Produced by the Agribusiness Watch, the study “Agrocoupists” consolidates lists of Brazilian farmers and businessmen indicted for financing highway blockades, antidemocratic camps and the January 8th 2023 coup attempt, in Brasília
By Alceu Luís Castilho and Bruno Stankevicius Bassi
Who are the “agribusiness folks”? What are the names of the agribusiness executives who funded the coup attempt led by Jair Bolsonaro?
These questions have been lingering since November 21st, 2024, when the Federal Police indicted the former president and 36 others for attempted coup d’état. The report published that day revealed to Brazil and the world the existence of the Green and Yellow Dagger plan: a murder plot orchestrated by members of the Armed Forces and high-ranking government officials. The goal? To declare state of emergency and assassinate President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Federal Court Justice
Alexandre de Moraes.
The fingerprints of agribusiness on the coup attempt became public after the arrest of Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cesar Barbosa Cid, Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp. In his plea bargain, made public on February 19th, 2024, Mauro Cid stated that he received approximately R$ 100 thousand in cash, transferred by an agribusiness executive. The bills were delivered in a wine bag by General Walter Braga Netto, who told Cid about the source of the money: “General Braga Netto handed it over and said it was someone from agribusiness who had given it to him, but I don’t know the name of the person who gave it to him”.
Who are these faceless, nameless, and unpunished “agribusiness folks”?
To answer this question, Agribusiness Watch released the report “Agrocoupists”, which identifies 142 agribusiness entrepeneurs who provided logistical or financial support to antidemocratic acts between the second half of 2022 and the fateful January 8th, 2023.
These agrocoupists are not just caricatured farmers, with wide-brimmed hats and boots, in the country’s hinterlands. Across 88 pages, the report reveals the names of banks and multinational companies directly linked to the businessmen who financed terrorist acts. They receive funding from finance institutions such as Santander, Rabobank, and John Deere, and hold supply contracts and partnerships with giant groups like BTG Pactual and Syngenta — the latter being part of the financing chain of the Parliamentary Agricultural Front (FPA).
The most alarming fact concerns accountability: apart from the few who were caught in the January 8th terrorist acts, none of the individuals have faced legal consequences for supporting the coup attempt.
THE OBSERVATORY ANALYZED 1,452 NAMES TO MAP AGRIBUSINESS TIES
Over the course of four months, the Agribusiness Watch research center reviewed lists of individuals and legal entities investigated for contracting infrastructure for the coup camps — generators, tents, portable toilets, food — and for facilitating the blocking of highways from north to south of the country.
The database of funders of antidemocratic acts — 551 names in total — was supplemented by the list of 898 defendants criminally responsible in Supreme Federal Court investigations related to January 8th and by the list of indicted individuals from the Federal Police’s Operation Lesa Pátria. Finally, we included in the analysis the names of three Pará landowners investigated for providing support to terrorists George Washington de Oliveira Sousa and Alan Diego dos Santos Rodrigues, responsible for the attempted bombing at Brasília airport on Christmas Eve 2022.
Using this data, our team sought to identify direct relationships with agribusiness: ownership of rural properties registered with the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) or the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR); partnerships in agricultural companies registered with the Federal Revenue Service; and registration of rural insurance beneficiaries with the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply. In the case of the indicted private companies, the research was extended to their partners.
In all, we found that 142 landowners and agribusiness executives were implicated for their participation in antidemocratic acts.
They account for 10% of all names analyzed throughout the research. This data may — and likely is — an underestimate, as individuals with homonyms are common, and due to the General Data Protection Law, both INCRA and the Federal Revenue Service land databases no longer display CPF numbers.
Only cases in which there was absolute confirmation of a relationship with agribusiness were listed in this report.
“SOYBEAN ARC” CONCENTRATE 71% OF AGROCOUPISTS
Of the 142 landowners and companies identified in the survey, 74 are based in Mato Grosso, 17 in Goiás, and 13 in Bahia. These three states account for 71% of the names consolidated by the observatory. Their relationship with agribusiness is clear: together, they make up the main soybean production corridor in the country, responsible for 47% of the national harvest. The ten leading municipalities in grain production are within this “arc” — which runs parallel, further east, to the Arc of Deforestation in the Amazon.
It was precisely this hub that produced the majority of trucks identified at the Army HQ in Brasília. What’s more: 56 of the 234 trucks inspected originated in Sorriso, Mato Grosso, the world’s largest soybean-producing region.
Of this total, 28 belong to two interconnected families. With ten names on the list, the Bedin clan sent fifteen trucks to the federal capital. Linked to the Bedins through business and marriage, the Lermen family sent thirteen vehicles to the coup command center.
The group is led by pioneer Argino Bedin, the “Father of Soybeans” in Sorriso. The same businessman who remained silent before the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee into Antidemocratic Acts, in the Senate. When he returned to Sorriso, four days after his testimony, Argino was hailed at a gala event organized by politicians and leading figures of Mato Grosso’s agribusiness sector.
The path that connects the Soybean Arc to the coup movements passes through the organizations representing agribusiness. Five executives investigated in cases related to the January 8th coup and the pro-coup camps are leaders of Aprosoja, one of the founding organizations of the Pensar Agro Institute (IPA), the logistics arm of the agribusiness caucus in Congress.
Among them is Christiano da Silva Bortolotto, former president of Aprosoja-MS and the Rural Union of Amambai (MS), where he stars a historical conflict against the Guarani-Kaiowá people from the Tekohá Kurusu Ambá.
Check below the map showing the origin of the agrocoupists:
IMPUNITY IS THE CENTRAL THEME OF THE REPORT AND VIDEO ESSAY
IMPUNITY IS THE CENTRAL THEME OF THE REPORT AND VIDEO ESSAYNone of the farmers suspected of financing the coup acts have been arrested or convicted for this reason. Those indicted in parliamentary inquiry commissions — both in the Senate and the Legislative Chamber of the Federal District — are not included in the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (PGR) complaint that defined the six coup networks in the Supreme Court (STF) trial. The businesspeople listed as owners of the trucks caught at the Army HQ have also not been prosecuted.
Even with Mauro Cid’s statement pointing to the “agribusiness folks” as responsible for financing the Green and Yellow Dagger plan. Even though messages intercepted by the Federal Police prove that the organizers of the encampment urged Jair Bolsonaro to step outside the bounds of the Constitution.
Impunity is one of the central issues highlighted by the “Agrocoupists” report. The businesspeople who financed Bolsonaro’s effort have so far emerged unscathed and with a cleansed image. Gradually, they are becoming invisible, as if only olive-green plots had been the decisive factors behind the institutional violence.
The fingerprints of agribusiness on the coup attempt could be seen as early as 2022. Agribusiness Watch revealed the tip of the iceberg in a dossier titled “The Agrarian Origins of Terror” — published just four months after the terrorist acts of January 8th, 2023. At the time, the investigation identified the agrarian connections of 44 executives and politicians who participated in organizing the riots at Three Powers Plaza in Brasília and the highway blockades in five states.
Two years later, little progress has been made in holding those who funded the coup in Brazil accountable.
The impunity of the agrogolpistas was detailed in a video produced on our YouTube channel, available here:
| Alceu Luís Castilho is the editor-in-chief of De Olho nos Ruralistas. |
| Bruno Stankevicius Bassi is the research coordinator of the observatory. |
