FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Military Faction Demands Brazil’s Ex-President Lula Be Jailed on Eve of High Court Habeas Ruling
April 4, 2018 (EIRNS)—Brazil’s Army Commander Gen. Eduardo Villas Boas yesterday raised the specter of a military intervention, should the Supreme Court accept former President Lula da Silva’s appeal for habeas corpus today, and not order him to jail immediately. Lula is the latest target in the “Lava Jato” color revolution underway in Brazil, which succeeded in toppling President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. As EIR was first in breaking the story, that Lava Jato operation is being run by the same network in the U.S. Department of Justice that is also trying to overthrow the government of Donald Trump in the U.S.
In a tweet last night, General Villas Boas wrote that the army was “attentive to its institutional missions” and that
“I assure the nation that the military, along with all good citizens, shares the desire of repudiation of impunity and respect for the Constitution, social peace and democracy.”
The import of the general’s tweet was lost on no one in Brazil, and caused an uproar across the political spectrum. The head of the Air Force issued a statement disagreeing with General Villas Boas’ comments; the Defense Minister said there was nothing wrong with what he had tweeted; the head of the Western Military Command also backed him up; a large grouping of lawyers and politicians denounced this as the worst threat to democracy in Brazil since the 1964 military coup; and so on.
Perhaps the most revealing response came from the Lava Jato judge in Rio de Janeiro, Marcelo Bretas, who retweeted General Villas Boas’ threat along with an applause emoticon, adding that he disagreed with those saying that the general’s comments amounted to a threat to carry out a military coup. Judge Bretas is notorious in Brazil for handing down a vicious 45-year sentence as part of the Lava Jato prosecution against Adm. Othon Pinheiro, revered throughout Brazil and especially among nationalist military layers as the father of Brazil’s nuclear program.
The DOJ’s Lava Jato operation is succeeding in its assigned mission of destroying the Brazil’s institutions, and of dangerously polarizing the country. General Villas Boas is part of a right-wing liberal grouping in the military, who favor British free trade and knee-jerk anti-communism. That grouping has been growing more and more vociferous of late, which includes having a group of top retired officers meet a week ago with “social media” representatives organizing against Lula, in order to map out a strategy of street demonstrations and other protests to insist that Lula be jailed.
