Sabotage at km 160 of Dutra: book details new thesis on JK’s death

The car in which Juscelino Kubitschek died would have been sabotaged in the parking lot of a farm hotel on Via Dutra, while the former president met with emissaries of President Ernesto Geisel. The thesis is by journalist Alex Solnik and supports The Code 12, a book that he is now launching, a few days before the 50th anniversary of the accident, completed on August 22.

The title is the key to the argument: according to Solnik, code 12 designates a type of operation, the attack camouflaged as an accident. Between leaving the hotel and the crash, three minutes passed.

Solnik adds the accusation that the hotel was the front of a clandestine SNI agency, frequented by General Golbery do Couto e Silva. The owner, Brigadier Newton Villa-Forte, founded the agency. The journalist also cites an unpublished book by Uruguayan agent Mário N. Barreiro, who says he met a “Brigadier Vilafão” and an agent trained in Uruguay to sabotage cars in a former Dutra coffee farm.

Three minutes between the hotel and the truck

JK was returning from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro on the afternoon of August 22, 1976, in the Chevrolet Opala driven by Geraldo Ribeiro, when the car crossed the central median of Dutra and invaded the opposite lane, where it collided with a truck. Both died. The last stop had been the Hotel-Fazenda Villa-Forte, at km 160 of the highway.

The first to raise the suspicion of sabotage was the writer Carlos Heitor Cony, in Operation Condor, written with journalist Anna Lee. Two days after the disaster, the establishment’s car guard told Cony that, when he entered the road, Ribeiro felt something strange in the vehicle and asked if anyone had touched it. The driver was also a mechanic.

The forensic examination at the time attributed the blame to the driver of a Viação Cometa bus. Years later, in an interview with Cony and Anna Lee, the expert himself claimed to have received a military report that was supposed to serve as a starting point for the work.

From the 2019 report to the death certificate

The version of the accident resisted for decades, maintained by the dictatorship’s investigations, by a commission of the Chamber of Deputies in 2001 and by the National Truth Commission in 2014.

The picture changed with the civil inquiry that the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office conducted between 2013 and 2019, released in 2021 and considered the most complete investigation into the case. The MPF ruled out the collision with the bus, stating in a note that the crash into the rear of the Opal, a premise that supported the fatality thesis, never occurred. It was in this inquiry that the expert Sérgio Ejzenberg produced a study of more than 200 pages concluding that there was not a simple traffic accident.

In May of this year, the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances, linked to the Ministry of Human Rights, approved a report of more than 5,000 pages by historian Maria Cecília Adão that attributes JK’s death to the dictatorship. The death certificates of the former president and Geraldo Ribeiro must be rectified.