Operation Last Mile, launched by the Brazilian Federal Police on July 11, found out that during the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party), the then Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, asked that three employees of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama, in Portuguese) be spied on by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin, in Portuguese). The espionage case was revealed by UOL on Sunday (21).
According to the Federal Police report, there were three attempts by the federal government to obtain personal data about the public servants. Federal Police delegate Rodrigo Augusto de Carvalho Costa, who was Leite's advisor, was responsible for one of the requests for information about three Ibama agents. His contact was Giancarlo Rodrigues, a sergeant in the Army named in Operation Last Mile as a member of the so-called “parallel Abin.”
On March 28, 2022, Costa asked Rodrigues to “verify the rap sheet” of the three Ibama servants. According to Leite’s former advisor, the request was important because the servants were “bothering his ministry.”
Leite wasn’t the only authority to use the method. In May 2020, during the administration of Ricardo Salles (Liberal Party), Leite’s predecessor at the head of the Ministry of the Environment, an Ibama employee was monitored by the “parallel Abin” using the FirstMile software, which provides information on the geolocation of the person being spied on.
A month earlier, the Ibama employee was dismissed after denouncing illegal mining in the Apyterewa Indigenous Land, in São Félix do Xingu, southern Pará state. The other two servants, who took part in similar operations, were persecuted internally and suffered administrative sanctions.
UOL informed that it had contacted Abin and former minister Joaquim Leite, but had received no reply about the allegations in the Federal Police report.
Edited by: Martina Medina
