RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – During the 13 months Adriano da Nóbrega spent on the run, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro chose discretion and refrained from referring to the ex-police officer he had honored during his time as a state deputy. But last Saturday, the senator surprised journalists by voluntarily taking over the microphone at a construction inauguration in Rio de Janeiro.
“What do you want to ask about Adriano?” the Bolsonaro clan’s firstborn shouted to reporters. A claim by allied Bolsonarists critical of the senator’s lack of resolve to challenge accusations of involvement with militias and the alleged salary kickback scheme among cabinet officials, the change in stance not only pleased a wing of supporters, but also marked the family’s shift in narrative to distance itself from the militiaman killed last February 9th in a police operation in Bahia.
“I, as a state deputy, honored hundreds and hundreds of state police officers who survived the gunfights with drug traffickers. I decorated Adriano more than 15 years ago. It’s no use trying to link me because I have nothing to do with militias,” the senator said.
On the same occasion, President Jair Bolsonaro, who until then had refrained from commenting on ties with Adriano da Nóbrega, raised the tone by directing the responsibility for the death of the former State Police (PM) officer to the authorities of Bahia. “I met Adriano in 2005 and never had contact with him again. People change, for better or for worse… But it was the police of Bahia, of the Workers’ Party (PT), who killed Captain Adriano”.
The shift in discourse is abrupt, and the fact that the BOPE’s ex-captain died in Bahia provided additional ingredients for this ‘Trojan horse’ in the narrative. The attacks on the leftist governor of Bahia, Rui Costa, have not ceased since that brief meeting with the press. The State is in charge of the command of the police that killed Adriano da Nóbrega.
In his Twitter profile, that same Saturday, the President accused the MP of Bahia of a “likely summary execution” of Nóbrega. He added that Costa “keeps very strong ties of friendship with criminals convicted in second instance,” in reference to ex-President Lula.
The provocation was a counter-strike to the governor’s reaction, who had replied to Bolsonaro’s statements, also through social media, that the police protocol in Bahia is to arrest criminals alive, “even if the criminals maintain bonds of friendship with the Presidency”. The President’s comments provided an opportunity for 20 governors, including Rui Costa, to release a joint letter criticizing him for crossing his position’s institutional boundaries.
However, Bolsonaro did not back down. On Tuesday, February 18th, he again used Twitter to demand independent expert examination for what he calls a potential “file burning”. He also questioned who will inspect Adriano da Nóbrega’s cell phones, seized by the police, suggesting the chance of forged messages and audios with the aim of accusing innocent people of the crime. One of his sons, federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, shared the message on social media, saying that “there are people who don’t want a decent investigation, why?
Senator Flávio, on the other hand, called for sensitive images to be exposed, to the point of releasing a video that was said to be of Nóbrega’s body with attack wounds on his back, in addition to the police report filed by the police in Bahia, describing an alleged gunfight during the operation. “Who is cheating the records? To hide what? Who had Adriano killed?”, he posted.
Shortly after the Bolsonaros’ publications, suggesting that Nóbrega had been tortured before his death, the courts of Bahia determined that a new investigation into the militiaman’s corpse be carried out, now under the responsibility of the Forensic Medical Institute of Rio de Janeiro.
On February 12th, three days after his death, Flávio publicly expressed his views on the matter for the first time, alleging that he had received a denunciation of concealment of evidence relating to the police actions.
“It has just come to my attention that there are people expediting the cremation of Adriano da Nóbrega in order to eliminate the evidence that he was brutally murdered in Bahia. I urge the relevant authorities to stop this and clarify what actually happened.” The body of the ex-police officer may only be cremated after the new expert examination.
Comparisons to Marielle and Celso Daniel
Despite the risk of bringing the attrition of the link to the militiaman into the Planalto, President Jair Bolsonaro doubled his efforts in the strategy of feeding ambiguous narratives in order to shield his family from the unfolding of the case.
While he reiterates that he has not kept a close relationship with Adriano da Nóbrega, the hard core of Bolsonarism – with the exception of city councilor Carlos Bolsonaro, who has not yet spoken – confers martyrdom status on the ex-PM as a way of equating his death with that of Marielle Franco and, at the same time, rekindling the Celso Daniel case.
