2024-03-28 10:43:00
The former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, presented to senior military officials a plan to carry out a coup d’état after his defeat in the October 2022 elections. This is what two former commanders told the police. In interrogations made public by the Supreme Court, former army commander Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, and former air force commander Carlos Baptista Júnior, said that Bolsonaro held meetings in December 2022 in which he presented a document that would have served base to overturn the results of the elections that he lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The military argues that they tried to dissuade him, and points to Bolsonaro as an active promoter of efforts to remain in power, further complicating his legal situation in the investigation into the attacks on the capitol in Brasilia.
Freire Gomes told police that he had warned Bolsonaro that the Army would not tolerate “any act of institutional breakdown” and that his actions could result in his arrest. Baptista Júnior, meanwhile, assured that he tried to dissuade Bolsonaro from “any extreme measure,” but pointed out that the former navy commander, Almir Garnier, promised Bolsonaro that he would send his troops. “If Commander Freire Gomes had agreed, an attempted coup d’état would possibly have occurred,” the Federal Police document cites.
Bolsonaro never signed the draft decree that would have established a state of siege, but eight days after Lula’s inauguration, on January 1, 2023, thousands of his supporters stormed Brasilia, in an attempt to overthrow the new government. . More than 1,400 people have been charged for their role in the insurrection, and 131 people have been convicted.
Freire Gomes and Baptista Júnior were questioned by police in recent weeks as part of the investigation, along with 25 other suspects and witnesses, whose testimonies were also published to “clarify the alleged conspiracy to discredit the Brazilian electoral system and carry out a military coup.” ”. “What is a coup d’état? They are tanks in the streets, weapons, conspiracies. None of that happened in Brazil,” contrasted Bolsonaro, who always denied having planned a coup d’état, although during the electoral campaign, he repeatedly raised doubts about the reliability of the Brazilian electoral system.
The former president, who has separately been banned from running for political office until 2030, has surrendered his passport while the investigation continues, and is prevented from leaving the country or communicating with the other suspects, who include some of his former ministers and closest allies.
Surrounded
In parallel, the Brazilian Federal Police last week accused the former president of “criminal association and falsifying his own vaccination data against Covid-19,” marking the first formal accusation against the beleaguered leader of the Brazilian extreme right. . The supreme court – now in sympathy with Luluism – published the police indictment alleging that Bolsonaro and 16 other people inserted false information into the public health database to make it appear that the former president, his 12-year-old daughter and several others in his circle had received the Covid vaccine.
During the pandemic, Bolsonaro was one of the few world leaders who criticized inoculation, openly disobeyed health restrictions, and encouraged society to follow his example. His administration ignored the offer from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to sell millions of injections to Brazil in 2020, and openly criticized the decision of the then governor of São Paulo, João Doria, to buy vaccines from the Chinese company Sinovac.
The former president reiterated that he had not received the Covid-19 vaccine and said he was calm. “It is a selective investigation. I’m calm, I don’t owe anything. “The world knows that I did not get vaccinated,” Bolsonaro told Reuters. And Brazil’s attorney general now has the final say in whether to file charges. The police accuse Bolsonaro and his assistants of altering the Ministry of Health database shortly before traveling to the United States in December 2022, two months after failing in the re-election attempt, and seek to cement the “escape plan” of the former president, whom thousands of Brazilians still support.
In February, tens of thousands of supporters of the former Brazilian president took over São Paulo in a show of force against legal challenges that could put him in jail. In his speech to protesters, Bolsonaro refrained from attacking old enemies and the Supreme Court, and appeared resilient. “What I am looking for is pacification, erasing the past,” said Bolsonaro, while he himself held an Israeli flag, a sign of defiance against current President Da Silva, who has received widespread criticism in his country for comparing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza with the Holocaust. “Amnesty for the poor who are imprisoned in Brasilia. We ask the 513 congressmen and 81 senators for an amnesty bill so that justice can be done in Brazil,” he claimed for those imprisoned for the attacks.
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