Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro will stand trial for allegedly orchestrating a coup 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 politician, who governed Brazil from 2019 until the end of 2022, facing 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 a conspiracy to keep Bolsonaro in power after he narrowly lost the 2022 presidential election to his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
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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 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, 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 that 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.
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 manoeuvres,” Bolsonaro added.
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