'It cost me many friendships': ex-Brazil military chief reveals inside struggle to stop Bolsonaro's coup

In his final days as Brazil’s president, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, six weeks after losing the election and still refusing to recognise the result, summoned the heads of the armed forces to a meeting.

The defence minister, Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, removed a document from a plastic folder and handed copies to the commanders of the navy, army and air force.

It was a draft decree proposing to invalidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s October 2022 election and keep Bolsonaro in power.

“The draft coup decree – which some people still insist to this day never existed – was there, awaiting approval or rejection; consensus or a majority,” writes the then head of the air force, Lt Brig Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior, in a book published this month.

After learning the document would prevent Lula from taking office, Baptista Júnior told the defence minister he refused even to receive it: “The air force will not take part in this.” He then stood up and left.

The extensive investigation and trial that convicted Bolsonaro of attempting a coup concluded the plot failed to move forward mainly because the heads of two of the three armed forces – Baptista Júnior and army commander Gen Marco Antônio Freire Gomes – refused to take part.

Navy commander Adm Almir Garnier Santos was convicted, as was Nogueira. Both are serving their sentences at military facilities, while Bolsonaro is under house arrest.

Freire Gomes has kept a low profile, but Baptista Júnior, speaking to CuriosityNews by video call, said he decided to write the book to help prevent history from repeating itself.

In the book, the 65-year-old former fighter pilot gives a detailed, first-hand account of the ways Bolsonaro tried to cling to power.

Baptista Júnior said he was motivated by the fact that, despite abundant evidence presented during the former president’s trial, opinion polls showed about a third of the population did not believe there had been an attempted coup.

“Keeping in power someone who lost an election is a coup d’état,” he said from his home in Brasília.

The book, whose Portuguese title translates as I Said No! – An Anti-Coup Bulwark, was published on 15 September, about two weeks before the first round of the presidential election, in which Lula faced one of Bolsonaro’s sons, far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

Some Bolsonaro supporters have accused Baptista Júnior of trying to influence the vote, although he makes clear he will vote for neither Lula nor Flávio, and criticises both in the book. He said the timing was simply the result of the writing and editing process.

Despite writing that he voted for the far-right populist in 2018 and 2022, Baptista Júnior is critical of Bolsonaro, a former army captain who spent 30 largely undistinguished years as a city councillor and congressman before the presidency.

He describes Bolsonaro as having “significant limitations in political, institutional and administrative experience” and an “almost total imperviousness to outside opinions or information that did not conform to the ‘truths’ he had already established as his own” – citing his refusal to accept scientific evidence supporting Covid-19 vaccination.

During the election, Bolsonaro became “entirely consumed by his own efforts to remain in office,” Baptista Júnior writes. After casting doubt on the vote, the president ordered the armed forces to investigate the electronic voting system, but refused to accept their reports when they found no irregularities.

The book touches on, but does not detail, one of the most shocking revelations from the coup investigation: a plan drawn up by army special forces to kidnap or assassinate Lula, the newly elected vice-president and a supreme court justice. Baptista Júnior writes he was not summoned to those meetings and only learned of them through the press.

He does, however, recount more than a dozen meetings in which Bolsonaro summoned the heads of the armed forces to discuss ways to remain in power. At one, he witnessed the army chief tell the president, after hearing a proposal for institutional rupture: “If you do that, I’ll have to arrest you.”

Baptista Júnior had already given that account in testimony, and during the trial both Freire Gomes and Bolsonaro denied it. He stands by his account, writing it was not something anyone present would forget.

Saying no to the coup cost the pilot “many friendships,” he said. Even some military personnel still call him a “traitor” or “watermelon,” a slur for soldiers seen as green on the outside but communist red within.

The attacks began soon after the air force chief refused to join the plot, when army general Walter Souza Braga Netto, whom Baptista Júnior considered a friend, ordered other military officers to attack him on social media and “make his life and his family’s hell.” Braga Netto, Bolsonaro’s running mate, was also convicted over the attempted coup.

Most of Baptista Júnior’s revelations initially emerged in 2024, when he was summoned to testify to federal police and, more than a year after leaving office, revealed he had witnessed an attempted coup.

Juliano da Silva Cortinhas, who worked on the civilian side of the defence ministry between 2013 and 2016, before the Bolsonaro administration, said: “It’s positive that he and the army chief said no to the coup, but as a matter of duty they should have reported it to the police as soon as it happened.”

Cortinhas, who heads a security research group at the University of Brasília, said the armed forces could not present themselves as the “saviours” of democracy because that would be like “tripping society up and then holding out a hand to help it back to its feet.”

“It was the commanders who allowed active-duty officers to take part in politics,” he said, noting that the Bolsonaro administration had the largest number of military personnel serving in civilian posts since the end of the 1964–85 military dictatorship.

Cortinhas sees as positive the fact that high-ranking officers were convicted of an attempted coup for the first time, but noted others involved escaped justice, and many were not even identified.

“The risk of a new coup is even greater today,” he said.

The new factor, he said, was US president Donald Trump, who has sought to influence elections across Latin America in support of far-right candidates such as Flávio Bolsonaro. In 2022, when Joe Biden was in the White House, Bolsonaro’s vice-president acknowledged attempting a coup would leave Brazil in a “difficult position before the international community.”

Cortinhas said he feared that if Lula was re-elected and Trump refused to recognise the result, some members of Brazil’s military could feel emboldened. “Coup-supporting groups remain within the armed forces,” he said.

Baptista Júnior confirmed there remained active-duty military personnel who believed a coup d’état would be justified under certain circumstances.

“That’s why eternal vigilance is the best path,” he said.