The Brazilian Federal Police has launched an operation against former president Jair Bolsonaro and several of his allies, including former Defense Minister Walter Braga Netto, for their alleged involvement in a coup plot to keep him in power after the October 2022 elections.

This Thursday the agents broke into the house of Bolsonaro in Angra dos Reis, in Rio de Janeiro, to carry out the searches, at the same time that they have given him a period of 24 hours to voluntarily surrender your passport.

In addition to the withdrawal of passports from all suspects, among precautionary measures There is also the prohibition of leaving the country, of communicating with each other and the suspension of their public functions.

“I left the government more than a year ago and I continue to suffer relentless persecution. Forget me, you already have someone else governing the country,” reports the newspaper ‘Folha de Sao Paulo’ that Bolsonaro protested during the police operation.

The Police have executed about thirty search warrants and four others in preventive detention, including those of two former Bolsonaro advisors, Filipe Martins and Colonel Marcelo Camara, and that of the Army Special Forces major, Rafael Martins, within the framework of the ‘Tempus Veritatis’ operation.

Among those investigated is the president of the Liberal Party (PL), Valdemar Costa Neto, who has been arrested after agents searching his home in Brasilia found a firearm whose documentation had expired.

The list of illustrious detainees is also completed by former Minister of Defense Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, former Minister of Justice Anderson Torres, who He was already in prison for several months after the January 8 attacks, the former Navy commander, Admiral Almir Garnier, and the former head of the Security Cabinet, General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro.

Lula, on Bolsonaro: “I was not prepared to lose”

For his part, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has assured that he is convinced that the attacks of January 8 would not have been possible. without the participation of Bolsonaro, in what was his first reaction after the start of the police operation this Thursday.

“The citizen who was in the Government I wasn’t prepared to lose, I wasn’t ready to go out. So much so that he didn’t even have the courage to take over. He stayed at home crying because he left for the United States,” Lula recalled during an interview for Rádio Itatiaia.

“He had to participate in that coup attempt construction (…) I don’t know, but I don’t think it would have happened without him,” said Lula, who while asking to respect Bolsonaro’s presumption of innocence, trusts that he will fall. the full weight of the law on those responsible for those events.

coup plot

According to the investigation, the suspects They spread unfounded theories of fraud in the 2022 elections before they were held with the aim of legitimizing a subsequent military intervention.

The plot would consist of two partsa first carried out by the so-called ‘digital militias’, in charge of disseminating the alleged irregularities of the electoral process through the media and social networks, while in the second, which would have the endorsement of some military personnel, it would be carried out the riot

Research The Police found a coup ‘draft’ which contemplated the arrests of Supreme Court judges Gilmar Mendes and Alexandre de Moraes, as well as that of the president of the Senator, Rodrigo Pacheco.

The Police maintain that Bolsonaro asked to remove the names of Pacheco and Mendes, but not that of De Moraes, whose agenda was detailed in that draft so that he could be followed at all times and, in the event of a coup, arrested.

Likewise, they discovered that related soldiers pressured those who were opposed and that Bolsonaro’s then advisor, Colonel Mauro Cid, his name appears in other cases involving the former president, received 100,000 reais (18,000 euros) to cover any expenses that may arise.