The far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro was in his final days as Brazil’s president when, six weeks after losing the election and still refusing to recognise the result, he summoned the heads of the armed forces to a meeting.
The defence minister, Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, took out a document from a plastic folder and handed copies to the commanders of the navy, army and air force.
It was a draft decree proposing to invalidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s election in October ۲۰۲۲ and keep Bolsonaro in power.
“The draft coup decree – which some people still insist to this day never existed – was there, awaiting approval or rejection; consensus or a majority,” writes the then head of the air force, Lt Brig Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior, in a new book coming out this month.
After learning that the document would prevent Lula from taking office, Baptista Júnior told the defence minister he refused even to receive it: “The air force will not take part in this.” He then stood up and left the room.
The extensive investigation and trial that convicted Bolsonaro of attempting a coup concluded that the plot failed to move forward mainly because the heads of two of the three armed forces – Baptista Júnior and the army commander, Gen Marco Antônio Freire Gomes – refused to take part.
The navy commander, Adm Almir Garnier Santos, was convicted, as was Nogueira. Both are serving their sentences at military facilities, while Bolsonaro is under house arrest.
Freire Gomes has kept a low profile, but Baptista Júnior, speaking to the Guardian by video call, said he had decided to write a book to help prevent history from repeating itself.
In the book, the ۶۵-year-old former fighter pilot gives a detailed, first-hand account of the various ways in which Bolsonaro tried to cling to power.
Baptista Júnior said he was motivated by the fact that, despite the abundance of evidence presented during the former president’s trial, opinion polls still showed that about a third of the population did not believe there had been an attempted coup.
“Keeping in power someone who lost an election is a coup d’état,” he said, speaking from his home in Brasília, where he was dressed in civilian clothes – having recently retired – and about to pick up his grandson from school.
The book, the Portuguese title of which translates as I Said No! – An Anti-Coup Bulwark, is due to be published on ۱۵ September, about two weeks before the first round of the presidential election, in which Lula will face one of Bolsonaro’s sons, the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro.
Some Bolsonaro supporters have accused Baptista Júnior of trying to influence the vote, although he makes clear that he will vote for neither Lula nor Flávio, and criticises both in the book. He said the timing of the book was simply the result of the writing and editing process.
Despite writing that he voted for the far-right populist in the ۲۰۱۸ and ۲۰۲۲ elections, and even recounting a lighthearted moment at a barbecue when he saw the first lady reprimand the president for drinking beer, Baptista Júnior is critical of Bolsonaro, a former army captain who spent ۳۰ largely undistinguished years as a city councillor and then congressman before reaching the presidency.
He describes his former boss as someone with “significant limitations in political, institutional and administrative experience” and an “almost total imperviousness to outside opinions or information that did not conform to the ‘truths’ he had already established as his own” – citing his refusal to accept facts such as the scientific evidence supporting Covid-۱۹ vaccination.
During the election, Bolsonaro became “entirely consumed by his own efforts to remain in office”, writes Baptista Júnior. After repeatedly casting doubt on the vote, the president ordered the armed forces to investigate the electronic voting system, but refused to accept their reports when they found no irregularities.
“He may still not believe the election result even today. Whether that is a matter of character, personality or something pathological, I don’t know,” said Baptista Júnior.
The book touches on, but does not go into detail about, one of the most shocking revelations from the coup investigation: a plan drawn up by army special forces to kidnap or assassinate Lula, the newly elected vice-president and a supreme court justice. Baptista Júnior writes that he was not summoned to those meetings and only learned about them through the press.
He does, however, recount more than a dozen meetings in which Bolsonaro summoned the heads of the armed forces to discuss ways to remain in power. At one of them, he witnessed the army chief tell the president, after hearing a proposal for an institutional rupture: “If you do that, I’ll have to arrest you.”
Baptista Júnior had already given that account in testimony, and during the trial both Freire Gomes and Bolsonaro denied it. But he stands by his account in the book, writing that it was not something anyone present would forget.
Saying no to the coup cost the pilot “many friendships”, he said. Even some military personnel still call him a “traitor” or a “watermelon”, a slur for soldiers seen as green on the outside because of their uniforms, but communist red within.
The attacks started soon after the air force chief refused to join the plot, when the army general Walter Souza Braga Netto, whom Baptista Júnior considered a friend, ordered other military officers to attack him on social media and “make his life and his family’s hell”. Braga Netto, Bolsonaro’s running mate, was also convicted over the attempted coup.
Most of Baptista Júnior’s revelations in the book initially emerged in ۲۰۲۴, when he was summoned to testify to federal police and only then, more than a year after leaving office, revealed that he had witnessed an attempted coup.
Juliano da Silva Cortinhas, who worked on the civilian side of the defence ministry between ۲۰۱۳ and ۲۰۱۶, before the Bolsonaro administration, said: “It’s positive that he [Baptista Júnior] and the army chief said no to the coup, but as a matter of duty they should have reported it to the police as soon as it happened.”
Cortinhas, who heads a security research group at the University of Brasília, said the armed forces could not present themselves as the “saviours” of democracy because that would be like “tripping society up and then holding out a hand to help it back to its feet”.
“It was the commanders who allowed active-duty officers to take part in politics,” he said, noting that the Bolsonaro administration had by far the largest number of military personnel serving in civilian posts since the end of the brutal ۱۹۶۴–۸۵ military dictatorship.
Cortinhas sees as positive the fact that high-ranking officers were convicted of an attempted coup for the first time, but noted that others involved in the plot escaped justice, and many were not even identified.
“The risk of a new coup is even greater today,” he said.
The new factor, he said, was the US president, Donald Trump, who has sought to influence elections across Latin America in support of far-right candidates such as Flávio Bolsonaro. In ۲۰۲۲, when Joe Biden was in the White House, Bolsonaro’s vice-president acknowledged that attempting a coup would leave Brazil in a “difficult position before the international community”.
Cortinhas said he feared that if Lula was re-elected and Trump refused to recognise the result, some members of Brazil’s military could feel emboldened. “Coup-supporting groups remain within the armed forces,” he said.
Baptista Júnior confirmed that, although it was difficult to know how many, there remained active-duty military personnel who believed a coup d’état would be justified under certain circumstances.
“That’s why eternal vigilance is the best path,” he said.
