Brazilian President Lula da Silva said Wednesday that the soldiers who participated in the attacks on the headquarters of the three powers in Brasilia “will be punished.”
“All those who participated in the coup act will be punished. Everyone. The rank does not matter, the force that participates does not matter,” said the Brazilian president during an exclusive interview with the Globonews website, the first he gave to a media outlet after to assume as Head of State.
“All of those who are found to have participated in the events will be punished. They must be separated from their functions and will answer before the law,” Lula da Silva stressed.
“The soldier, the colonel, the sergeant, the lieutenant, the general, have the right to vote, they have the right to choose who they want to vote for. Now, as it is a career position, they defend the Brazilian State.” It is not Lula’s Army, it is not Bolsonaro’s, it is not Collor’s, it is not Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s,” said the Brazilian president.
The Brazilian president also harshly criticized the intelligence actions of the security forces after the attacks on January 8 by radical sympathizers at the headquarters of the three branches of government.
“Here we don’t have information from the army, the police, the navy… none of the information was useful,” Lula said during an interview.
According to the Brazilian president, none of the security forces warned in advance that there would be a threat of attack this Sunday.
“And then I realize that [a manifestação] had been summoned more than a week ago on social media,” he said.
Lula said that if he had known that hundreds of people had arrived in Brasília on the Friday before the attacks, he would not have traveled.
On the day of the attacks against Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency, Lula was not in Brasilia, as he had traveled to the interior of São Paulo to visit the city of Araraquara, affected by flooding caused by heavy rains at the beginning of the year.
In the interview, the Brazilian president insisted that all those who participated “must be sentenced”, because otherwise “democracy cannot be guaranteed”.
Source: TSF
