Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro
Credit: Reuters Photo
Brazil: Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro of overseeing a failed conspiracy to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election in a coup plot that included disbanding courts, empowering the military and assassinating the president-elect.
Four of the five justices weighing the case voted to convict Bolsonaro and seven co-conspirators, including his running mate, defense minister and navy commander, in a forceful rebuke by one of the very institutions the men sought to overthrow.
Bolsonaro, 70, was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison, though his lawyers are likely to request house arrest because of his health problems.
The conviction is a landmark ruling for Latin America's largest nation. In at least 15 coups and coup attempts with links to the military since Brazil overthrew its monarchy in 1889, Thursday marked the first time the leaders of one of those plots have been convicted.
It also could deal a definitive blow to one of Latin America's most important and influential political figures. Bolsonaro galvanized a right-wing movement that transformed Brazil into a more polarized and, in some ways, conservative nation -- but his conviction now leaves the right without a clear leader.
At the same time, the ruling will very likely escalate the conflict between Brazil and the United States. President Donald Trump had demanded that Brazil drop the charges against Bolsonaro, saying that, like him, the former Brazilian president was being politically persecuted for trying to reverse a rigged election.
The White House had sought to force Brazil to drop the case with steep tariffs, a trade investigation and severe sanctions against the Supreme Court justice leading it. Instead, several Brazilian justices criticized the U.S.' attempts to intervene as they voted to convict.
Asked about Bolsonaro's conviction, Trump told reporters Thursday that he was "very unhappy about it. I know President Bolsonaro" and like him, he said. "I think it's a terrible thing, very terrible. I actually think it's very bad for Brazil."
Bolsonaro's conviction relied upon troves of evidence showing that he and his inner circle had spent months undermining voters' confidence in Brazil's elections systems and then, after narrowly losing the 2022 vote, attempted to find ways to keep him in power.
The plans envisaged declaring a state of emergency that would have dissolved the Supreme Court, annulled the election result and given the military sweeping powers. It also included a plot to assassinate Bolsonaro's opponent, now the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; Lula's running mate; and Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice who had overseen the election and launched several investigations into Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro denied the charges and said he had no knowledge of an assassination plot. Instead, he testified that he sought ways within Brazil's Constitution to correct what he claimed was a stolen election. (A review by Brazil's military found no evidence of electoral fraud.)
For months, Bolsonaro and his allies have called the case an abuse of power by the Supreme Court to politically oppress him and smother his movement.
"He never intended to stage a coup d'état. This is effectively a political movement being judged, not just its leadership," Bolsonaro's lawyer, Paulo Cunha Bueno, said in an interview before the verdict. A conviction, he added, "will leave a scar on the court's history."
As the trial marched toward a verdict over the past two weeks, Bolsonaro found himself abandoned by some allies accused of plotting the coup alongside him. That included his former defense minister, whose lawyer claimed he had tried to persuade the former president to abandon the plans.
He also faced damaging testimony from his personal secretary and records showing that the assassination plot was printed out and brought to the presidential palace, among other evidence.
Much of the turmoil also played out publicly. Bolsonaro openly spread misinformation about voter fraud; Brazil's highway police stopped voters in left-leaning districts on election day; and, a week after Lula's inauguration, thousands of Bolsonaro's supporters stormed Brazil's halls of power in a failed bid to induce a military takeover.
As a result, Bolsonaro's conviction was widely expected, a view reinforced by the makeup of the five-member panel of Supreme Court justices judging the case. In addition to de Moraes, whom Bolsonaro attacked openly, the panel includes a justice who was Lula's former personal lawyer, and another who is Lula's former justice minister and close ally.
That led Bolsonaro to place his faith in a Hail Mary from abroad: Trump.
For months, one of Bolsonaro's sons has lobbied the White House to help his father avoid a prison sentence. Then, in July, Trump stepped in.
His government levied eye-watering 50% tariffs on Brazil that have pushed the nation toward China, and then it hit de Moraes with some of the harshest sanctions the United States has at its disposal, usually reserved for people who have committed human rights abuses.
The White House has cited de Moraes' aggressive campaign to combat what he says are threats against Brazil's democracy, including moves to jail people for threatening the court, censor voices online and block entire social networks across Brazil.
Even as Brazil has stood its ground, it is now bracing for further punitive measures in response to Bolsonaro's conviction. The Trump administration has made clear that it is ready to continue the fight, casting both Trump and Bolsonaro as victims of a global attempt to muzzle conservative voices.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain turned longtime member of Congress, was elected president in 2018, lifted to power by a wave of voter frustration over corruption and crime. At the time, his most potent adversary, Lula, was in prison on a corruption conviction that was later thrown out.
He transformed Brazil's politics with his freewheeling, combative and sometimes belligerent style that included dismantling regulations, questioning the credibility of scientific findings, harshly attacking his opponents and praising the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985.
While he and Trump came from starkly different backgrounds, the two men shared strikingly similar approaches to politics. Like Trump, Bolsonaro pulled his nation's conservative movement further to the right and remains its standard-bearer, evidenced by the large crowds that protested his prosecution across Brazil ahead of his conviction.
Opinion surveys show that nearly two-fifths of Brazil view his prosecution as unjust and that he would be the leading right-wing candidate in next year's presidential election. A previous ruling in a separate case has barred Bolsonaro from running until the end of the decade. His conviction in the coup plot, if it stands, makes him ineligible to hold office ever again.
In Brazil, a country with a long history of leaders who have tried, and at times succeeded, to seize power through coups, Bolsonaro's conviction was seen by many as a victory for democracy.
As he cast his vote, de Moraes insisted that the evidence showed Brazil had come dangerously close to being plunged back into a dictatorship similar to the one it had endured for more than two decades, because of the actions of "a political group that doesn't know how to lose an election."
"It's impossible to trivialize this return to dark moments in history that we've already lived through," de Moraes said. "And the evidence is abundant."
In the sole dissent, one justice, Luiz Fux, absolved Bolsonaro and all but two of his seven collaborators in the plot. In a scathing 14-hour presentation of his vote -- which at times lulled some, including Brazil's top prosecutor, to sleep -- he picked apart the evidence in the case and argued that it failed to link Bolsonaro and others to the coup plans.
"It would set a very serious precedent, it would be very dangerous to hold political agents responsible based on generic allegations," Fux said, while referencing, on more than one occasion, the ill-fitting glove that helped absolve O.J. Simpson.
And, offering a glimmer of hope to Bolsonaro, Fux questioned why the case was not being weighed by the full bench of 11 Supreme Court justices, and claimed that the defense had been given too little time to review the evidence.
This, analysts say, could give Bolsonaro a window to appeal his conviction. Yet, given the makeup of the court, even a vote by the full bench would be expected to uphold the ruling.
In total, Bolsonaro's crimes had carried a maximum sentence of 43 years. He had been awaiting the verdict under house arrest, watched closely by the police because the court deemed him a flight risk.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.