‘Os Onze – O STF, seus bastidores e suas crises’ reveals further evidence of the Pro-Bolsonaro Soft Coup at the 2018 Election.
By André Barrocal, CartaCapital.
On Tuesday before Sunday’s final vote in the 2018 election, there was a meeting in the Superior Electoral Court between court judges and the then-general at the head of government intelligence, Sergio Etchegoyen.
TSE President Rosa Weber, still in office today, had been cursed and threatened via social networks by a Pro-Bolsonaro colonel, Antonio Carlos Alves Correia.
When the meeting was over, Supreme Federal Court (STF) President Dias Toffoli, also still in office today, warned those attending the TSE and wanted to say something.
What he said there is related in a newly released book, with stories from the Supreme Court”:Os Onze – O STF, seus bastidores e suas crises.
“Toffoli described a dark scenario,” write authors Felipe Recondo and Luiz Weber, both journalists.
“He recalled that the then Army commander, General (Eduardo) Villas Bôas, had 300,000 armed men who mostly supported Jair Bolsonaro’s candidacy.”
The book’s account is another brick in a plot that one day history will spell out in capital letters about Brazil and the election of 2018.
There are clues that the Armed Forces enacted a pro-Bolsonaro “white coup”, when it blocked the Supreme Court to prevent Lula’s release and candidacy, something that to this day discourages his supporters about the possibility of his release, and would not accept the PT’s (Workers Party) return to power.
On October 9, 2018, two weeks before Toffoli spoke at Supreme Electoral Court of “300,000 soldiers” which is the active Brazilian troop total, one of Fernando Haddad’s campaign leaders had received an alert.
All the offices of the PT electoral headquarters were being monitored by the government intelligence agencies under Etchegoyen. More: Toffoli was too, there was even a file on him.
Was it a dossier filled with illegal investigations of the Operation Car Wash task force recently revealed by Intercept?
The warning received by the PT was reported by CartaCapital in the issue of the magazine which was on news stands three days later.
The report also told of how at at that moment an amazing story was circulating around Toffoli’s cabinet at the STF.
When Bolsonaro was stabbed on September 6, senior officials had rebelled and decided to take to the streets.
The threat of a military coup was real.
Since then-President Michel Temer had no moral authority to contain them, it was left to Toffoli, who would take charge of the STF one week later, to defuse the situation.
Toffoli took control of the Supreme Court on September 13, having appointed as special advisor General Fernando de Azevedo e Silva, the Army’s second in command at the time.
It was an attempt to have a direct channel to the Army. The General’s nomination had come from General Villas Bôas, who was the Army’s Senior Commander, leader of the 300,000 soldiers Toffoli had talked about.
Azevedo e Silva is now Bolsonaro’s Minister of Defense. Villas Bôas is a special advisor to GSI, the intelligence agency of the Planalto Palace.
Eduardo Costa Pinto of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), the author of an article published in April this year entitled “Bolsonaro and the Barracks: Madness with Method,” says that the Army paved the way for Bolsonaro’s victory with a “white” or soft coup, “by blocking the Supreme Court. And that the conductor of the coup was Villas Bôas.”
Costa Pinto notes that by taking on Azevedo e Silva as Minister of Defense, Bolsonaro enigmatically acknowledged those who deserved it: “Thank you, Commander Villas Bôas. What we have talked about will die between us. You are responsible for me being here.” Bolsonaro said.
Leaving the command of the Army to serve as special adviser to the Presidency, Villas Bôas, now sick and confined to a wheelchair, publicly told the President: “You bring the necessary renewal and release of the ideological bonds that hijacked free thinking.”
“Villas Bôas gave Bolsonaro an ultimatum: ‘We only have you.'” reported CartaCapital.
Translation: He alone would be a palatable candidate for what the Army thought right to do in the country.
For Costa Pinto, the General’s public demonstrations when Army chief, from 2015 to 2018, show that Villas Bôas prevented a “classic coup” – a military uprising – with his preaching of legality, of an electoral resolution to the country’s problems.
But it was “the guardian” of the “white coup” that brought Bolsonaro to power, by acting to remove Lula from the electoral race.
On the eve of the Supreme Court ruling on Lula’s release in April 2018, Villas Bôas threatened the court via Twitter.
“I assure the Nation that the Brazilian Army thinks it shares the desire of all citizens to repudiate impunity and respect the Constitution, social peace and democracy, and to be attentive to their institutional missions.”
The General practically admitted the threat in an interview with Folha in November 2018.
“There we consciously worked knowing that we were on the edge. But we felt that it could get out of our control if I didn’t express myself. Because other people, reserve military and civilians identified with us, were speaking more emphatically. ”
There was one more notable electoral action by Villas Boas. When the UN Human Rights Committee defended Lula’s candidacy, the General responded in Estadão, calling it an “attempted invasion of national sovereignty.”
Scenes from a plot waiting to arrive in the history books.
Editor’s note from Viomundo: General Villas Bôas’s tweet in April 2018 was released just in time to be read out on Globo’s Jornal Nacional, as the final news, in the exact tone that the station used during the military dictatorship, when “messages” were transmitted like this – often disguised as “ interviews ”with harsh words by Antonio Carlos Magalhães. Brazil changes very little…
Original version of this text in Portuguese at Carta Capital.
