Brazilian democrats have celebrated the strength of their country’s judiciary and institutions after the former president Jair Bolsonaro was left facing political oblivion and jail time for allegedly plotting a coup, in stark contrast to the US’s failure to bring Donald Trump to justice for his anti-democratic acts.
“In Brazil coup-mongers go to jail. In the US they get back into the White House,” said Marcelo Freixo, a leading leftwing politician on Wednesday after the attorney general formally accused Bolsonaro of engineering a sprawling conspiracy to cling to power following his defeat in the 2022 election.
For his alleged crimes – which include participation in an attempted coup d’état, an armed criminal association and a violent attempt to abolish the rule of law – Bolsonaro could face a prison sentence of over 40 years. Trump meanwhile is beginning his second term as president after managing to shirk responsibility for his alleged offenses, including inciting the January 2021 attacks in Washington DC.
“In the US Trump encouraged an attempted coup through the storming of the Capitol and emerged unpunished. In Brazil Bolsonaro led an attempted coup and he is going to jail,” said Freixo hailing the South American country as “a more serious democracy than the US”.
Freixo was far from alone in voicing those sentiments as Brazilians absorbed the shocking details in the attorney general’s 272-page indictment, which laid bare just how close one of the world’s largest democracies came to suffering a violent military rupture after Bolsonaro lost its last presidential election to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022.
Desperate to cling to power, Bolsonaro allegedly presided over an intricate two-year authoritarian conspiracy, which involved using social media to spread disinformation about Brazil’s supreme court and election voting system, sowing chaos on the country’s streets, and using that turmoil as a justification for a military intervention.
The most sinister element of the alleged plot involved the “neutralization” of public figures considered foes of Bolsonaro’s political movement, with the use of guns and poison. The targets allegedly included the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes and Brazil’s current president, Lula.
Bolsonaro had even allegedly prepared an address he planned to make to the nation after carrying out his power grab. In it, the far-right populist planned to quote the Italian theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas’s ideas about resisting “unjust laws”, seemingly as a way of validating his illegal actions.
Bolsonaro has rejected the attorney general’s accusations, with his lawyers voicing “astonishment and anger” over the charges. His politician son, Carlos Bolsonaro, compared the claims in the indictment to a “sack of dung”.
In a statement, Bolsonaro alleged Brazil’s justice system had been “weaponized” against him in an effort to criminalize his movement and silence millions of Brazilian supporters. “This is the same failed strategy that was used against President Trump,” he said of his most important international ally.
But progressive Brazilians hailed how, unlike in the US, Brazil’s police and judiciary seemed to be successfully holding those who allegedly conspired against Brazil’s young democracy to account.
“Here in Brazil the institutions did their job defending democracy,” Freixo said. “We’ve always been told that North American institutions are really strong – but the institutions that showed themselves to be truly strong were the Brazilian ones, which did not allow a coup to take place.”
A former Brazilian secretary of justice, the lawyer Augusto de Arruda Botelho, said: “For any person who calls themselves a democrat, this is a historic moment in Brazil. This is a moment where we say: ‘There are limits.’”
“Political and ideological and party political divergences are healthy … in any democracy. But there are limits. And Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo went way beyond this limit,” Botelho added. “The limit is the law. They broke the law when they tried to stage a coup d’état and they are now being prosecuted for this.”
Conrado Hübner Mendes, a constitutional law professor at the University of São Paulo, said he believed there was “more than enough evidence” for Bolsonaro to be found guilty at trial. Mendes believed a criminal conviction, combined with the fact that Bolsonaro has already been barred from seeking elected office until 2030, “should put an end to his political career”.
However, Mendes doubted it would deal a fatal blow to “the political criminality Bolsonaro helped build and which remains strong” in Brazil, in the form of the ex-president’s hard-right successors.
Botelho said it was hard to predict the future of Bolsonaro, who is only likely to be arrested once the legal process has fully played out, something that could take months.
“It hurts him politically,” he said. “But in a way it also boosts his supporters,” who would try to paint their leader as the victim of political persecution.
Source: theguardian.com
