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Two Presidents, One Assassination Plot: Brazil’s Trial of the Century
Brazil’s Supreme Court will decide if former President Jair Bolsonaro tried to stage a coup after the last election and plotted to kill his opponents.
SÃO PAULO—The plot was code-named Green and Yellow Dagger and is central to a Supreme Court decision this week over whether to convict Jair Bolsonaro of trying to stage a coup and stay in power as Brazilian president.
It was, prosecutors allege, a plan to assassinate his political rivals.
Masterminded in late 2022 by an army general in Bolsonaro’s government, the scheme allegedly laid out ways to kill President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The justice will be one of those deciding Bolsonaro’s fate.
Reading more like the script of a Hollywood thriller than a government dossier from one of the world’s largest democracies, the alleged plan lists a menu of methods that range from poisoning Bolsonaro’s rivals to blowing them up with grenades.
“I have to be very thankful to be alive!” da Silva quipped after police said they had unearthed the scheme as part of their two-year investigation into the coup attempt.
In early November 2022, Bolsonaro had just lost a presidential election to da Silva in the closest race in the country’s history. Convinced that his leftist rival had stolen the vote—a claim dismissed by the electoral court—Bolsonaro, now 70, was spitballing ideas with his inner circle on how to stop da Silva from taking office on Jan. 1, 2023, according to police. No idea—it appears—was too crazy.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin at an August ceremony.
Military figures surrounded Bolsonaro while he was in office. He himself is a former army captain who proudly served under Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Among them was Mário Fernandes, an army general who had trained at the elite Black Needles military academy, near Rio de Janeiro, as Bolsonaro did.
One of Bolsonaro’s most trusted aides, Fernandes was appointed second in command of the General-Secretariat, responsible for handling the inner workings of the presidency and liaisons with lawmakers.
During recent questioning before the Supreme Court, Fernandes admitted coming up with the Green and Yellow Dagger plan, a reference to Brazil’s national colors. At just after 5 p.m. on Nov. 9, 2022, he typed it up in a three-page Word document and printed it out at the presidential palace in Brasília, according to police.
At 5:48 p.m., Fernandes is registered as entering the lakeside Alvorada Palace, which served as Bolsonaro’s official residence, a few miles away.
Bolsonaro denies having any knowledge of the plan. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal early this year, he shrugged at the mention of the document, saying he didn’t believe it was a crime to want someone dead. “Damn, just think about all the people who have said they want Trump dead!” he said.
While Bolsonaro’s defense lawyers have sought to frame the document as the absurd musings of a general that had nothing to do with the right-wing leader, many legal experts disagree.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes says the former president’s involvement had been ‘amply proven.’
“The fact the plan was produced within the presidential offices, in November 2022, when Bolsonaro was still in office, quashes the idea that Bolsonaro knew nothing about it,” said Ilmar Muniz, a São Paulo-based criminal and constitutional lawyer.
The document refers to reconnaissance work that was already under way and specifies details, including the network provider of burner phones needed for the operation—evidence that police allege proves the plans were concrete.
Fernandes, who has been jailed in Rio, denied revealing the plot to anyone. “I did print it out, but only out of habit, I prefer not to read long documents on a screen…so as not to strain my eyes,” he told the Supreme Court during questioning in July.
“It’s nothing more than a personal thought of mine that I happened to type up,” Fernandes told the court. “It was a compilation of data, a situational study, a risk analysis I put together.” He said he immediately tore up the document after printing it out.
De Moraes, who has presided over the trial and who on Tuesday was the first to vote to convict Bolsonaro, pointed to the plan as one of the most damning among the thousands of documents unearthed by police as part of the investigation into the alleged coup attempt. Prosecutors also accuse Bolsonaro and his allies of discussing an emergency decree and other measures in the final weeks of 2022 in a scattershot approach to cling to power.
“Not even the most pessimistic of us could imagine that something like that was being planned,” de Moraes said Tuesday of the alleged proposal to assassinate him and others, saying the plan’s existence and Bolsonaro’s involvement had been “amply proven.”
Bolsonaro, who is currently under house arrest, faces five criminal charges over the alleged coup attempt, which police say only failed because the head of the army refused to agree to it. The navy allegedly backed it.
Even after da Silva took office on New Year’s Day, 2023, Bolsonaro didn’t give up, according to prosecutors. They accuse him of inciting supporters to rise up against the election results in violent attacks on Congress and other government buildings on Jan. 8, 2023—riots that were similar to the U.S. Capitol attack two years earlier.
After de Moraes cast his vote Tuesday, Justice Flávio Dino also determined that Bolsonaro was guilty. The three remaining justices on the court’s five-member panel will vote over sessions scheduled Wednesday and Thursday. Only a majority vote is needed for a guilty verdict, which could put Bolsonaro behind bars for the rest of his life.
Federal police, who first discovered the Dagger plan on an external hard drive, described it as having the “hallmarks of terrorism” in an investigation report in November last year.
The plan largely centers around ways to kidnap or kill Justice de Moraes, who had already become a despised figure on the right before the trial for intervening on everything from social media to Covid vaccines during Bolsonaro’s government.
The document proposes an initial reconnaissance mission that would track the movements of the Supreme Court justice at home, work and the gym, listing his most common routes and information about his security personnel.
It lists the equipment necessary for de Moraes’s killing or kidnapping: six ballistic vests, low-frequency radios, disposable cellphones, four pistols, four rifles, ammunition, a light machine gun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher and 12 grenades.
Fernandes also proposed the “neutralization” of da Silva, suggesting the easiest way to assassinate the leftist leader would be to poison him on one of his frequent trips to the hospital.
Da Silva, who turns 80 next month and was treated for throat cancer in 2011, has faced a series of other medical problems over recent years.
“Poisoning or the use of a chemical or medication that causes organ failure,” Fernandes is alleged to have written.
Alckmin, a soft-spoken anesthesiologist-turned-politician from the centrist PSDB party, could also be eliminated, Fernandes wrote in the document. “No major public outcry is expected,” he wrote about the possible consequences of killing Alckmin, saying it was necessary to prevent the presidency from falling into the hands of the PSDB after da Silva’s death.
Write to Samantha Pearson at samantha.pearson@wsj.com
