“I am convinced that the door of the Planalto Palace was opened for people to enter, because there are no broken doors,” the president said at his first breakfast with journalists in the capital.
“It means that someone facilitated their entry here,” he added, and anticipated that he will carry out a thorough investigation into who were the uniformed officers who facilitated the violent actions at the three headquarters.
On Sunday, thousands of supporters of the far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro invaded the headquarters of public powers in Brasilia, shaking the capital exactly on the day that Lula had been a week since he returned to power for a third term.
During the violent mobilization, the protesters looted offices and destroyed priceless works of art in their attack on the buildings that house the Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court, demanding a coup against the Lula government, with barely a week to go. management.
“We are going to investigate calmly to see what really happened,” said the president, who defeated Bolsonaro by a narrow margin of less than two percentage points in the presidential elections in October.
The president announced “a thorough review” of the team that works in Planalto, the seat of the Brazilian Presidency, reported O Globo and the AFP and ANSA news agencies. “The truth is that the palace was full of Bolsonaristas, of the military, and we want to see if we can correct (the situation), to place career officials, preferably civilians, or who were here before or who were suspended, so that this can be transformed into a civilian cabinet,” he said.
Authorities are investigating who organized and how the protesters were financed. They also detained more than 1,500 people after acts of vandalism reminiscent of the invasion of the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021 by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
Lula insisted that he is “waiting for the dust” from the attacks “to settle” and that he still wants to see the images recorded by the security cameras of the Planalto Palace, the Federal Supreme Court and the National Congress. For the leftist leader, there were “many people” from the Federal District Military Police and the Armed Forces who were “in collusion” with the criminals.
After the attacks, Lula signed a decree that determines federal intervention in the public security of the Federal District, a measure that was later endorsed by deputies and senators. After the scenes of destruction in Brasilia, the police, the Federal District government and the Armed Forces were criticized for their actions against the vandalism promoted by the coup leaders.
The videos that circulated on social networks show how a group of policemen breaks through and watches the attackers invade the Congress building. After the episodes of vandalism, the governor of the Federal District, Ibaneis Rocha, was dismissed from his position for 90 days by the STF. Anderson Torres, Jair Bolsonaro’s former minister, was exonerated from the position of Secretary of Public Security of the Federal District and the subject of an arrest warrant, and the former commander of the Military Police, Colonel Fábio Augusto, was also arrested.
