Bolsonaro plotted to stay in power, military heads say

Sought to reverse loss in Brazil’s 2022 election

SAO PAULO — Top Brazilian military leaders declared to police that former president Jair Bolsonaro presented them a plan to reverse the results of the 2022 election he lost, but they refused and warned him they would arrest him if he tried it, according to judicial documents released Friday.

The testimonies of Bolsonaro’s former army and air force commanders to police, and released by the Supreme Court, is the first direct mention of the right-wing leader as actively participating in a conspiracy to ignore the results of the October 2022 election won by his rival, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The statements by military commanders during Bolsonaro's term add to his legal woes as prosecutors seek to find links between the far-right leader and the Jan. 8, 2023 riots that trashed government buildings in capital Brasilia one week after Lula's inauguration.

A federal police report said former army commander Marco Antônio Freire Gomes testified that he and other top military leaders attended several last-minute and unscheduled meetings at the presidential palace after the second round of the elections “in which thenPresident Jair Bolsonaro offered possibilities of using legal tools . . . regarding the electoral process.”

General Freire Gomes told federal police that in one of the gatherings Bolsonaro told the three commanders of his military and his then-Defense Secretary Paulo Sergio Nogueira he wanted to create a commission to “investigate the confirmation and the legality of the electoral process.” He added other tools could be used, such as issuing a decree of a state of siege.

Freire Gomes said he rejected the idea from the start and told Bolsonaro that such a move “could end in the in the legal responsibility of the then president,” according to the federal police document.

The Brazilian general also declared to police he “always made it clear to the then-president that, under the conditions at the time, there was no possibility to reverse the result of the elections from a military standpoint.”

Former air force commander Brigadier Carlos de Almeida Baptista Jr. also told federal police he rejected Bolsonaro’s electoral moves.

He added that he believes that General Freire Gomes’s rebuke was key to stopping Bolsonaro from seeking the reverse the elections result.

“If the commander [Freire Gomes] had agreed, possibly, a coup d’etat attempt would have taken place,” the federal police document quotes Baptista Jr. as saying.

“Gen. Freire Gomes said that if such move was attempted he would have to arrest the president,” the police document reads.

Baptista Jr. also told the federal police that Almir Garnier, the former commander of Brazil’s Navy, “said he would put his troops at Jair Bolsonaro’s disposal,” according to the document.

Bolsonaro has denied that he and his supporters attempted a coup when rioters assaulted government buildings a year ago.

“What is a coup? It is tanks on the streets, weapons, conspiracy. None of that happened in Brazil,” he said during a demonstration last month.

Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Fabio Wajngarten, called Freire Gomes’s testimony “folkloric” on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday.

Bolsonaro started raising unfounded questions about Brazil’s electronic voting process years before the vote, and those efforts to sow doubts accelerated in the lead-up to the election.

But top figures in the military giving lengthy testimonies to Federal Police is an ominous omen for Bolsonaro.

“It’s one of the first big signs that Bolsonaro is going to stand alone and lose much of the military support he had,” said Sérgio Praça, a political scientist from the Rio de Janeiro-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank and university.

The testimonies are unlikely to have a significant impact on public opinion, said Manoel Galdino, a political scientist at the University of Sao Paulo.

He said that Bolsonaro loyalists will not be swayed by new evidence, while many others are already convinced that the former president was involved in plotting a coup.

“There has been no major new revelation to the point of changing Bolsonaro’s status or the role he will play in the October municipal elections, for example,” said Galdino.