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Report: Brazil’s Bolsonaro Plotted to ‘Set the Country on Fire’ in Failed Coup Attempt

© AP Photo / Eraldo PeresFILE - Former President Jair Bolsonaro talks to reporters after arriving at the airport in Brasilia, Brazil, Friday, June 30, 2023. Bolsonaro denied on Thursday, Sept. 21, a report claiming he had consulted top military leaders to stage a coup and stop his successor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office in January.
FILE - Former President Jair Bolsonaro talks to reporters after arriving at the airport in Brasilia, Brazil, Friday, June 30, 2023. Bolsonaro denied on Thursday, Sept. 21, a report claiming he had consulted top military leaders to stage a coup and stop his successor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office in January. - Sputnik International, 1920, 17.10.2023
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Brazil’s Congress found that former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro schemed to remain in power after his 2022 election loss in a report that also implicated top military officers.
Despite Brazil’s popular image, the country of Carnaval and rowdy street parades suffers the recent collective trauma of a US-backed military dictatorship that smothered civil society for over 20 years. Now, a new investigation claims a controversial former leader brought the country perilously close to returning to authoritarian rule.
The preliminary report, released on Tuesday by the National Congress of Brazil, found that ex-President Jair Bolsonaro was the “intellectual or moral” architect of “a willful and premeditated coup attempt” after his loss in last year’s presidential election.
“Unlike what the Bolsonaro supporters maintain, the eighth of January was not a spontaneous or disorganized movement,” said Senator Eliziane Gama, referring to the ransacking of government buildings in the country’s capital earlier this year that has become infamous in Brazil. “It was an idealized, planned and prepared mobilization in advance.”
The lengthy report, comprising more than 1,300 pages, suggests Bolsonaro should be charged with criminal association, political violence, abolition of democratic rule of law and coup d’état under Brazil’s penal code.
The evidence will now be brought before the country’s attorney general, who is tasked with making the final decision as to whether to charge the former leader.
The investigation determined Bolsonaro sought to work through a number of channels to create a generalized climate of chaos that would give the country’s military an excuse to intervene. The bombastic ex-president is known for praising the country’s former military dictatorship, which lasted until 1985; he once claimed “the only mistake of the dictatorship was torturing and not killing.” In fact, hundreds of Brazilians were killed or disappeared during military rule, and some 20,000 were tortured.

Unlike in neighboring Argentina, Brazil has never formally reckoned with the legacy of its dictatorship or brought charges against military leaders. That could change if the recommendations of Tuesday’s report are followed, which endorses charges against several military officers, including former Army and Navy generals and Bolsonaro’s vice presidential candidate and former Minister of Defense General Walter Braga Netto.

The military figures are among the 61 people the report maintains were part of Bolsonaro’s plot to undermine Brazilian democracy, including the events earlier this year which saw the country’s Supreme Federal Court, National Congress and presidential palace vandalized.
“There was one goal only: to storm or to allow the three branches of government to be stormed, destabilize the administration, set the country on fire, provoke chaos and political disorder – and even, if necessary, a civil war,” read the report.

Bolsonaro served as president of Brazil from 2019 until 2022. His anticommunist rhetoric and praise for the country’s military was seen as a throwback to the country’s years of military dictatorship that took place after the United States backed the removal of constitutional President João Goulart in 1964.

The military dictatorship was a linchpin of Operation Condor, a US-backed campaign of political terrorism, repression, and assassination throughout Latin America during the Cold War.

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