Generals Penteado and Feitosa, two of Augusto Heleno’s main assistants, provide clarification; Dutra testifies for 7 hours and delivers documents challenging Ibaneis
An unprecedented event, the summoning of 89 soldiers from the Institutional Security Office and the Military Command of Planalto for provide clarifications to the Federal Police on the events of January 8 in Brasilia is a symbol of the impact of the politicization process of the Armed Forces during the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL). This is the opinion of analysts and military listened to by Estadão.
“What is happening is absolutely new. Is this what remains of the legacy of so much closeness to Bolsonaro, since 2018?, said the political scientist and historian João Roberto Martins Filho, professor at the Federal University of São Carlos. In reaction to the process of partisanship in the military sectors, which culminated with the acts of 8 January, the current army commander, general Tomás Miguel Miné Ribeiro de Paiva, started an internal process to depoliticise the Force. The idea was born while Julio Cesar Arruda, the head of the army dismissed by the president, was still at the helm. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on January 21st.
The Army is changing seven of its eight Land Forces Area Commands this month — only the Eastern Military Command will remain unchanged. Tomás is betting on appeasement to recover institutionality, to overcome the wounds caused by 01/8 – when the radicals invaded and destroyed the Planalto Palace, the National Congress and the Federal Supreme Court (STF).
Supreme
The outrage shown by the protesters at the Supreme Court aroused deep displeasure among the ministers of the House, which were addressed throughout the Bolsonaro government not only by the then president, but also by generals of his ministers, such as Augusto Heleno and Walter Braga Netto.
Generals like Otávio Rêgo Barros, recently appointed research coordinator at the Center for Strategic Studies of the Army (CEEEx), is one of the voices calling for a vote of confidence in General Tomás in his task of recovering the institutional role played by the Armed Forces . Rêgo Barros had publicly warned of the need to avoid emotional criticism which would only hinder the necessary harmony for dialogue between politics and operations in civil-military relations.
Rêgo Barros was the army’s chief of social communications during the command of General Eduardo Villas Bôas and a spokesman for Bolsonaro from 2019 to 2020, later becoming a critic of the captain’s government.
Martins Filho recalls that the attitude of peace involving the political and military leadership follows the logic of political realism. “Given the seriousness of the facts, a situation has arisen in which the testimony of the military to the Federal Police has become natural”. He attributes it more to a reaction from the STF than to a policy by the Lula government. “What was decisive was Minister Alexandre de Moraes’ decision to keep the investigation into the military in the Supreme Court.”
The professor states that the singularity of the testimony of over 80 soldiers to the PF lies in the fact that they are providing clarifications by decision of a civilian power and not following disputes involving groups within the Forces, as happened before 1964.
Reaction
Another important fact is the absence of reactions in the barracks. Everyone remembers when the STF looked into the possibility of seizing Bolsonaro’s cell phone, in 2020. General Heleno, then prime minister of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), said that if the measure was determined, it could have provoked ” unpredictable consequences for the stability of the country”.
The military reacted even more when the then Minister Celso de Mello, of the STF, wrote that Generals Heleno, Braga Netto and Luiz Eduardo Ramos could be brought to testify “under a rod”. Action in the event that they had refused to provide clarifications in the investigation opened into the allegations of Sérgio Moro, who had resigned from the Ministry of Justice, according to which Bolsonaro would have attempted to interfere in the federal police. No manifesto against the PF or Justice was produced this time.
Source: Terra
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