Eduardo Michelle and Bolsonaro were more in favor of a coup, said Mauro Cid

Federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro and former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro were part of the wing most enthusiastic about a coup around former president Jair Bolsonaro, according to the first of more than ten statements by lieutenant colonel Mauro Cid in his agreement award-winning collaboration in investigations into the coup plot between 2022 and 2023.

The information based on the full statement was published by columnist Elio Gaspari de The Globe and from Folha de S.Paulo on the last night.

According to what the former president’s former aide-de-camp said, Eduardo and Michelle made up one of three wings formed after the president’s defeat in the 2022 elections to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

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This group was made up of reserve major Angelo Denicoli and senator Carlos Heinze, who were looking for an alternative to the coup by looking for fraud in the election, according to the columnist.

According to Cid, Bolsonaro had met several times with a jurist “who cannot remember his name”. The meetings served to finalize a document that suggested the arrest of the ministers of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) Alexandre de Moraes and Gilmar Mendes and the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco. Bolsonaro would have excluded the names of Mendes and Pacheco from the decision.

For the former president, signing the coup document would depend on the support of the three commanders of the armed forces. The former commander of the Navy, Almir Garnier, would be the most enthusiastic about the idea, according to the report, but he conditioned his own adherence to that of the army, “as he did not have the capacity alone”, Cid was quoted as saying.

Brigadier Baptista Júnior, from the Air Force, reportedly said that he was “definitely against any attempt at a coup d’état”. Freire Gomes, from the army, would be a kind of “middle ground for the other two generals”. Although he did not agree with “how things were being conducted”, he believed that a coup would not be necessary because the institutions would be functioning and no fraud would have been found.

The hypotheses that Bolsonaro worked with were to convince all forces to join the coup or find fraud in the election. In the group most sympathetic to the first idea would be former minister Onyx Lorenzoni, current senator Jorge Seif, former minister Gilson Machado, senator Magno Malta, Eduardo Bolsonaro and general Mário Fernandes, Michelle Bolsonaro.

A more moderate group formed by senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the former head of the Civil House, Ciro Nogueira, the former attorney general of the Union, Bruno Bianco, and Baptista Júnior called for the president to send people to their homes and become a leader oppositionist.

Another wing composed of Freire Gomes, the former Minister of Defense, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira and General Júlio César de Arruda, assessed that “nothing could be done given the results of the elections”. This group feared that the radical wing could lead Bolsonaro to sign “a crazy thing”.