RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On September 1st, last year, no one paid any attention to a message on Facebook threatening then federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro.
The author wrote that he would test the “bravery” of the PSL candidate for the presidency of the republic when the two would meet and that he “deserved” to be shot in the head.
Nobody paid attention to the post because threats of this kind are almost invariably nothing but ranting. No one gave it any credit since the author, an unemployed waiter, also used to publish disjointed texts and utterly meaningless conspiracy theories on his social media page. He seemed crazy. Five days later, however, Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, the author of the message, stabbed Bolsonaro in a rally in Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais).
The attacker was indeed mentally unbalanced, but the attack showed that threats should not be underestimated, no matter how unlikely they may seem.
For the past six months, the federal police have been hunting down members of a terrorist group that has already carried out at least three bombings in Brasília and have announced that their most audacious goal is to kill the president.
In the past two weeks, Veja magazine has interviewed one of the leaders of the Secret Forest Society (SSS), who claim to be the Brazilian branch of “Individualists Tending Toward the Wild” (ITS), an international organization that calls itself eco-extremist and is investigated for promoting attacks on politicians and entrepreneurs in several countries.
The terrorist identifies himself as “Anhangá”. Under the group’s guidance, the contact was made through the deep web, a kind of clandestine area of the internet that, while untraceable, is used as a means of communication by criminals of various sorts.
Anhangá assures that the plan to kill Bolsonaro is real and began to be devised from the moment the president was elected.
He was supposed to be executed on the day of his inauguration, but the strong security system set up by the police and the army eventually caused the group to postpone the action. “We checked the area first. However, it was still unpredictable. We weren’t sure how it would work,” says the terrorist.
Days before the inauguration, the SSS placed a bomb in front of a Catholic church fifty kilometers from the Palácio do Planalto.
The bomb failed to detonate due to a faulty fuse. On the same day, the SSS posted a video on the internet claiming the attack and disclosing details about the bomb that only those who built it could know.
The group also announced that the next target would be the elected president, which led the authorities to recommend the cancellation of an open car parade. “We could easily blend in and carry out this attack, but the risk was enormous (…), so it would be suicidal. We didn’t want that.”
In the attack, explosives and weapons were to be used. “The ultimate goal would be to shoot Bolsonaro or his family, his children, his wife.”
After that, in April, two Ibama cars were set on fire at one of the agency’s offices in Brasília. Among the debris were matchsticks, remains of duct tape and traces of flammable fluid.
There was graffiti with death threats against Environment Minister Ricardo Salles. Again, in a video posted on the deep web, the group claimed the attack and displayed the material used, providing evidence that they had indeed perpetrated the attack.
According to Anhangá, this was another warning; this time addressed directly at Ricardo Salles.
“Salles is a cynic, and he will not rest, when he least expects it, even if he leaves the ministry he is holding, his turn will come. (…) He is a wolf watching over a chicken coop”, says the extremist, who points out the existence of a third target in the government.
About Damares Alves, the Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, he says: “She has become the Christian white evangelical who preaches progress and condemns all ancestry. Eco-extremism is highly incompatible with what her ministry advocates.”
A sort of international holding company of so-called eco-terrorists, ITS was founded in 2011 in Mexico and claims to have representatives in Argentina, Chile, Spain, and Greece.
The organization stands up against everything that leads to environmental destruction and advocates the use of extreme measures and violent acts against nature’s enemies.
Last May, Chile’s eco-terrorists declared responsibility for a letter bomb sent to a businessman. Two years earlier, in 2017, a similar artifact was addressed to the president of a mining company, who was injured.
In Mexico, the ITS declared its responsibility for several explosions at universities. One of them resulted in the death of a researcher in 2016. Late last year, the group also claimed responsibility for a bomb left near an orthodox church in Athens.