Former Air Force commander Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior offers a rare first-person account of the pressure placed on Brazil’s military leadership after Jair Bolsonaro’s election defeat — and the decisions that helped prevent an institutional rupture.
Nearly four years after Brazil came close to one of the gravest institutional crises of its modern democratic era, a former military chief has provided an unusually detailed account of what happened inside the country’s armed forces as allies of Jair Bolsonaro explored ways to overturn the result of the 2022 presidential election.
Lieutenant-Brigadier Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior, who commanded the Brazilian Air Force during the final phase of Bolsonaro’s presidency, says he directly resisted efforts to draw the military into a plan that could have prevented Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office after defeating Bolsonaro at the polls.
His account appears in a new book, Eu Disse Não! — Uma Trincheira Antigolpista — roughly translated as I Said No! — An Anti-Coup Bulwark — in which Baptista Júnior describes the tense meetings, personal pressures and deep divisions that emerged among Brazil’s senior military leadership in late 2022.
The former commander’s central claim is stark: Brazil was not merely experiencing rhetorical confrontation or political instability. In his assessment, the danger of an institutional break was real and at times “imminent.”
According to Baptista Júnior, one of the most consequential moments occurred after Bolsonaro’s defeat, when senior military commanders were confronted with proposals that could have been used to challenge or invalidate the election outcome. His account describes a draft decree presented during discussions involving Bolsonaro and members of his government, with the apparent objective of creating the legal and military conditions for an extraordinary intervention.
Baptista Júnior says both he and then-army commander General Marco Antônio Freire Gomes refused to support such a move. Their resistance, he argues, was decisive because a political rupture without the backing of the Army and Air Force would have been extraordinarily difficult to implement.
The Navy’s position was different. Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, who commanded the Brazilian Navy, was described in testimony and subsequent court proceedings as substantially more receptive to the plans under discussion. The contrasting positions inside the armed forces exposed just how divided Brazil’s military leadership had become during the closing weeks of Bolsonaro’s presidency.
For Baptista Júnior, resisting the political pressure came at a personal cost.
He has said the experience damaged relationships accumulated over decades of military service and cost him numerous friendships. The rupture was particularly significant because sections of Brazil’s officer corps had developed close political and ideological ties with Bolsonaro during his presidency.
Baptista Júnior himself was no natural political ally of Lula. He has said that he voted for Bolsonaro in both the 2018 and 2022 elections. His account therefore portrays his resistance not as support for the Workers’ Party or its leader, but as a defence of the constitutional limits governing the armed forces.
That distinction is central to the broader significance of his testimony.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, cultivated the military throughout his political career and appointed large numbers of serving and retired officers to positions in his administration. By the end of his presidency, the boundaries separating the military establishment from partisan politics had become increasingly blurred.
The result was an environment in which some officers viewed Bolsonaro not simply as a civilian president and commander-in-chief, but as the political representative of a broader conservative movement in which the armed forces themselves had become deeply entangled.
Baptista Júnior’s book presents that politicisation as one of the most dangerous elements of the crisis.
He describes growing tension well before the 2022 election. In August of that year, months before voters went to the polls, he hosted a private dinner attended by senior military commanders, Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli and then-prosecutor general Augusto Aras.
According to Baptista Júnior, the commanders wanted to warn senior institutional figures that confrontation between the branches of government was becoming dangerously intense. He later described the atmosphere as an institutional “crossfire” that risked pushing the country toward rupture.
Those concerns intensified following Bolsonaro’s defeat.
Lula won the October 2022 runoff, but Bolsonaro had spent months questioning the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting system without producing evidence of systemic fraud. Protests subsequently appeared outside military installations, with some Bolsonaro supporters openly calling on the armed forces to intervene and prevent Lula from assuming the presidency.
Inside the government, according to the investigations and military testimony that followed, discussions became more serious.
Baptista Júnior recounts direct pressure from Bolsonaro himself. During one encounter, he says the president warned him that he had already received “two yellow cards” — language the former commander interpreted as a signal that his continued resistance was being noticed at the highest level of government.
