Case against Brazil coup plotters could end decades of impunity

The arrest of a four-star general in Brazil over the weekend shows courts are ready to play hardball with those accused of plotting to violently overturn election results, breaking with the impunity that shadowed nearly a century of military coups.

Former Brazilian Defense Minister Walter Braga Netto was arrested on Saturday for allegedly meddling in the investigation of a coup plot organized with former President Jair Bolsonaro, his running mate in the 2022 election.

Last month, federal police accused them and over two dozen active and retired military officers of taking part in the plot, including a scheme to kill President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva before he could take office.

Lawyers for Bolsonaro and Braga Netto deny they took part in the alleged conspiracy or would have benefited from one.

The preventive arrest and police report targeting military brass suggest they may not enjoy the traditional amnesty for members of Brazil's armed forces who punctuated the 20th century with their political interventions.

It may also provide a test for Lula's fraught relationship with the Brazilian military.

Before Braga Netto, military historians cite just two such high-ranking generals arrested for meddling with presidential succession in the 1920s and the 1960s.

Unlike Argentina and Chile, where armed forces also brought down elected governments to install bloody dictatorships during the Cold War, Brazil never punished the leaders of its military regime from 1964 to 1985.

Due to a 1979 law pardoning the crimes of the military government, Brazilian courts have all but ignored public evidence that the dictatorship tortured thousands of people and killed hundreds, according to a 2014 government report.

"Because there was no punishment, because that history wasn't told, it's alive – like a serpent's egg," said Eliana Pintor, 62, one of hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in the Sao Paulo rain on Tuesday to demand Bolsonaro and his alleged co-conspirators be brought to trial.

Brazil's prosecutor general is expected to decide next year whether to bring charges against Bolsonaro and his associates, who deny any wrongdoing and call the investigation legally suspect and politically motivated.

Bolsonaro's allies in Congress are pushing a bill granting amnesty to the former president and his supporters facing legal jeopardy for vandalizing government buildings in Brasilia in January 2023 during a protest calling for the military to overturn election results.

Although that bill currently faces political and legal hurdles, Brazil's often slow-moving justice system could take years to try to eventually punish Bolsonaro and other targets of the federal police investigation concluded last month.

A survey released on Friday showed 51% of Brazilians believe Bolsonaro and military officers attempted a coup to block Lula's presidency. But the Genial/Quaest poll found 38% disagreed — underscoring the deep political divisions that could eventually derail prosecution.

Still, even the prospect of alleged coup-plotting generals on trial would break with precedent in Brazil.

"It's a great novelty and a great challenge to Brazil's justice system," said Paulo Abrao, the executive director of the Washington Brazil Office, a progressive think tank that has worked on accountability for crimes during the dictatorship.

Abrao said that efforts to prosecute senior military officers in Brazil have long faced resistance from those fearing that such a move would "destabilize democracy."

TESTING RELATIONS

For Lula, who entered politics as a union leader organizing strikes against the military government in the 1970s and whose allies include former members of the armed resistance to that regime, a trial could test his delicate relationship with the military.

Defense Minister Jose Mucio stressed in a statement to Reuters that the evidence presented by the federal police points to acts by individuals, not the institution of the armed forces.

That view is widely shared in the military, according to three senior officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Still, setting aside ideology, material interests have weighed on relations between the military and Lula's government.

In Bolsonaro's government, military officers held positions of power unlike anything seen since the end of the dictatorship. Thousands took well-paid jobs in the federal government and several served as ministers in Bolsonaro's cabinet.

Carlos Fico, a military historian at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said that the alleged coup attempt may have been "less motivated by ideology and doctrine than a desire to maintain a series of benefits, such as government jobs and the special retirement conditions the military has in Brazil."

Bolsonaro himself burst onto the public scene in the late 1980s, soon after the end of Brazil's military government, as an army captain demanding higher wages for soldiers and built his power advocating for the interests of military rank and file.

Those benefits are now under pressure as Lula's government has looked for ways to trim the public payroll and pensions, including a proposal to raise the minimum retirement age for military officers to 55.

Two people involved in the discussions said the resistance from the armed forces has carried more weight than in other parts of the federal government facing proposed cuts.

However, political ramifications are secondary for the many Brazilians who have been waiting most of their lives to see soldiers held responsible for their crimes.

Victoria Grabois, an 81-year-old human rights activist, lost her husband, father and brother in 1973 due to their opposition to the dictatorship. Her efforts to bring their killers to justice have been fruitless.

"No one ever sat for trial," she said.

Although the officers accused last month of plotting to overturn the 2022 election had nothing to do with the crimes against her family, Grabois said she is heartened by the prospect of accountability.

"Maybe this will put a stop to the coup-mongering desire in the military," she said.