Case against Brazil coup plotters could end decades of impunity

SAO PAULO, Dec 16 (Reuters) - The arrest of a four-star general in Brazil over the weekend shows courts are ready to play hardball with those accused of plotting to violently overturn election results, breaking with the impunity that shadowed nearly a century of military coups.

Former Brazilian Defense Minister Walter Braga Netto was arrested on Saturday for allegedly meddling in the investigation of a coup plot organized with former President Jair Bolsonaro, his running mate in the 2022 election.

Last month, federal police accused them and over two dozen active and retired military officers of taking part in the plot, including a scheme to kill President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva before he could take office.

Lawyers for Bolsonaro and Braga Netto deny they took part in the alleged conspiracy or would have benefited from one.

The preventive arrest and police report targeting military brass suggest they may not enjoy the traditional amnesty for members of Brazil's armed forces who punctuated the 20th century with their political interventions.

It may also provide a test for Lula's fraught relationship with the Brazilian military.

Before Braga Netto, military historians cite just two such high-ranking generals arrested for meddling with presidential succession in the 1920s and the 1960s.

Unlike Argentina and Chile, where armed forces also brought down elected governments to install bloody dictatorships during the Cold War, Brazil never punished the leaders of its military regime from 1964 to 1985.

Due to a 1979 law pardoning the crimes of the military government, Brazilian courts have all but ignored public evidence that the dictatorship tortured thousands of people and killed hundreds, according to a 2014 government report.

"Because there was no punishment, because that history wasn't told, it's alive – like a serpent's egg," said Eliana Pintor, 62, on...
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