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Brazil came within a whisker of a far-right military coup and the assassination of a supreme court judge just days before President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took power in January 2023, a federal police report has claimed.
The report about the alleged plot to help the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro cling to power was made public on Tuesday, and paints a chilling portrait of how close one of the world’s largest democracies came to being plunged back into authoritarian rule.
The 884-page document describes a complex, three-year conspiracy that investigators believe was designed to pave the way for a military power grab by using social media to disseminate false claims of electoral fraud that plotters hoped would justify such an intervention in the public eye.
Police claim that plot was supposed to reach “its zenith” on 15 December 2022 – a fortnight before Lula was due to be sworn in after narrowly beating Bolsonaro in October’s presidential election.
Conspirators, including several senior military figures, allegedly hoped that on that day Bolsonaro would sign a “coup decree” which would effectively allow a military takeover.
On 16 December 2022, “after the consummation of the coup d’état”, the report claims two close Bolsonaro allies – the former defence minister Gen Walter Braga Netto and the former minister of institutional security Gen Augusto Heleno – were to be placed in charge of a “crisis management” cabinet.
The federal police report – which the Guardian has reviewed – claims the only reason Bolsonaro did not sign that decree blocking the transfer of power was because the plotters had failed to secure sufficient support from Brazil’s military top brass.
“The evidence [gathered] … shows that the commander of the navy, Adm Almir Garnier [Santos], and the defence minister, [Gen] Paulo Sérgio [Nogueira de Oliveira], adhered to the coup attempt. However, the [army] commander [Marco Antônio] Freire Gomes and [Carlos de Almeida] Baptista Júnior of the air force positioned themselves against any kind of measure that would cause an institutional rupture in the country,” the report alleges.
Federal police said the only thing that prevented the coup attempt taking place was “the unequivocal stance” of Freire Gomes, Baptista Junior and the majority of the army high command. It claimed those people “remained faithful to the values that govern the democratic rule of law state and did not cave in to coup-mongering pressure”.
Bolsonaro was last week formally accused of being one of 37 people involved in criminal conspiracy designed to obliterate Brazil’s democratic system through a rightwing coup d’état. He denied those accusations on Tuesday, calling them madness.
“I never discussed a coup with anyone,” he told reporters in the capital, Brasília. “If someone had come and talked to me about a coup, I would have asked them: ‘What about the day after? What would the world do?’”
Gen Braga Netto last week denied a coup plot had been afoot, calling such claims “fanciful and absurd”. Gen Heleno has yet to comment on the police claims but last year publicly denied being involved in preparations for a coup.
Gen Nogueira de Oliveira and Adm Almir Garnier Santos have yet to publicly comment on the claims.
More details to follow …
