Brazilian President Lula da Silva has removed the Chief of the Army, General Julio Cesar de Arruda, following riots which saw thousands of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro storm the country’s top political institutions on January 8.
According to Globonews, Arruda is set to be replaced by southeastern army commander Tomas Ribeiro Paiva.
Arruda served for two years as the Dean of the Agulhas Negras Military Academy, where Bolsonaro graduated in 1977, and was seen as a key ally of the former president. He spent only 23 days as Army Chief, having been appointed just two days before Bolsonaro stepped down.
Over 2,000 Brazilians have been arrested for allegedly participating in the chaos in Brasilia which saw the country’s presidential palace, Supreme Court, and Congress ransacked, priceless pieces of art trashed, and graffiti messages demanding a military coup scrawled throughout.
Prosecutors are bringing them up on an array of charges, including staging a coup, to armed criminal association, violent attempts to subvert the democratic state of law, and damage to public property.
Arruda reportedly sheltered many of those implicated at Army headquarters, and has been accused of allowing hundreds to escape by insisting that Lula’s justice minister was “not going to arrest people here.”
He’s certainly not alone. Numerous military officials have been implicated in this month’s unrest, including Anderson Torres, a former justice minister under Bolsonaro and the security chief of Brasilia at the time of the rioting. Authorities jailed Torres last week after reporting they’d found a draft in Torres’s home which would have declared a “state of defense” to overturn Lula’s victory at the polls by overriding a decision by the electoral court of Brazil.
On Friday, Brazilian Defense Minister Jose Mucio said he believed “there was no direct involvement by the armed forces,” but “if any element participated, they will have to answer as citizens.”
Dozens of members of Lula’s security detail have been forced out after being accused of involvement in the riots as well, amid what Lula described as a "deep review" of the security situation.
Civil-military ties in Brazil were widely expected to be more difficult under Lula than they were under his predecessor, and observers point to the riots as proof that relations between the elected government and its infamously coup-happy army have soured.
Bolsonaro fled Brazil two days before Lula was inaugurated, and has been living in an 8-bedroom mansion in central Florida owned by former MMA fighter Jose Aldo ever since.
The former president quickly condemned the riots and has denied any involvement in the unrest but maintains the election was stolen from him. While no direct evidence tying him to the chaos has been reported, a recently-announced inquiry is set to probe whether Bolsonaro was one of the “intellectual authors” of the alleged attempted coup.