According to the police, four soldiers were taken into custody on the second day of the G20 meeting as part of an effort to dismantle a criminal organization that was in charge of organizing a coup.
Four soldiers escorting the G20 summit were detained by Brazilian police on suspicion of plotting to kill then-President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a 2022 “coup,” a federal police source told AFP.
According to the source, the four “were arrested in Rio, where they were participating in the security operation for the G20 leaders’ meeting,” alongside the detention of a police officer.
The suspects were “mostly soldiers with special forces training,” according to a statement from Brazil’s federal police, although it made no mention of their involvement in the security deployment for the G20 conference.
In an effort to “dismantle a criminal organization responsible for planning a coup d’etat to prevent the government legitimately elected in 2022 elections from taking office,” the police said they arrested them on the second day of the G20 meeting.
The leaders of the world’s largest economies are gathering annually in Rio, including US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
The normally relaxed coastal city’s streets are lined with troops in armored vehicles as part of the event’s strict security.
The arrests on Tuesday follow less than a week after a suspected far-right member killed himself while attempting a failed bombing of the Supreme Court.
The statement said that the alleged conspiracy against Lula, which involved “the murder of the candidates to the presidency and vice presidency,” was supposed to have taken place on December 15, 2022, only weeks before the seasoned leftist took government again at the beginning of 2023.
The police stated that the suspected coup plotters, who also planned to kill a justice of the Supreme Court, intended to form a “crisis cabinet” with themselves in it.
The judge they planned to assassinate, according to Brazilian media, was Alexandre de Moraes, a prominent justice who has angered the right with his investigations into the far-right and his 40-day shutdown of the social network X due to a dispute with its owner, Elon Musk, over misinformation.
“Yellow and Green Dagger”
“Advanced military operational” knowledge was possessed by the suspects. The codename for their plot was “Green and Yellow Dagger,” which the authorities claim was a reference to the colors of the Brazilian flag.
According to the statement, they might be charged with coup plotting, violently attempting to topple the government, and belonging to a criminal organization.
After a ten-year hiatus, Lula returned to power in October 2022 by defeating far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who had held the position for one term.
On January 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters assaulted government facilities in Brasilia in an uprising that was similar to the Trump supporters’ 2021 takeover of the US Capitol.
The Brasilia riots and other purported schemes to stop Lula from seizing power have been the subject of numerous investigations.
The suspect in the 2023 disturbance is also the man who killed himself during a failed bombing attempt on the Supreme Court last week.
