Curiosities 33 - The "Bombing" of Formiga/Minas Gerais
João Henrique Barboza Jorgetto • April 1, 2024
The year is 1987 and the location is the city of Formiga, in Minas Gerais. The high bank fees irritated some traders in the quiet town, so they held a demonstration. The place chosen to express their anger was the city's exhibition center. Little by little, more and more protesters joined the picket line and the number already reached five thousand people when suddenly military jets flew over the city and dropped two bombs, causing widespread panic and quickly dispersing the crowd who believed they had been the target of an attack. Of the federal government in response to the demonstration. The bombs hit an area located close to the site's exhibition park.
The rush and panicked screams soon gave way to curiosity: what had happened?
The fact is that everything was just a coincidence that occurred after an incident with F-5 fighters that were training in the region.
The aircraft, two F-5 fighters from the 1st fighter aviation group, had the mission of carrying out a simulated attack on a bridge in Formiga in another of the many training sorties carried out in the region. After the simulated attack, one of the F-5s began an ascent maneuver. In the middle of this process, two bombs detached from the hangar and fell into the city, causing a bang and collapsing a wall of the exhibition park, in addition to opening a crater. Seven meters, according to witnesses at the scene.
Luckily for everyone involved, the bombs were training models; that is, they did not contain an explosive charge. They were only used to make the aerodynamics of an aircraft more realistic in ground attack situations and should not have been launched, but something in the process would have gone wrong. In the heat of what happened, the jets made low passes over the city, looking for the bombs to assess the damage and start the necessary procedures to repair the damage as soon as possible. This all helped to increase the panic. Imagine yourself in the city, a roar, a rush and two jets flying very low and at high speed. I wouldn't be giving soup in the middle of the street.
The FAB was on site the same day and took away one of the bombs. The second bomb was later unearthed and donated to the municipality. What caused the incident is still uncertain, but officially, it turned out to be a mistake by the weapons specialist when attaching the bombs to the plane's hangers. The rest is a lot of accumulated legend, like the story that the mayor called the Ministry of the Armed Forces several times in anger, and no one listened to him, thinking it was some bad joke.
What was a fact is that the Air Force ended up paying very high compensation to the municipality (somewhere around 5 million reais, if converted to today) and that the bomb today rests in a place called "Praça da Bomba, “made in honor of the fateful day of April 2, 1987.