In the same post in which he attacked the governor of Bahia, the President used the opportunity to tease leftists with insinuations about the murder of the former mayor of Santo André. “It’s a case similar to the burning of the file of former mayor Celso Daniel, which his party, the PT, never bothered to clarify, quite the opposite,” he wrote.
Collages with the photo of the militiaman and the words “Who had Adriano killed?” are circulated by Bolsonarist groups, which also compare his death to that of Celso Daniel. In 2005, Nóbrega was awarded the Tiradentes Medal by Flávio Bolsonaro, a traditional honor granted by the Legislative Assembly of Rio. He was serving a prison sentence for the murder of a car watcher who had denounced being blackmailed by MPs belonging to a militia headed by Nóbrega, who was ultimately acquitted in a second instance and released. Before his death, the ex-police officer was under investigation for leading the group known as the ‘Escritório do Crime’ (Crime Bureau), where Marielle Franco’s murderers were said to have been recruited. Despite the criminal record, President Bolsonaro did not hesitate to emphasize Nóbrega’s virtues as an MP last Saturday.
And now the police report of the leftist Bahia government, general and reporting an alleged gunfight.
Who is cheating the records? To hide what? Who had Adriano killed? pic.twitter.com/wBD437ZAw4
– Flavio Bolsonaro (@FlavioBolsonaro) February 18th, 2020
“There is no final sentence convicting Captain Adriano of anything. Without wanting to defend him. I don’t know his past life. That year [2005], he was a PM hero,” said the President, who conceded to having been the mentor of the award, assuring he would have guided his son to pay tribute. “There is no connection between me and the militia in Rio de Janeiro. None at all.” But Nóbrega’s relationship with Flávio Bolsonaro extends beyond the medal awarded 15 years ago, according to an investigation by the Rio Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The militiaman’s mother and ex-wife worked in the then-state deputy’s office, and are suspected of being on a list of ghost employees. In other words, they lent their names to receive salaries even though they never worked in the office. But according to the Prosecutor’s Office investigation, Nóbrega directly benefited from the kickback scheme -the appropriation of part of the employees’ salaries- that was allegedly taking place in Flávio’s former office. The senator denies this. The link between his wife and Nóbrega would be Fabrício Queiroz, a former deputy advisor and alleged operator of the scheme, who is still on the run today. Queiroz and Nóbrega have known each other for a long time, and both answer for murder committed in 2003.
The Bolsonaros’ aggressive stance in diving headlong into the case also points its cannons at the PSOL political party, which, together with PT and Rede, lodged a request for the annulment of Flávio Bolsonaro’s congressional mandate for alleged involvement with militias. Before drawing a parallel between the deaths of Nóbrega and Marielle, the President once again targeted the left-wing party, recalling that Adélio Bispo, who stabbed him in 2018, was once affiliated to the PSOL.
“Honest Brazilians want the names of those behind the deaths of Mayor Celso Daniel, City Councilor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, ex-captain Adriano da Nóbrega, as well as the names of those behind the assassination attempt on Jair Bolsonaro,” the President wrote, although he had never spontaneously spoken out in defense of clarifying the deaths of Marielle and Anderson, not even on the day of the assassination on March 14th, 2018.
Although the current narrative strives to portray it as the most interested in the outcome of investigations into the police operation in Bahia, the Bolsonaro family remains in the eye of the hurricane triggered by Nóbrega’s death.
The opposition increases pressure for the course of the lawsuits against Flávio in the salary kickback affair and his potential link with militias. “The president, mindful of the truth, resorts to lies to deflect the focus of his connections with Adriano da Nóbrega,” says PSOL deputy Marcelo Freixo.
More pragmatic allies of the president now fear that the government will again be affected by the scandal involving his eldest son, and they are amazed at the clan’s sudden indiscretion in addressing the issue. On the few occasions when he spoke about his relationship with Nóbrega before his death, Flávio Bolsonaro chose to be evasive, saying that “if he is guilty, let him feel the weight of the law”. Dead, Nóbrega became a victim and martyr in the speech of the President and his family.
Source: El Pais