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Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, has moved a step closer to jail after a federal police investigation laid bare what it called a murderous authoritarian plot to explode the country’s democratic system with a military coup that the far-right populist allegedly helped mastermind.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied involvement in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 presidential election, which he narrowly lost to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
But on Tuesday, an 884-page federal police report accused the former army captain of taking a lead role in planning and organizing the conspiracy and trying to persuade the most senior members of the military to join the criminal enterprise.
Several top members of the armed forces allegedly agreed, including the commander of the navy, Adm Almir Garnier Santos, and the army’s ground operations commander Gen Estevam Theophilo.
The police report paints the former defence minister, Gen Walter Braga Netto, as being one of the plot’s main architects, although he has denied a coup was ever discussed. Braga Netto, 67, who was Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential running-mate in the 2022 election, has denied involvement in any coup plot. Garnier Santos and Theophilo have yet to publicly comment on the allegations.
Police allege Bolsonaro ultimately backed away from the three-year plot after the heads of the army and the air force, Gen Marco Antônio Freire Gomes and Air Lieutenant Brigadier Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior, refused to offer their support.
“We were very close to a coup – and a coup of crazies,” said political commentator Octavio Guedes of the apparent conspiracy that allegedly included plans to arrest or assassinate top leaders, including Lula before seizing television and radio stations to announce the military take-over.
A handwritten document discovered during a raid on the HQ of Bolsonaro’s political party outlined what appeared to be a six-stage “operation” to use troops to interrupt the transfer of power and annul the 2022 election. The text concludes with what it calls the operation’s “desired political end state”: preventing Lula walking into the presidential palace to take office.
“How could they think the world would accept this?” asked Guedes, who believed pressure from Joe Biden’s US administration had played an important role in ensuring the alleged plot flopped, as well as the refusal of military commanders to sign up. “Brazil also owes its democracy to Biden,” said Guedes, a commentator for the TV network GloboNews. “History would be very different if it had been Trump [in power].”
As details of the alleged plot have emerged, pro-democracy Brazilians have celebrated how their country’s justice system appears to be closing in on Bolsonaro, in contrast to the US. There, Bolsonaro’s ally, Donald Trump, has not been held to account for suspected crimes including inciting his followers to storm the US Capitol in January 2021 and trying to overturn his election defeat.
The federal police report claims Brazil’s answer to the Capitol attack – the 8 January 2023 rightwing riots in Brasília, when congress and the presidential palace were ransacked – was part of the long-running conspiracy to help Bolsonaro cling to power.
Bolsonaro allegedly shied away from approving a military takeover in December 2022, on the eve of Lula’s 1 January 2023 inauguration. But police claim plotters hoped the post-inauguration scenes of chaos in Brasília might provide what one accused general called “a trigger event” – an outbreak of disorder that would justify a military intervention.
“An attempt at this trigger event came on 8 January 2023,” the federal police report claims.
Ultimately, however, security forces contained the unrest and Lula’s administration reasserted control. Nearly two years later, Lula remains in office while media reports suggest Bolsonaro, 69, could face decades in prison if convicted of being part of a criminal conspiracy to destroy Brazilian democracy.
“The chances of him being arrested have never been higher,” said Celso Rocha de Barros, a political columnist and author, although he said it was not inevitable and refused to rule out an eventual political comeback.
Barros, who was among those who had spent years warning that Bolsonaro and his supporters were cooking up a coup, said the police investigation’s conclusions had not surprised him in the slightest. “In 2018 … I wrote an article saying: ‘Bolsonaro is going to stage a coup’. All you had to do was pay attention to what he was saying,” Barros said. “He never hid … that he wanted a coup – he always made it crystal clear. The only people who didn’t see this were those who didn’t want to see it or those who made money out of not seeing.”
Speaking to reporters in Brasília on Tuesday, Bolsonaro admitted he could be arrested but claimed he was the victim of political persecution and called the accusations against him “madness”.
Lula allies have used the police allegations to a counter rightwing push for an amnesty for hundreds of people who took part in the 8 January rampage – and perhaps even Bolsonaro himself. “We are dealing with very dangerous people … there can be no amnesty,” the president of Lula’s Workers’ party (PT), Gleisi Hoffmann, told CNN Brasil.
Referring to the alleged plot to kill Lula, Hoffmann added: “This cannot go unchallenged.”
Guedes said it remained unclear whether Bolsonaro would wind up in prison, noting: “Brazilian history is a history of impunity, not punishment.”
“Political history is full of unexpected twists,” he added, remembering how Lula had seemed politically dead and buried when he was jailed for corruption in 2018 but then staged a sensational comeback to defeat Bolsonaro in 2022.
The prosecutor general, Paulo Gonet, must now decide whether to bring charges against Bolsonaro and the 36 other alleged conspirators, or order further inquiries.
Guedes believed Bolsonaro’s future would be decided by how Brazil’s “democratic right” responded to the coup allegations and whether leading conservatives such as the governors of the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais distanced themselves from the disgraced former president.
“Bolsonaro’s destiny will be decided by the right and I think the democratic right has already abandoned Bolsonaro,” Guedes said. “This democratic right may isolate Bolsonaro – and I think this is already happening.”