The episode illustrates the extraordinary position in which Brazil’s military commanders found themselves.
The armed forces are constitutionally subordinate to civilian government, yet senior officers were simultaneously being asked to consider actions that could have compromised the democratic transfer of power. Refusing the president therefore required military leaders to distinguish between loyalty to the commander-in-chief and loyalty to the constitutional order itself.
Baptista Júnior’s account suggests that this distinction became decisive.
He has also said there were fears that factions within the Army might act independently even if the official command rejected an institutional rupture. That possibility contributed to anxiety over how aggressively authorities should respond to demonstrators gathered outside military facilities in the weeks after the election.
The crisis ultimately culminated on January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed and vandalised Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in Brasília, one week after Lula had taken office.
The attacks triggered sweeping criminal investigations into political organisers, financiers, military personnel and members of Bolsonaro’s inner circle.
Brazil’s Supreme Court later convicted Bolsonaro over the attempted coup plot, imposing a sentence of 27 years and three months, according to Brazilian reporting. Several former senior officials and military figures were also convicted.
Baptista Júnior’s testimony became part of those proceedings, giving prosecutors and judges a direct account from one of the three officers who commanded Brazil’s armed forces during the critical period.
Yet his book is more than a reconstruction of the past.
Its publication comes at a politically sensitive moment as Brazil again moves toward a presidential election and Bolsonaro’s political movement attempts to preserve its influence despite the former president’s legal troubles.
Bolsonaro’s son Flávio has emerged as a presidential contender, seeking to carry the family’s political brand into the next electoral cycle. That gives Baptista Júnior’s disclosures renewed relevance: the same political forces that shaped the confrontation of 2022 remain active in Brazilian politics.
For Bolsonaro’s supporters, the former president continues to be portrayed as the victim of an aggressive judicial and political campaign. Critics have challenged the investigations and questioned aspects of the Supreme Court proceedings, while Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied wrongdoing related to an attempted coup.
Baptista Júnior’s account complicates those arguments because it comes not from a traditional Bolsonaro opponent but from an officer who served directly under him, voted for him and occupied one of the highest military positions in the country.
At the same time, the former air force chief has not offered an unqualified endorsement of every aspect of the judicial response.
In interviews surrounding the publication of his book, he has raised concerns about aspects of the coup investigation and suggested political factors may have influenced parts of the legal process. He has questioned, for example, why investigators did not more fully establish the origins of some draft decrees discussed during the period.
That makes his position unusually complex.
He insists that a coup danger existed and says he personally resisted it, yet he also argues that institutional excesses should be scrutinised regardless of which political side is responsible.
The broader lesson of his account concerns the relationship between Brazil’s military and politics.
Since the end of military rule in 1985, the country has struggled periodically with the political role of the armed forces. Bolsonaro’s presidency revived that debate more dramatically than at any time in the previous three decades.
His administration elevated military officers into civilian positions, encouraged political identification between parts of the armed forces and the conservative movement, and repeatedly invoked the military in confrontations with the judiciary and electoral authorities.
Baptista Júnior now argues that Brazil must break more decisively with that tradition.
Military institutions, in his view, cannot become partisan actors without undermining their own legitimacy and creating conditions in which senior officers may eventually be forced to choose between political loyalty and constitutional legality.
The 2022 crisis demonstrated how dangerous that choice can become.
Brazil’s democratic institutions survived, but Baptista Júnior’s testimony suggests the outcome was not inevitable. It depended partly on individual decisions taken behind closed doors by a small number of military commanders who refused to cross a constitutional line.
That is perhaps the most consequential message of his book.
Democratic systems are often described as structures built on constitutions, courts and electoral rules. But during moments of extreme institutional pressure, their survival can also depend on whether the people entrusted with coercive power decide to respect those boundaries.
For Baptista Júnior, that decision came with professional isolation and broken friendships.
But in the crisis that followed Brazil’s 2022 election, saying “no” may also have helped determine whether the country’s transfer of power would be decided by voters — or by the military.
