The former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup following his loss in 2022 to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Justices Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha and Cristiano Zanin ruled on Thursday 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 four of the five judges involved in the trial had found Brazil’s former leader guilty.
…On Tuesday two other judges, 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.
…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.
…There were leftwing celebrations outside the supreme court as Rocha sealed the fate of Bolsonaro and seven other close allies who were also convicted. They include the former defence ministers, Netto and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, the former minister for institutional security, Gen Augusto Heleno, and the former navy commander, Adm Almir Garnier Santos.
Bolsonaro’s former spy chief, Alexandre Ramagem, and justice minister, Anderson Torres, were also found guilty, as was Cid.
Of course, there are those who argue that Bolsonaro should be pardoned for the sake of pacifying a politically divided country. But others are not buying it.
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.
Bolsonaro’s buddy Trump and his lapdog Marco Rubio condemned the verdict and threatened repercussions. because Bolsonaro tried to do what Trump wanted to do after his own loss in 2020, and Bolsonaro’s followers ransacked the parliament building and the courts in January 2023 just like Trump cult members did on January 6th 2021. These two had already tried to pressure the court to absolve him by imposing tariffs and sanctions on Brazil and the judges but that does not seem to have had any effect at all.
that’s badass like sweet sweetback’s badass song, babes. you love to see it, as the kids say.
Hope it sticks, especially since there are currently calls in Brazil to ignore the outcome or pardon him, in order to “heal a divided country”.
Heal a divided country by letting the criminals off doesn’t work. The US experience after the civil war shows that and experience around the globe is similar. If you let the leadership off the hook they will just cause further problems. There is a case for letting low level people off if they can’t be picked out for any serious charge but the leadership has to be shut down.
Trump is afraid of this ruling because it’s what we should have been doing here for many decades but haven’t. Nixon’s pardon was supposed to heal our politics. But instead it excused Reagan for his Iran Contra issues, Bush Jr. for his torture issues, Obama for his extrajudicial drone murder of al-Awlaki (this isn’t just a partisan rant), and Trump for Ukraine shenanigans, fake electors, an insurrection, gross interference with other parts of the government the presidency should have no control over, illegal tariffs, and just about everything going on with his deportation efforts. This is probably not even an exhaustive list, it’s just what I recall off the top of my head.
One could make a case that if Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration had admitted what they knew about Nixon’s efforts as a candidate to interfere with US foreign policy and prolong the Vietnam war that all of the above would have been more difficult to do.
So Brazil can have their own version of that mess, or they can stick Bolsonairo with 27 years in prison. I can hope it seems like an easy choice.