The military of the Army Special Forces, the so-called “black kids”, who appear as defendants in core 3 of the coup criminal action testified on Monday, 28, to the Supreme Court (STF) and denied the complaints of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) that they would have performed tactical actions in the attempt of institutional rupture that occurred in 2022.
This group is the target of some of the most severe accusations of the process, such as the attempted murder of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT), Vice President Geraldo Alckmin (PSB) and STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes, but all defendants claimed that the situations pointed out by the PGR were less serious than described.
Army Lieutenant Colonel Rafael Martins de Oliveira claimed, for example, that the “Copa 2022” group identified by the Federal Police (PF) as responsible for monitoring Moraes with the aim of murdering him was, in fact, to discuss football, “after all it was a year of the World Cup”.
“I never participated, I never saw a minute, or any of this in this criminal action,” said Martins. “I never had knowledge, I saw or I will find myself from the plan green and yellow, only after my arrest,” he continued to comment on the plan that would have been plotted in the Copa 2022 group.
According to the PF, the group members in the Signal application used codenames from countries, such as “Germany,” “Argentina,” “Austria,” “Brazil,” “Ghana” and “Japan” – in reference to that year’s World Cup – to plan and organize Moraes’s tracking. The investigators identified that third party CPFs were used to activate the telephone lines, which allowed the military to maintain their identity preserved.
Defendant Rodrigo Bezerra, who is a Lieutenant Colonel of Army, repeated several times that it would not be the user “Brazil” and questioned the extracts of Radio Base Station (ERBs) attached by the PGR to the case file, claiming that they would be inaccurate by covering extensive areas. Lieutenant Colonel Martins used part of his statement to argue that Bezerra never participated in any group in which he was part.
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The two military personnel also denied having attended the meeting at the house of General Walter Braga Netto in which the plan to kill Moraes was discussed. According to Martins, his and other officers’ participation in the meeting was a “fairy tale he (Mauro Cid) imagined.”
“From the moment they decided that black kids are people who plot, articulate in joint networks, everything becomes an alleged coup meeting,” he said.
Martins, however, did not answer if he received money from Cid to execute the scam attempt, as said by the whistleblower. “The inability to produce material proof speaks louder than the whistleblower’s word,” he said
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Meeting to press by coup would be ‘fraternization’
Just as Martins reduced the Copa 2022 group to a football chat, Colonel Marcio Nunes Resende Júnior claimed that the WhatsApp group “Dosss !!!!” – Formed only by military officers who, according to the PF, would have acted to press authorities and stimulate the coup – would only be “friendship” and to share “joke”.
Resende Júnior stated that the meeting held on November 28, 2022 held at his father’s building hall would have been just a “fraternization”, an “informal event” and “a meeting of friends”. The PF, however, points out that the meeting was held to prepare the letter that would be delivered to the then Army Commander to press him to join the coup in planning.
“It was an impractical thing. The complaint makes us believe that we would arrive in the general and would propose such a thing. It would be arrest for sure,” said Resende Júnior. “Military personnel of this suit would never be gathered for something like that,” he added.
