The appointment had the approval of the transition team and had been anticipated by Lula da Silva’s future defense minister, jurist José Mucio Montero.
The fact that the change of command occurred before the assumption of Lula da Silva was considered by the influential columnist of the newspaper O Globo Miriam Leitão -victim of torture during the military regime dictatorship- as an act of ignorance of the authority of the Army leadership of Lula as legitimate president.
“The change of command before Lula’s inauguration is ideological and improper. The military chiefs want to pass on the message that they do not accept being led by the president elected by the Brazilian people,” Leitão wrote after learning of Bolsonaro’s decree.
The relief is the first step of the leader of the Brazilian left to adapt the Armed Forces to the new scheme of power, after four years of politicization of the barracks, promoted by the outgoing president.
Transition
During the Bolsonaro government, some 6,000 men-at-arms, both retired and active, held all sorts of positions -including vice-presidency, chief of staff and important ministries, as well as minor positions- who will be discharged as of Monday . This policy of the outgoing government sought to revive the political power of the Armed Forces, absent since redemocratization in 1985, and to implant in its midst a Bolsonarist bias that is at the heart of the claims of sectors related to the extreme right so that a coup d’état prevents the assumption of the “communist” Lula da Silva.
Julio César de Arruda will be appointed interim head of the Army tomorrow and Lula da Silva should ratify him after he is sworn in instead of the outgoing commander, Marco Antonio Freire Gomes.
The decree was signed, in addition to Bolsonaro, by the acting Defense Minister, retired General Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, with which De Arruda will cease to be the head of the Department of Engineering and Construction of the Army.
The Workers’ Party leader’s transition team also announced it will replace the current incumbents in the Navy and Air Force, though those replacements will take place for sure next week after he takes office. The new chiefs will be, respectively, Admiral Marcos Olsen and Brigadier Marcelo Damasceno.
In line with the subordination of the military to the political power that it seeks, the future government will once again put a civilian in charge of the Ministry of Defense, after, for the first time since the return to democracy in 1985, both former President Michel Temer (2016-1018) as Bolsonaro placed at the head of that portfolio generals who claimed responsibility for the 1964 coup, which established a 21-year dictatorship.
Authority
Beyond what can be interpreted as a certain rebellion of a sector of the generalate, Lula da Silva welcomed the replacement -which was negotiated by both sectors- to have a military interlocutor willing to order the eviction of that camp installed on 30 October in front of the Army Command, in the western region of Brasilia, a federal area where the Brasilia Police is not allowed to operate.
There are also far-right militant camps facing military units from other states. The outgoing head of the Army, Freire Gomes, is a supporter of Bolsonaro and would have refused to order that eviction. Likewise, he would have stated his intention to leave office because he was not willing to receive orders from Lula da Silva.
One of the activists who has participated in the Bolsonaro rallies in front of the Brazilian barracks is George Washington de Oliveira Sousa. This is a businessman from the state of Pará, in the Amazon region, who was arrested on Saturday charged with terrorism due to his alleged responsibility in a failed attack with a truck bomb at the Juscelino Kubitscheck International Airport, in Brasilia.
The incoming Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, affirmed that Bolsonaro “assumed an anti-democratic position by inciting the Bolsonaro hordes not to respect the Constitution” nor the result of the elections.
Padilha declared that “the fronts of the barracks where the camps are have become true incubators for terrorist acts.”
Source: Ambito
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