In 2021, Brazil’s then-president Jair Bolsonaro declared the three possible future paths he saw laid out for him: prison, death or victory. At that point, he had already evaded death, surviving a 2018 knife attack during a campaign event in his first run for president.
Victory would elude him as well. In a stunning upset following Bolsonaro’s 2022 reelection campaign, left-winger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also known as Lula, succeeded in unseating the far-right former military officer with less than a percentage point’s margin. It meant Bolsonaro became the first president since Brazil’s 1985 return to democracy to fail to win reelection.
Now, it seems that the 70-year-old Bolsonaro will spend much of his future in prison. Overnight, a panel of Supreme Court justices voted 4-1 to convict the ex-president for overseeing a failed coup d’état following the 2022 election, charging him with trying to cling to power and planning to assassinate his opponent.
The sentence was stiff: 27 years and three months in prison. Although, as The New York Times noted, his lawyers are likely to request that Bolsonaro remain under house arrest due to his health problems.
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Yesterday, as part of our new investigative series Big Tech’s Invisible Hand, we published an article by our Brazilian reporting partner Agência Pública that laid bare a meeting with Facebook executives in Brasília. In that meeting, Bolsonaro reportedly commented on his possible imprisonment with tears in his eyes, saying: “If I get arrested, I won’t last two days.”
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One of the co-authors of that article, Agência Pública executive director Natália Viana, told Crikey that public opinion had swung decisively against Bolsonaro and that essentially all of Brazil’s major media outlets had appeared to turn against him.
“There are a couple of things at play. First, the case against him is robust. Second, Brazil really needs to leave the military coups behind us, and I think the vast majority agree — even the military,” she said.
Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper, had glorified the country’s 1964-85 military dictatorship during his time in power. In a country where at least 15 successful or attempted coups have happened since 1889, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric made many Brazilians uneasy.
As the reelection campaign progressed, Bolsonaro and his allies embarked on a more systematic campaign to try to undermine the country’s democracy. As the Times reported, the conviction “relied upon troves of evidence showing that he and his inner circle had spent months undermining voters’ confidence in Brazil’s elections systems”.
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Following the loss, a plan was hatched to declare a state of emergency, dissolve the Supreme Court, annul the election result and give sweeping powers to the military, the report said. Perhaps most shockingly, the plot also included a plan to assassinate Lula. According to The Guardian, the murder plot was “abandoned only because Bolsonaro managed to win over just one of the three armed forces chiefs, the navy commander, while the heads of the air force and the army refused to join”.
The next part of the anti-democratic offensive played out in a very public fashion. On January 8, 2023, a date now infamous in Latin America’s largest country, hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters stormed political institutions in Brasília, damaging the Supreme Court, Congress and presidential palace.
US President Donald Trump had strongly criticised the prosecution of his ally. (Trump himself had been accused of inciting insurrection for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 US election, and his supporters’ invasion of the US Congress in 2021 served as a likely inspiration for the Bolsonaristas.) The Trump administration had sought to pressure Brazil into dropping the case, applying a 50% tariff on imported Brazilian goods, which the Associated Press reported was in reaction to the process against Bolsonaro.
After Bolsonaro’s conviction, Trump told reporters he was “very unhappy about it”.
“I think it’s a terrible thing, very terrible. I actually think it’s very bad for Brazil,” he said.
Viana said Trump’s interventions had had a galvanising effect on Bolsonaro’s opponents in Brazil.
“Trump’s pressure only made us more eager to convict him,” she said.
