The chief of Brazil's army says growing political and economic turmoil in Latin America's biggest country risks becoming a "social crisis," according to comments posted online by Folha newspaper.

General Eduardo Villas Boas issued the unusual warning in a videoconference with reserve officers last Friday, Folha reported Wednesday.

"We are living through an extremely difficult, critical situation -- a crisis of political nature, of economic nature, of a very serious ethical nature," he said in the speech, a clip of which was posted on Folha's website.

The risk, he said, "is that if it continues it could be transformed into a social crisis with negative effects on stability."

But Villas Boas, who was appointed by embattled President Dilma Rousseff in January, added that the country's "institutions are working properly."

Although only now leaking out, news of the general's comments is rapidly getting attention online.

Brazil only returned to democracy in 1985 after two decades of dictatorship started in a 1964 military coup and the country remains highly sensitive to the issue of military involvement in political life.

Rousseff, who is battling impeachment threats over her alleged financial mismanagement of the government, was herself imprisoned and tortured as a leftist guerrilla during the dictatorship. She has repeatedly referred to an opposition campaign to bring her down as a "coup plot."

Brazil, which will host next year's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, is also simultaneously in a sharp economic downturn and facing fallout from a giant corruption scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras.