Bolsonaro’s allies discussed using 1,500 military to stage a coup in Brazil

Two people very close to the former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), plotted to use 1,500 military personnel to execute a coup, according to audios of conversations released this May 8 by CNN Brazil.

“We have to convince General Pimentel (…) we have to convince the commander of the Special Operations Brigade of Goiânia and arrest Alexandre de Moraes (Federal Supreme Court Justice); we are going to organize, develop, instruct and equip 1,500 men,” says former Army General Ailton Barros, a man trusted by the former president.

Barros told this to Colonel Elcio Franco, who became an advisor to the Civil House and number two in the Ministry of Health, which led him to be investigated for the delay in purchasing vaccines against Covid-19.

When Barros comments to Franco that 1,500 men would have to be used to stage a coup, the latter replies that the then Army commander feared being held responsible.

“He is afraid of the consequences, damn it; fear of the consequences, what is it? To have insufflated (a coup)? (…) he is going to the worst hypothesis,” Franco said in the conversation, the date of which was not disclosed by the local press.

Barros was presented in the last election campaign as Bolsonaro’s “number one” in Rio de Janeiro and was arrested last week as part of the investigation into falsifying the former president’s vaccination card.

This trusted aide allegedly mobilized his contacts to get a health center in the city of Duque de Caxias, governed by a Bolsonarist mayor, to agree to falsify Bolsonaro’s vaccination booklet saying that he had been vaccinated there.

In another of the audios leaked in recent days, Barros also claimed to know who was the principal in the murder of Rio city councilwoman Marielle Franco, killed in March 2018.

With information from Sputnik