The reliable Brazil Report offers a fascinating snapshot of the intelligence agency of the second largest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Now known as ABIN, the Brazilian Intelligence Agency was previously known as National Intelligence Service or SNI. The country’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro has expressed admiration for SNI, which powered a military coup in 1964, a coup supported by the American CIA.
According to journalist and researcher Elio Gaspari, author of a best-selling book series on Brazil under military rule, twenty years after the inception of SNI, Gen. Couto e Silva admitted that “We tried to create an information service, but we got screwed.”
The SNI was “a special case,” says reporter Paula Schmitt.
It was espionage turned inwards, aimed at identifying and destroying the opposition while spreading enough fear to discourage any manifestation of dissent. To that end, the SNI went far beyond gathering intelligence. It persecuted artists, promoted censorship, and kidnapped and tortured antagonists of the regime. It even created its own false-flag terror attacks.
Now, under the new president’s direction, the agency is signaling that it will return to domestic politics. In bureaucratic terms ABIN is subordinate to the Office of Institutional Security, (GSI), now headed by retired General Alberto Heleno.
As military commander of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti in 2004-2005, Gen. Heleno commanded 6,000 blue helmet soldiers and led an assault on Cité Soleil that has been blamed for dozens of civilian deaths. He was also floated as possible vice president for Bolsonaro during the 2017 presidential election.
Schmitt:
According to a report from newspaper Estadão, the GSI intends to return to its “golden years” of the military government and keep a close eye on indigenous people and the Catholic Church—historically associated with left-wing movements in Brazil, and more so now under the leadership of Pope Francis. More specifically, the article claims that the GSI is set on monitoring the upcoming Pan-Amazonian Synod, which will take place in October 2019 in Rome.
According to the Vatican, the official meeting of bishops will call for “a Church with an Amazonian face” that seeks “a model of alternative, integral, and solidarity-based development, grounded by a code of ethics that includes responsibility for an authentic, natural, and human ecology.” In other words, the synod intends to help curb deforestation and the destruction of native peoples inhabiting the Amazonian forest—an agenda seen as anathema to the right-wing government of Bolsonaro. “We want to neutralize this,” Gen. Heleno said to Estadão, criticizing the “progressive clergy” for its “interference in Brazilian domestic affairs.”
Like President Trump, Bolsonaro seeks to deploy intelligence services to neutralize political actors or movements that challenge reactionary populist government.
Source: For Brazil’s intelligence agency, the future as uncertain as its past
