The minister of the Social Communication Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, Paulo Pimenta, says that the information released this Tuesday (19), during the Operation Countercoupclearly show “direct participation of the core government [de Jair] Bolsonaro” in the attempted coup d’état that would culminate in the assassination of then-elected president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; his deputy, Geraldo Alckmin; and the minister of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) Alexandre de Moraes.
Pimenta made reference to excerpts from documents released today by the STF, citing prior meetings for the actions that would culminate in the murders of Lula, Alckmin and Moraes. One of them would have taken place on November 12, 2022 at the house of General Walter Braga Netto.
Minister of the Civil House during the Bolsonaro government, Braga Netto was also a candidate for vice president on the former president’s ticket. One of the meetings mentioned in the document was attended by Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp Mauro Cid; and former presidential advisor Marcelo Câmara – both Army lieutenant colonels.
Petition
“In addition to having participated in several past acts already reported in other moments of the investigation, such as the meeting at General Braga Netto’s residence, where the operational planning for the actions of the ‘black kids’ (members of the Army’s special forces) was presented and approved, there are signs of [participação em] activities related to monitoring the arrest/execution of minister Alexandre de Moraes”, says an excerpt from petition 13,236 released by the STF, with details of the investigation.
In another section, the petition says that the former interim minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Bolsonaro government, General Mário Fernandes, would have directly cited the plan to assassinate Lula and Alckmin. “The objective of the criminal group was not only to neutralize Minister Alexandre de Moraes, but also to extinguish the winning presidential ticket, through the assassination of President Lula and Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin, as set out in the operational planning called ‘Punhal Verde Amarelo’, prepared by General Mário Fernandes”.
Coup and murders
According to Pimenta, the investigations show that the group that planned the coup and the murders clearly had the objective of, through force, preventing the fulfillment of the popular will expressed in the election that elected Lula president.
“The PF’s suspicion is that meetings may have taken place inside Braga Neto’s house, who is nothing more than the figure who was a candidate for vice president and who coordinated a house, there in Brasília, which functioned as headquarters , including for the organization of camps. These are extremely serious facts that take the direct participation of the core of the Bolsonaro government in the action to another dimension and to another level”, argued Pimenta this Tuesday during a G20 event.
According to the minister, this environment stimulated by Bolsonaro, financed by people close to him, took Brazil to the brink of the abyss. “We just didn’t have a tragedy for a detailwhich could have happened on January 8th. It could have happened the day they tried to blow up the airport,” he said.
“And it could also have happened if this Operation Punhal Verde Amarelo had been successful, with the audacity of killing the President of the Republic and his vice president. In the report, they talk about the need to annihilate the party, then made up of President Lula and Alckmin, in addition to kidnapping Alexandre de Moraes to take his life. According to them, there was a need for the three to be annihilated; were slaughtered, so that the criminal action could reach its objective”, he added.
Perplexity
According to Pimenta, both Lula and the other authorities received the information about Operation Countercoup with perplexity, “due to the gravity, those involved, the audacity, the risk to democracy”, he said when recalling that President Lula’s diplomacy took place on the day December 12, the date on which several attacks were committed near the Federal Police headquarters, in a place very close to the hotel where Lula was staying.
“We probably have, for the first time, information about the participation of active officers and also members of the PF. All of them, people very close to the power core of the previous government. Through Mauro Cid’s computer, the PF found the details of this operation that aimed to assassinate the president of the Republic, the vice-president and also minister Alexandre de Moraes”, reiterated Pimenta.
“We are not talking about figures who were far from the core of power. They were inside the Palácio do Planalto, which takes this investigation increasingly to the door of Bolsonaro’s own office”, he added.
Bolsonaro has not yet commented on Operation Countercoup. Braga Netto’s lawyer, Luís Prata, said that he only learned about the operation through the media, and that he also needs to have access to the STF petition for a “possible manifestation”.
