Anderson Torres, who was security chief in the capital, Brasilia, allegedly connived in the storming of government buildings and was abroad at the time of the attacks
Brazil's former justice minister Anderson Torres attends a meeting of the Lower House's Human Rights Commission at the National Congress in Brasilia, Brazil in this June 15 2022 file photo. Picture: ADRIANO MACHADO/REUTERS/
Torres didn’t last long. Within hours of the January 8 invasion of Brazil’s presidential palace, Supreme Court and Congress by election-denying Bolsonaro supporters, he had lost his new job — becoming the first to fall in recriminations after the worst assault on the country’s institutions since its return to democracy in the 1980s.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes issued an arrest warrant for Torres on Tuesday. It wasn’t immediately clear what the charges were, but Moraes cited alleged “omission” and “connivance” by Torres. The shake-up of capital security highlights a wider challenge facing Lula, whose government must now deal with a sweeping criminal investigation of the Brasilia riots while establishing a fresh chain of command among police and security forces.Many rank-and-file officers have long sympathised with the law-and-order appeal of Bolsonaro’s hard-right politics, and the former president spent the past four years stacking federal law enforcement organs with loyalists.
When Moro quit in April 2020 over the alleged meddling, Brazilian media reported that the president had suggested Torres to run the federal police, but his former colleagues there resisted the idea due to his lack of seniority. During the October 30 runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro, the PRF faced accusations of conducting illegal highway roadblocks in Lula strongholds in northeastern Brazil, in what critics said amounted to voter suppression efforts.
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