do Sul, 160 kilometers from the capital Campo Grande.

The suspect in that case is Adoilto Fernandes Corone, an entrepreneur who had already been identified as a financier of the protests by the Attorney General’s Office. Other targets of the operation would be the so-called CACcollectors of weapons, shooters or sports hunters, according to the TV Globo network.

Bolsonaro in the crosshairs

For the incidents of January 8attributed to far-right activists who support former President Jair Bolsonaro, 2,215 people were arrestedof which about 300 remain in prison. The rest will respond to the courts in freedom.

The Supreme Court, responsible for the trial against the coup plotters, has already accepted the accusations against 550 of those responsible for those attacks, who will answer for various crimes against democracy and the rule of law. The Supreme included Bolsonaro among those investigated in order to determine if, even though he was in the United States that day, from where he returned on March 30, prompted that movement or had some role in the planning of the coup attempt.

The former Brazilian president testified last month before the Federal Police for having published a video on social networks in which he called for the release of those detained for coup and denounced fraud in the elections. Bolsonaro argued before the commissioner that he questioned him that he posted the video by mistake on Facebook because he was under the influence of morphine, recovering from hospitalization for gastric problems during his three-month stay in the United States.

for the attempted coup Bolsonaro’s former Justice Minister Anderson Torres is detained and prosecutedwho at the time of the attack was the Secretary of Security of the Brasilia government and had ordered the police not to repress the coup leaders who assaulted the headquarters of the Court, the Congress and the Planalto Palace.

On Wednesday, to demonstrate that Brazil lives “in a democratic regime”, Lula He ordered the removal of the fences that for more than three years surrounded the seat of government in Brasilia. “Democracy returned to this country and the presidency should not be surrounded by fences, because democracy does not support them”the president told journalists and maintained that the removal of these fences does not compromise the security of the Planalto Palace, since “that is what the Police, the Armed Forces and also the Office of Institutional Security of the Presidency are for.”