Analysis: Denounce exposes Bolsonaro’s coup core – 02/02/2023 – Power

The denunciation of Senator Marcos do Val (Podemos-ES) about a coup plot with the participation of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) exposes what was said with half words by politicians who had access to the then reclusive president in the Palácio do Alvorada after his defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

He operated in that heavy environment, typical of the bunker mentality that has accompanied the politician since his victorious campaign in 2018, a coup center. It could be a bit Tabajara, as a Supreme Court minister joked given the clumsy procedures and reported lack of care, but it was real.

So tangible that, materialized in audios and prints of messages shown by Veja magazine, which obviously still need to be examined for legal purposes, further complicates the already convoluted ex-president, now in voluntary self-exile in Donald Trump’s Florida.

Such as Sheet reported at the end of 2022, one of these interlocutors met with Bolsonaro and saw him in the shadows, brooding over complaints against the Superior Electoral Court led by Alexandre de Moraes, suggesting an enigmatic “let’s win” while listening to coup ideas from generals around him.

In a recent interview with the newspaper O Globo, the leader of Bolsonaro’s PL, Valdemar Costa Neto, painted a similar picture, saying that the “guy was disintegrating” in Alvorada. The chief said the then president resisted the coup impulses around him, but also candidly admitted that “everybody” had minutes of the uprising at home.

It was a reference to the previous complication for Bolsonaro, the draft of a state of defense decree that would be illegally applied only to the TSE, watering down Lula’s victory and opening the way for a coup that was found by the Federal Police in the former minister’s residence. Anderson Torres (Justice), as the Sheet showed.

In the end, nothing happened at the turn of the year. Bolsonaro fled to the US and Lula took office, but if Do Val’s account is to be precise, the attempt by the vandals on January 8 is exactly correlated with part of the devised plan according to the senator by the then president and the notorious Bolsonarist Daniel Silveira, arrested this same Thursday (2).

At that moment, in front of the Army HQ in Brasília, in addition to other units throughout Brazil, the coup spores that attacked the headquarters of the Three Powers were fermenting. If it is not clear exactly what the Bolsonaro-Silveira duo intended to do, the events of the 8th show one of the options.

In an equally or more complex situation is the former military wing of the past government. Military members of the Defense leadership consider it inevitable that General Augusto Heleno, former head of the GSI (Institutional Security Office), be investigated for the complaint that State instruments, Abin taps, would be used against Moraes.

Needless to say that the same GSI housed the dozens of soldiers now removed from their duties, accused of having been at least lenient, at most encouragers, of the action of the 8th.

Heleno was one of the voices around Bolsonaro’s Alvorada, as well as the former head of the Government Secretariat Luiz Eduardo Ramos and the vice-president on the list defeated in October, Walter Braga Netto. All four-star generals, top of the hierarchy, in reserve.

This line of investigation could generate a lot of friction for the new commander of the Army, General Tomás Paiva Ribeiro, who took over with the mission to lance the most acute Bolsonarist outbreaks of his Force and stabilize the troop.

At the Supreme Court, ministers say that the turbulence is predictable and also dangerous, given that Tomás has just reached the chair. But the fact that the new plot directly involves action against a member of the court suggests inflexibility on the part of Moraes, with the support of his peers.

In the opening speech of the year of the Judiciary, the always discreet Rosa Weber was very incisive about the need to curb the coup movements that erupted in the Praça dos Três Poderes, supporting Moraes’ operational doctrine — which is not immune to criticism, of course.