2023-08-19 09:01:58
“I know the risks I run on Brazilian soilbut we cannot give in,” said former President Jair Bolsonaro after several days of bad news. On the one hand, one of his former collaborators has complicated his situation in investigations by the Federal Police and the Supreme Court in a scandalous case, that of the Saudi jewels. As if that were not enough, Klepter Rosa Gonçalves, who was in charge of the Military Police (PM) of Brasilia, was arrested this Friday. He has been accused, along with six other members of that force of not having prevented thousands of supporters of the former Army captain from attacking on January 8 the headquarters of Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court on January 8. For the prosecution, it was not lack of expertise. The high command of the capital PM had “ideological harmony“with the most radical Bolsonarism that, among other things, demanded that the military take action and prevent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from remaining in power.
The arrest of the septet, which also includes former commander Colonel Fabio Augusto Vieira, represents progress in clarifying what happened on 8E. He accuses them of coup attempt, damage to property and omission of duty. The degree of harmony between the police officers and the conspiratorial state of the extreme right reached such a point that, the prosecution remarked, they exchanged “coup-like” messages over their phones and, furthermore, they shared with Bolsonaro and his entourage the idea that Lula had won the elections in a bad way. “According to existing evidence, the defendants had prior knowledge of the risks and they intentionally adhered to the foreseeable criminal result, breaching their functional duty to act”, stressed the Prosecutor’s Office. For this reason, the Secretary of Public Security is under house arrest, Anderson Torreswho had held the same position in the Bolsonaro government.
A few hours before the members of the PM were arrested, the testimony he gave a hacker in the parliamentary commission investigating the riot. The informant, whose name is unknown, accused Bolsonaro of seeking his services to try to invade electronic voting systems.
complication horizon
The former captain has been disqualified from holding elective positions until 2030 for having questioned electoral transparency. He, in turn, has several pending cases, including the one that has been opened due to the events of 8E and the scandal of the jewels that Saudi Arabia gave to the Brazilian State and that he tried to turn into personal patrimony.
According to Mônica Bergamo, a columnist for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, Bolsonaro’s entourage does not believe that the ex-president can also be arrested soon, “They believe that the minister of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Alexandre de Moraes, who is carrying out several investigations, I would not have the courage to arrest him without a well-founded reason.” One of those reasons is that the former president obtained 58.2 million votes in the 2022 elections, at a reduced distance from Lula.
“We are living in difficult times” However, Bolsonaro has recognized this Friday. These difficulties were aggravated by the legal problems faced by his former deputy, Colonel Mauro Cid, currently under preventive detention. The former president denied having ordered him to sell the gifts. Cid, he remarked, had autonomy to make his decisions. Bolsonaro spoke after hearing that his ex-dean’s lawyer, Cezar Bitencourt, reported that his client was preparing to confess to these operations on presidential instruction. This Friday, however, Bitencourt backed down. Cid would not confess. He would just make some “clarifications” in front of the investigators.
In this context, De Moraes authorized lift the banking and tax secrecy of the former captain and his wife, Michelle Bolsonaro. The head of the Supreme Court agreed to a request from the Federal Police (PF).
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