Is Brazil on the Cusp of a Military Coup?

There are worrying signs that the military is planning to return to power in Brazil, even if it does so indirectly through a presidential proxy.

Brazil stands at an historic crossroads today when the Supreme Court rules whether former leftist-populist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known just as Lula, should begin his 12-year jail sentence on corruption charges that his supporters say is politically motivated in order to prevent him from standing in this October’s presidential election. His absence is thought to guarantee the solidification of the post-coup political system that the US is shaping in Brazil after the “constitutional coup” against former President Dilma Rousseff. One of two things can happen – either Lula is sent behind bars or he’s allowed to continue the appeal process and walk free for now, both outcomes of which stand to be exploited by the military for its own purposes.

General Eduardo Villas Boas, the commander of the Brazilian Army, warned that the military “repudiates impunity and respects the Constitution, social peace and democracy” in what was widely interpreted as a threat to potentially intervene if the Supreme Court declines to jail Lula. The armed forces are already deployed in the country’s former capital of Rio de Janeiro as part of a targeted operation against drug gangs, which in hindsight might be seen as symbolic muscle-flexing that signals its intent to play a more active role in domestic affairs given how the ongoing US-provoked political crisis has made the country dysfunctional and largely ungovernable.

Helping matters along is how the “deep state”-backed Washington Post launched a psy-op last month in an attempt to precondition the Brazilian public to accept a return to military rule, headlining one of their latest articles “In Brazil, nostalgia grows for the dictatorship — not the brutality, but the law and order”. That piece correlates with the narrative now being pushed by the Mainstream Media that former military officer and current presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro is a “Tropical Trump” whose chances of winning are within the margin of error if Lula was disqualified and he faced CIA-supportedMarina Silva in a likely second-round runoff.

The sudden rise of Bolsanaro from a hitherto largely unknown political candidate to a potential presidential frontrunner under the aforementioned military-assisted scenario aligns with the author’s December 2016 prediction about the emergence of a so-called “Third Force” to replace the country’s two main political factions that were discredited by “Operation Car Wash”, a role which would probably end up being played by the military. At the time, the author forecasted the following:

“…It’s possible that the “deep state” organizers behind this large-scale ‘cleaning’/’purging’ are trying to seize the moment of political confusion and upheaval in order to get rid of as many of their opponents as possible as a means of facilitating the rise of a hitherto (relatively) unknown political actor who will “save the country” from its far-reaching political turmoil. This template structurally replicates that of traditional military coups though without the formal military component, having been a post-modern coup in that it was carried out completely behind the scenes and using nominally ‘legal’ means.

Judging by the track record behind them in getting Rousseff kicked out of the Presidency, this ‘third force’ isn’t friendly to the multipolar world by any measure, yet at the same time and as the saying goes, “the revolution devours its children” and some of the unipolar coup conspirators are now falling victim to the very same inquisition that they took part in against Rousseff.

Therefore, while it can’t be predicted with any given degree of solid confidence, one shouldn’t rule out that the ‘third force’ behind “Operation Car Wash” won’t stop with their anti-Rousseff regime change operation and will in fact go as far as ‘cleaning out’/’purging’ Temer and as many other politicians as they can in their quest to install “one of their own” in power afterwards.”

For all intents and purposes, former officer Bolsanaro has become the public face of the “Third Force” that the military is presenting as the law and order “solution” that Brazil urgently needs and who they’re eager to place into power no matter how openly they have to interfere in the country’s political process to achieve this. To that end, they have a few options available at their disposal. The first one is to directly intervene by arresting Lula if the Supreme Court rules against immediately imprisoning him, but this scenario could quickly lead to a second related one of staging a full-scale coup instead.

The third option could occur independently of the first two if Lula is jailed or sometime thereafter if the military decides to do this itself and possibly follow through with an official coup, and that’s “hacking the election” by manipulating the presidential campaign in such a way that Bolsanaro emerges as the inevitable winner. This could be achieved through a variety of means but could most likely take the form of pressuring the country’s main media outlets to provide favorable coverage to the military’s preferred candidate out of fear of vague punishments if they don’t, orchestrating a scandal to diminish Silva’s appeal, and/or outright defrauding the vote.

In fact, Bolsanaro doesn’t even really have to win in order for the military to gain de-facto proxy control of Brazil because Silva’s victory could in theory accomplish this as well, though she’s not exactly the poster child that the armed forces need at this time in “convincingly” carrying out whatever “law and order” plans that they have in mind, which is why the former officer is their current candidate of choice. Everything that’s happening at this moment and in the run-up to the election is therefore designed to place this man into power as the military figurehead of a “New Brazil”, one which epitomizes the US’ “Operation Condor 2.0” mission of reversing the “Pink Tide” and strengthening unipolarity in the New Cold War.