Brazilian federal police have arrested five people in an investigation into an alleged plot to assassinate President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, according to the supplied reporting. The arrests are the latest development in a wider probe into an alleged coup effort linked to the aftermath of Brazil’s 2022 election.
The police said the case included a detailed operational plan called “Green and Yellow Dagger”, which investigators say would have been carried out on December 15, 2022, with the aim of killing the president-elect and his running mate. That detail is significant because it marks the first time the federal investigation has publicly described the suspected plan as a murder plot against Lula and Alckmin.
Four of those arrested were reportedly working as security guards for the G20 leaders meeting in Rio de Janeiro, while a fifth was a police officer. The federal police source cited by AFP said the four were detained in Rio during the summit’s security operation. The arrests took place across several parts of the country, including Rio de Janeiro, Goias, Amazonas and the Federal District.
The broader context is Brazil’s still-unsettled struggle over the 2022 election and the aftermath of Lula’s victory over then-president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula took office in January 2023 after Bolsonaro’s defeat in October 2022, and thousands of Bolsonaro supporters later stormed government buildings in Brasilia on January 8, 2023. That attack triggered a series of related investigations into attempts to overturn the election result or prevent Lula from taking office.
The supplied reporting says the suspects under investigation were mostly military personnel with special forces training. It also says the alleged conspirators planned to create an “Institutional Crisis Management Office” to manage the fallout from the coup attempt if it succeeded. Another allegation in the investigation is that the plotters planned to seize and kill a Supreme Court justice, though the judge was not named.
This episode matters not only because it adds a violent new layer to the election aftermath, but also because of who the suspects are said to be. The presence of military-trained personnel and summit security staff raises questions about the reach of the alleged conspiracy and about how far the network extended into state institutions.
The reporting does not identify the specific suspects, and it does not say what charges may follow. It also does not provide any defense response. Even so, the case shows that the aftermath of the 2022 election remains politically volatile in Brazil nearly two years later.
The case is likely to reverberate beyond the immediate arrests because it keeps Brazil’s post-election violence under the spotlight and links the 2022 turmoil to people who were still working inside a major security operation in 2024. That overlap makes the investigation especially sensitive for institutions that are supposed to protect public order. Even if the police have only outlined an alleged plot at this stage, the public description of “Green and Yellow Dagger” gives the probe a concrete operational frame and suggests investigators believe the conspiracy was detailed rather than improvised.
The case is likely to reverberate beyond the immediate arrests because it keeps Brazil’s post-election violence under the spotlight and links the 2022 turmoil to people who were still working inside a major security operation in 2024. That overlap makes the investigation especially sensitive for institutions that are supposed to protect public order. Even if the police have only outlined an alleged plot at this stage, the public description of “Green and Yellow Dagger” gives the probe a concrete operational frame and suggests investigators believe the conspiracy was detailed rather than improvised.
