Those from the Army Special Operations Forces arrested preventively on Tuesday (19) on suspicion of participating in the planning and execution of a coup d’état have in common passages at the Army Command and General Staff School (Eceme) from 2017 to 2024.
There, three of them — lieutenant colonels Helio Ferreira Lima, Rafael Martins de Oliveira and Rodrigo Bezerra de Azevedo — produced and defended works on the role of Special Operations Forces in situations that do not fit into the regular war model.
Among the topics covered in the research are combating organized crime and drug trafficking, assistance to police forces and deterring the enemy. Brigadier General Mario Fernandes, the fourth and oldest member of the group, attended Eceme in the 1990s, and the works produced at the time have not been digitized.
Ferreira Lima, Oliveira and Azevedo are “”, a popular designation for the Army’s Special Operations Forces troops due to the black hats worn by their members.
The specialty is at the center of the criminal organization that operated during the government.
Created in 1905 as the Escola de Estado Maior, based in the Urca neighborhood, south of Rio de Janeiro, Eceme is the highest and most prestigious school in the Army. It aims to train senior officers for staff, command and other high-ranking duties.
In the past decade, he had academic master’s and doctorate degrees recognized, open to civilians, by Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel), which oversees postgraduate education in the country.
The only one to pursue a doctorate at Eceme was Azevedo. His 149-page work, entitled “Special operations and deterrence: reflections from a Defense perspective” and defended this year, is the most ambitious and sophisticated of the group.
The objective of the thesis is to study the use of Special Operations as an alternative deterrence tool to traditional resources for this purpose, such as nuclear weapons or large forces.
“Currently, the prevalence of hostile non-state actors and the growth in the use of gray zone tactics and hybrid warfare by States are examples of how adversaries circumvent the old tools of deterrence”, says an excerpt from Azevedo’s study.
Through interviews and questionnaires, Azevedo comes to the conclusion that “having qualified Special Operations and being willing to employ them increases deterrence.”
Although he emphasizes that the value of Special Operations is increased by the use of technology and joint action with conventional forces, the lieutenant colonel admits that their use is more relevant “in the phases preceding the conflict (…) particularly carrying out special reconnaissance of targets high value”.
And he warns: “However, the use of Op Esp, before the conflict, lacks a legal framework to support it.”
Ferreira Lima’s work, specializing in military sciences, is called “The current impacts of the recurrent employment of the Brazilian Army in non-war operations: an approach from the point of view of Special Operations”. It was defended in 2018, during the Law and Order Guarantee (GLO) operation in Rio de Janeiro.
“At the moment I write these words, Rio de Janeiro is under state Public Security”, he points out in the dedication to “all the men and women of the Brazilian Army”.
In conclusion, the lieutenant colonel recommends “reorganizing the instruction year of operational units” of the special forces.
Oliveira’s study, “Terrorist actions of organized crime, particularly drug trafficking, in Brazil from the 21st Century onwards – Implications for the Brazilian Army”, also specializing in military sciences and defended in 2018, discusses the concepts of terrorism and organized crime in order to help the Army combat them.
Lieutenant Colonel Gian Dermário da Silva participated in his defense panel, caught sending messages of coup content in a military WhatsApp group in 2022. Dermário said that the messages were “possibilities” and “just conjectures”.
Professor Adriana Marques, from the Institute of International Relations and Defense at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), states that the choice, by officers, of topics related to their specialty — in this case, the Special Operations Forces — is “natural ” at Eceme.
She remembers that, in the last decade, an important part of the Army’s leadership came from Special Forces.
Piero Leirner, professor at the Department of Social Sciences at UFSCar (Federal University of São Carlos), says that specialization in Special Forces makes the authenticity of a coup plan full of flaws like the one pointed out by the PF doubtful. “These officers wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. This whole thing looks like part of a psychological operation.”
Rodrigo Bezerra de Azevedo’s defense has been denying that there was “the alleged coup plot” and speaks of a “political setup”. “It’s a big factoid, we already have elements demonstrating the fragility of this investigation”, said lawyer Jeffrey Chiquini.
The lawyers for the other soldiers were not located by the report.
