Lula reduced 200 active service members in the government – 04/17/2023 – Politics

The number of active-duty members of the Armed Forces transferred to commission positions in the government, almost all of them to the Presidency of the Republic and Defense, has been decreasing since the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) over Jair Bolsonaro (PL), but still totaled 1,871 people in February.

The total cut from October, the month of the elections, to February, the date of the most recent data, is 319 vacancies. If only the period in which Lula took over the Presidency is considered, there are 196 less military personnel.

Retired Army captain and supporter of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), Bolsonaro took over his government with 1,793 active-duty soldiers from the Armed Forces requisitioned for government positions, practically the same number as Dilma Rousseff (PT) ended 2015 (1,800), her last closed year of government.

Through a speech praising militarism that several times flirted with the coup, the former president, according to the Treasury, reached 2,206 active-duty uniforms in commission positions in July 2022, a historic record (with an increase of 23 %).

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

Lula took over, resuming the tradition broken by Michel Temer (MDB) and Bolsonaro and once again put a civilian in charge of Defense, the former deputy and former minister of the Federal Audit Court José Múcio Monteiro.

Temer had been responsible for appointing General Joaquim Silva e Luna in charge of Defense, annulling part of the symbolism of the constitutional submission of military forces to the democratically elected civilian command.

Bolsonaro has always placed military personnel at the head of the portfolio – generals Fernando Azevedo e Silva, Walter Braga Netto (who was the vice-president in his frustrated re-election attempt) and Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, who at the time was the commander of the Army.

Lula, who during the campaign saw increasing distrust against him in the barracks, had against the beginning of his government a coup attack by Bolsonarists who vandalized the headquarters of the three Powers on January 8th.

They had as their starting point the headquarters of the Army Headquarters, a camp site treated with leniency by the military during Bolsonaro’s administration and at the beginning of Lula’s.

Thirteen days later, Lula dismissed the commander of the Army, General Júlio Cesar de Arruda, in the midst of an open crisis of confidence resulting from the attacks.

The decision was taken because Arruda would not have shown willingness to take immediate and forceful measures to reduce Lula’s distrust of Army personnel after the Bolsonarist attacks.

According to reports by Lula’s allies and generals heard by Sheetthe final straw for the exoneration was Arruda having resisted the request that Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s assistant, be removed from command of an Army battalion in Goiânia.

Such as Sheet showed in January, at least eight active-duty military personnel assigned to the Presidency of the Republic during the Bolsonaro government attended events in 2022 at the coup camp in front of the headquarters.

In addition, some of them participated in a WhatsApp group in which anti-democratic messages and threats to Lula were exchanged and shared. Part of these military personnel continued, at the time of the report, to occupy the Presidency.

Sought, the Defense did not comment on the quantitative data of active service members in the government. The Presidency’s Secom (Secretariat for Social Communication) only stated that the replacements took place within the process of changing and assembling the new government.

In his first months in office, Lula promised to punish military personnel who acted leniently in the acts of the 8th, but on some occasions he also promoted appointments of other uniforms to replace those who left.

At the end of January, for example, the government appointed 121 military personnel to the Institutional Security Cabinet, reversing part of the series of dismissals in the body that followed the coup acts.

In practice, this shows that the cut in uniforms during the Bolsonaro administration exceeded the 200 posts (or about 320, if considered the month of the election) that are shown in the statistical data, since Lula appointed other military personnel to part of these posts.

Data from the Statistical Panel of Personnel of the Ministry of Finance do not deal with reserve military personnel, only those who are active in the Army, Navy, Air Force and who have been requested to work in the government.

Bolsonaro also distributed positions to several reserve military personnel, including ministries, as was the case, among others, of generals Augusto Heleno, Luiz Eduardo Ramos and Braga Netto.

One of the federal bodies allocated by reserve soldiers was Funai (National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples).

The body informed, through the Access to Information Law, that at the end of the last government there were 24 soldiers from the Army, Navy or military police, all from the reserve or retired, occupying coordination and leadership positions in the body, in addition to a delegate retired from the Federal Police. Of these, 17 were exonerated at once, on January 18.

The data from the Treasury’s statistical panel also do not discriminate which of the active military is in Defense and who is in the Presidency of the Republic (especially in the Institutional Security Office), the two government bodies that now gather practically all required uniforms. According to previous data, this division was around 60% in the Presidency and 40% in Defense.