Defense minister swallows own words at House hearing
Defense Minister José Múcio Monteiro’s own words came back to haunt him at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, although lawmakers seemed not to notice.
Speaking about the Supreme Court’s ongoing efforts to accept charges against hundreds of January 8 rioters, Mr. Múcio said: “If we have relatives, friends, colleagues, soldiers, sailors, pilots who committed irresponsibilities, they [should be] punished.”
Of the 1,390 people charged in connection with the January 8 riots — when hordes of pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators stormed and ransacked the buildings that house Brazil’s three branches of government — several are retired military officers or their relatives.
Hundreds of the demonstrators joined the riots after leaving a pro-Bolsonaro putschist camp — set up shortly after Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in the October election — outside the Army’s headquarters in Brasília.
On January 2, shortly after taking office and days before the riots, the defense minister said that he himself had relatives in the protest camps, but argued that they were simply a “manifestation of democracy.” He added that he believed the camps would “fade away” and refused to use his authority to dismantle them.
In late 2022, local Brasília police tried to dismantle the putschist camp, but they were prevented from doing so by the Army, which has jurisdiction over military areas. After President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in on January 1, his Defense Ministry and government as a whole took no further action against the camp until after the riots. The camp was dismantled on the morning of January 9, and hundreds of people were arrested.
A report by the Justice Ministry later found that the protest camp was “central” to the unrest.
In addition to the retired military members who took part in the riots, the role of some active-duty officers is under investigation. Lula last month fired General Gonçalves Dias, his top security official, after leaked surveillance footage showed him to be inside the presidential palace on January 8.
Today’s public hearing was also a preview of the upcoming joint select committee on the January 8 riots. Two far-right lawmakers, Ricardo Salles and Marcel van Hattem, criticized the Armed Forces — a move that would have been unthinkable coming from them during the Bolsonaro administration.
Mr. van Hattem said that “what happened on January 8 ruined the credibility of the Armed Forces for a large part of the Brazilian population.” The strategy is clearly aimed at blaming the military for failing to stop the riots and whitewashing then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s very public efforts to threaten a coup and incite his voters to reject the election results.
Congressman van Hattem persisted in his putschist discourse, asking Army Commander Tomás Paiva: “What are the Armed Forces doing to reverse this [situation]? Because every day you salute a crook [a reference to Lula], the situation gets worse.” Other lawmakers fired back, stating that Mr. van Hattem has refused to accept Mr. Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat.
General Paiva politely replied that the military is “fulfilling its constitutional mission.”
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