Brasilia, February 8 (RHC)-- Brazil's Federal Police deployed this Thursday a vast operation against very close allies of former president Jair Bolsonaro, among several of them military officers, for attempting a coup d'état before and until January 8, 2023.
According to local media, among the targets of the operation against those who tried to keep the far-right leader in power and prevent the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, would be the former ministers and Army generals Walter Braga Netto, Augusto Heleno and Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, who were part of Bolsonaro's cabinet (2019-2022), and the former commander of the Navy, Admiral Garnier Santos.
Likewise, the former Minister of Justice Anderson Torres, who was already under investigation for the coup coup assassination of January 8, 2023, staged by Bolsonaro's supporters, and Valdemar Costa Neto, the president of the Liberal Party (PL), led by the former Brazilian president, are also being searched.
According to this information, the Federal Police suspects that this group of politicians and military officers formed a "criminal organization" that acted "in the coup attempt" to "keep the then president of the Republic in power," the institution said in a note.
Police agents served 33 search warrants, 4 imprisonment warrants and 48 precautionary measures against those investigated, which include "the prohibition to maintain contact" with the rest of the suspects and to leave the country; the suspension of their public functions and the obligation to surrender their passports.Initially, the Federal Police did not specify against whom the arrest warrants issued by the Supreme Court are against, but shortly after it has transpired that one of those involved would be the former president Jair Bolsonaro himself.
The investigation points out that the investigated group "was divided into action nuclei to disseminate" suspicions of fraud in the 2022 elections, in which Lula defeated Bolsonaro, who was seeking re-election, "even before the elections were held".
According to the Police, with this strategy they sought to "legitimize a military intervention". Those investigated allegedly constructed a narrative to sow doubts about the outcome of the elections by means of false information about the electronic ballot boxes that the country has been using since 1996 in its electoral processes and that never gave problems.
These events culminated in the coup attempt of January 8, 2023, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters invaded and vandalized the headquarters of the Presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court, in a desperate attempt to overthrow the Lula government, which had assumed power a week earlier.
