Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro will stand trial for allegedly orchestrating a violent plot to seize power through a military coup, after the country’s supreme court decided he should face criminal prosecution.
The ruling leaves the far-right populist, who governed Brazil from 2019 until the end of 2022, facing political oblivion and a possible jail sentence of more than 40 years.
The supreme court decided that seven other close allies of the ex-president should also stand trial for crimes including involvement in an armed criminal organization, coup d’état and violently attempting to abolish Brazilian democracy.
They are: Bolsonaro’s former defense ministers Gen Walter Braga Netto and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; his former navy commander, Adm Almir Garnier Santos; his former security minister, Anderson Torres; his former spy chief Alexandre Ramagem; his former minister for institutional security, Gen Augusto Heleno; and his former assistant, Lt Col Mauro Cid, who, if convicted, will receive a lighter sentence after he struck a plea deal with prosecutors.
The men are accused of forming the kernel of a sprawling conspiracy to keep Bolsonaro in power after he narrowly lost the 2022 presidential election to his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
On Wednesday five supreme court judges unanimously ruled that there was sufficient evidence for all of those men to face prosecution and officially declared them defendants.
The accusations relate to an alleged plan to stage a pro-Bolsonaro coup in the months between the October 2022 election and the far-right riots that broke out in Brasília on 8 January 2023 – one week after Lula’s inauguration.
Those attacks – which many believe were inspired by the 6 January 2021 storming of the US Capitol – were allegedly incited as part of a last-ditch attempt to return Bolsonaro to the presidency, against the public will, by creating turmoil that would justify a military intervention.
“It was a veritable pitched battle … It was an extraordinarily violent attempted coup d’état,” the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes told the court as he showed video footage of Bolsonarista hooligans vandalizing the supreme court and attacking police in the capital.
“Untamed violence – utter insolence … These images leave no doubt as to the materiality and the gravity of the crimes committed,” Moraes added.
In the weeks and months before the rightwing rampage in Brasília, a series of other machinations were allegedly afoot in the hope of stopping Lula taking power – some of them deadly. Police claim one sub-plot – code-named “Green and Yellow Dagger” – included plans to cause social and political chaos by assassinating Lula with poison and shooting the supreme court judge Moraes dead.
Brazil’s attorney general, Paulo Gonet, told the court police investigators had “uncovered a terrifying operation to carry out the coup, which even included killing the president and vice-president elect, as well as that of a supreme court minister”.
One assassination plot “envisaged using explosives, military ordnance and poison … [and] the operators only didn’t follow through on what had been agreed because they didn’t manage to … co-opt the commander of the army,” Gonet added, urging judges to put Bolsonaro and his alleged accomplices on trial.
Bolsonaro rejected the charges in a lengthy WhatsApp statement sent to allies as the hearing began on Tuesday, calling the case against him “an aberration, the like of which has never been seen before”. “They are accusing me of a crime I never committed – a supposed attempted coup,” Bolsonaro claimed, insisting he had never desired or suggested “a democratic rupture”.
In a written statement after Wednesday’s ruling, Bolsonaro claimed he was the victim of judicial persecution designed to end his political career and silence Brazil’s rightwing opposition.
“Those in power are focused on ensuring I spend the rest of my life in prison so I can never run for president again,” he wrote.
“The Brazilian people are being robbed of their right to choose their leader, and no country can call itself a democracy when its most popular candidate is barred from the ballot through judicial maneuvers,” Bolsonaro added.
In court, lawyers for the accused also denied their clients had broken the law, although many stopped short of denying a coup attempt had taken place.
Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Celso Vilardi, denied the ex-president had been involved in the 8 January uprising or led a criminal organization that plotted to murder Lula and other top authorities.
José Luis Mendes de Oliveira Lima, a lawyer representing Braga Netto, called his client “a man of unblemished reputation” who was not guilty of “any kind of criminal act”.
Oliveira’s lawyer, Andrew Fernandes Faris, called the former defense minister “a most honourable man”, and called for the charges against him to be thrown out.
The lawyer for Torres, Eumar Novacki, denied his client was part of the “macabre coup drama” and claimed the investigation was filled with “false conclusions”.
Demóstenes Torres, representing Santos, also denied his client was part of the plot and attacked the “federal police novelists” he claimed had concocted a fictional narrative about the supposed conspiracy.
Ramagem’s lawyer, Paulo Renato Garcia Cintra Pinto, said it would have made no sense for his client to have tried to destroy Brazil’s democracy since he had himself just been elected to congress in the 2022 election.
Bernardo Mello Franco, a political commentator for the newspaper O Globo, said he saw little chance of the ex-president avoiding jail. “Bolsonaro will probably be convicted, Bolsonaro will probably be arrested – or he’ll go into exile, he’ll flee the country … From a judicial standpoint Bolsonaro’s cornered,” he said.
Bolsonaro’s best chance of a “political resurrection” lay in helping elect a rightwing ally in next year’s presidential election who would agree to pardoning him after taking power. His congressman son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, and wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, were possible candidates.
The far-right populist was also banking on support from his most important foreign ally, the US president, Donald Trump, in his quest to avoid jail and ensure his political survival.
“Bolsonaro is hoping Trump will be a kind of saviour for him, both politically and judicially. He believes Trump will somehow interfere in Brazilian politics to help him,” said Mello Franco, although he suspected Trump had bigger fish to fry.
“Right now, I think Trump seems to have greater priorities than Brazil … [and that] the Bolsonaros are paying more attention to Trump than Trump is paying to Bolsonaro.”
Source: theguardian.com
