Lula received Planalto with a record number of soldiers – 01/18/2023 – Politics

Official data from the Ministry of Finance show that former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) reached the end of his term with a large contingent of members of the Army, Navy and Air Force working in the Presidency of the Republic, maintaining the record numbers verified during his management.

According to data for November —the most recent available at the Treasury—, 1,231 active members of the Armed Forces were requested and assigned to the Presidency, against 1,026 in November 2018, at the end of Michel Temer’s (MDB) administration, a 20% increase.

The impetus for the displacement of uniforms to various areas of government, in particular to the Presidency, took place in the wake of Bolsonaro’s militarist preaching. A retired army captain, the former president resorted at various times to an anti-democratic rhetoric that became the main political inspiration for the coup vandals who vandalized the headquarters of the three Powers on January 8th.

The number of active-duty military personnel in the final stretch of the Bolsonaro government exceeds not only those from the same period as Temer, but also those of other predecessors —Dilma Rousseff (943), Lula 1 (569) and 2 (818) and Fernando’s second term Henrique Cardoso (648).

The data does not include reserve military personnel who were also allocated by Bolsonaro to various posts, including the head of ministries – as were the cases, among others, of generals Augusto Heleno, Luiz Eduardo Ramos and Braga Netto.

Since the attacks on the 8th, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) has been criticizing military personnel who allegedly participated in or colluded with the coup demonstrations, statements that occur in parallel with a wave of dismissals of uniformed officers from commissioned positions.

This Wednesday (18), for example, the Planalto Palace exonerated 13 more military personnel from the GSI (Institutional Security Office). The body is responsible for protecting the president and the Planalto Palace.

The new batch of layoffs was published in the Official Gazette a day after the government dismissed 40 military personnel who worked at the Alvorada Palace – in addition to other uniforms from different areas of the government.

In an interview with GloboNews this Wednesday, Lula said that none of the intelligence agencies was able to warn him about the attacks and that any military that participated in the coup acts will be punished, “no matter the rank or the Force” to which they belong.

In November, the Sheet revealed audios and videos in which a Navy soldier appears in a message group encouraging anti-democratic acts in front of the barracks and stating that Lula, then already elected, would not take office on January 1st.

In the messages, Ronaldo Ribeiro Travassos also defended the murder of Brazilian Lula voters. The military was stationed at the GSI, led at the time by General Augusto Heleno, one of Bolsonaro’s most faithful allies.

Sought at the time, he said he would not comment on his lines and argued that he did not know if it was himself in the audios.

On the 13th, the Army indicted reserve colonel Adriano Camargo Testoni, who participated in the coup acts on January 8 and attacked members of the High Command of the Force.

This is the first police-military inquiry closed since the Armed Forces decided to punish military personnel who participated in the episode.

Testoni worked at the Armed Forces Hospital on a fixed-term contract — a type of contract used in the Army, Navy and Air Force to employ reserve or retired military personnel for temporary and specific functions.

After the video was recorded, the colonel was dismissed from his position despite having made another recording later apologizing and denying having participated in the riot in Praça dos Três Poderes.

Data from the Statistical Panel of Personnel of the Ministry of Finance also show that, in addition to the quantitative, the Bolsonaro administration expanded a movement started under Temer to spray military personnel in various government agencies.

When assuming a leadership position, active-duty military personnel receive an increase in their remuneration, up to the limit of the Executive salary ceiling.

From the late 1990s until 2016, the role of uniformed personnel was restricted, almost entirely, to just three bodies: the Ministry of Defense (always headed by a civilian during this period), the Vice-Presidency and the Presidency of the Republic.

In the latter location, the allocation generally takes place at the GSI, which at a certain period was called Casa Militar.

The three presidents of the Republic of that period were persecuted by the military dictatorship that ended in 1985. FHC had to flee into exile, Lula was arrested and Dilma, in addition to imprisonment, was subjected to torture.

Since Temer, in 2016, active-duty military personnel have been included in other portfolios. The emedebista was also responsible for breaking with the tradition of placing a civilian in charge of Defense, annulling part of the symbolism of the constitutional submission of military forces to the democratically elected civilian command.

Under Bolsonaro, the active-duty military has spread to about 20 different government agencies. In November last year, already after Lula’s victory, there were 12.

Data from the Treasury also point out that in the entire government there were 2,187 military personnel in November against 1,941 in the same period of 2018.

The bodies that bring together the largest contingents, in addition to the Presidency and Defense, are the Vice-Presidency (in November commanded by the general and now senator-elect Hamilton Mourão) and the Advocacy General of the Union.

THE Sheet was unable to contact former President Bolsonaro.

The Presidency’s Press Secretariat informed that questions on this subject should be forwarded to the Ministry of Defense, which, in turn, directed the sending of questions to each of the Forces.

Only the Navy responded, stating that there are currently 1,195 of its military personnel active in government bodies throughout the government, 174 of which in the GSI of the Presidency of the Republic. The Navy said that none of these requests had been canceled since January 1, the day Lula was sworn into office.

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