A majority of Brazil’s supreme court judges have voted to convict the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a military coup, leaving the far-right populist facing a decades-long sentence for leading the criminal conspiracy.
Justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha ruled yesterday that Bolsonaro – a former paratrooper who was elected president in 2018 – was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election, meaning three of the five judges involved in the trial had found the Brazil’s former leader guilty.
Delivering her decisive vote, Rocha denounced what she called an attempt to “sow the malignant seed of anti-democracy” in Brazil – but celebrated how the country’s institutions had survived and were fighting back.
“Brazilian democracy was not shaken,” Rocha told a court in the capital, Brasília, warning of the spread of “the virus of authoritarianism”.
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On Tuesday, two other judges, Alexandre de Moraes and Flávio Dino, also declared the 70-year-old politician guilty of leading what the former called “a criminal organisation” that had sought to plunge the South American country back into dictatorship.
“Jair Bolsonaro was leader of this criminal structure,” Moraes said during a five-hour address in which he offered a comprehensive account of the slow-burn conspiracy against Brazilian democracy.
“The victim is the Brazilian state,” said Moraes, claiming the plot had unfolded between July 2021 and January 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters rampaged through Brasília after the election’s leftwing winner, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, took power.
A fourth judge, Luiz Fux, voted to absolve Bolsonaro on Wednesday, claiming there was “absolutely no proof” the former president had been aware or part of an alleged plot to assassinate Lula and Moraes in late 2022, or had tried to stage a coup.
Fux called the 8 January 2023 uprising – when hardcore Bolsonaristas ransacked the supreme court, presidential palace and congress – a “barbaric act” that had caused “damage of an Amazonian-scale”. But the judge, who also controversially argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over the case, claimed there was no proof Bolsonaro was to blame for inciting the riots.
Fux did, however, vote to convict two of Bolsonaro’s closest allies – his former defence minister Gen Walter Braga Netto and his former aide-de-camp Lt Col Mauro Cid – for the crime of violently attempting to abolish Brazilian democracy. The judge concluded that the pair had helped plan and bankroll a plot to murder Moraes in order to generate social mayhem they hoped would trigger a military intervention.
Bolsonaro’s sentence is expected to be set on Friday after the remaining judge, Cristiano Zanin, has cast his vote. Experts say the sentence for crimes including engineering a coup d’état and violently attempting to abolish Brazil’s democracy could be as high as 43 years. The former president did not attend court this week, remaining in his nearby mansion, where he is under house arrest and where police officers have been stationed to ensure he does not flee to one of Brasília’s foreign embassies.
Progressive elation at the downfall of a president blamed for rampant environment destruction, hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths and attacks on minorities, has been tempered by the realisation that his political movement remains very much alive. Some fear Fux’s questioning of the judges’ authority over the case could open the door to legal challenges and even the trial’s annulment in the future.
Supporters of Bolsonaro demonstrate in São Paulo: a crowd packs into a city centre street waving green and yellow Brazilian flags and holding up their hands; one person holds up a placard with an image of Bolsonaro smiling and holding up his hands in V for victory signs. The crowd appears to include young and older people, black and white.
“I wouldn’t declare Jair Bolsonaro’s political death,” said Dr Camila Rocha, a political scientist from the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning who studies the Brazilian right.
Rocha expected supporters of the former president to keep fighting to rescue their leader from jail. Likely strategies included trying to elect a large number of rightwing senators in next year’s elections who could impeach members of the supreme court considered Bolsonaro’s foes; petitioning Donald Trump to heap more pressure on Brazil over Bolsonaro’s plight; and trying to ensure that a pro-Bolsonaro candidate beats Lula in the 2026 presidential election. Their hope was that a rightwing president might grant Bolsonaro a pardon, although the supreme court could torpedo those plans, she said.
“I think they’ll continue trying various ways of getting Bolsonaro out of jail and to uphold his leadership and keep him visible,” she predicted.
In recent weeks, pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers have been pushing the idea of an amnesty for their leader and others who were involved in the coup attempt and the 8 January 2023 riots in Brasília. They claim such forgiveness would help “pacify” a politically divided country.
But Fabio Victor, the author of a book about military involvement in Brazilian politics called Camouflaged Power, said he believed an amnesty would serve as an “incentive to illegality”. “It would send an awful signal – it would undoubtedly represent a setback to democracy,” he warned.
