Brazil advances against coup plotters, while Trump’s US buries punishment

The PF had already indicted the former general director of the PRF, Silvinei Vasques, who spent almost a year in the xilindró. The case of blockades, mainly in regions of the Northeast where Lula had surfed in the first round, inaugurated the season of Bolsonarist coups in Brazil.

On October 30, 2022, the then president of the TSE, Alexandre de Moraes, threatened Silvinei with arrest if he did not release the roads within 20 minutes. “Either you stop the blockades or you go to jail”, reported a report from Piauí magazine that narrated the meeting between the two on the day of the second round.

Already a former director of the PRF, he treated the CPMI parliamentarians of the Coup Acts as idiots when giving crude justifications for the roadblocks in June 2023. “It’s an impossible crime, which didn’t happen, there’s no way. How would we talk to 13 thousand police officers explaining this criminal form without having a WhatsApp, Telegram conversation, without a meeting, without any email sent?”, he asked.

Cynicism in its purest state. It was enough, as it was, for some people at the top to give orders without informing the real intention. This isn’t a cartoon, where the villain communicates his objectives publicly.

From the moment that part of the PRF leadership began acting as Jair’s electoral campaigners, they should have been removed from their duties. As they were not, the corporation was used by Bolsonarism in two coup attempts. The first time, transport for poorer voters was blocked. The second time, he turned a blind eye to the coup protests that blocked highways across the country in the weeks following the PT victory.

The PRF, which has always done excellent work in actions to combat slave labor and human trafficking, aligned itself with the president’s extremist ideology. An example of this was the death of Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, black, unarmed, who drove an old motorcycle and lived with mental illness, murdered by federal highway police officers who locked him in the trunk of a vehicle along with a gas bomb in Umbaúba (SE).