For many Brazilians, especially those who lived through the last military dictatorship and its aftermath, it was a trial they thought they would never live to see.
With the vote cast by justice Cármen Lúcia on Thursday, a panel of the country’s supreme court reached a majority to convict far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro and seven other defendants of attempting a coup after his failed re-election bid in 2022. He was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison.
Among his co-accused are three army generals and a navy admiral, a lieutenant-colonel and the former head of the country’s intelligence service, as well as Bolsonaro’s former justice minister.
Labelled “the crucial nucleus” of the coup bid based on the copious evidence they left behind them, the men were charged by the country’s chief federal prosecutor with various crimes in their alleged attempt to prevent left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returning to power after his narrow victory over Bolsonaro in October 2022.
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Bolsonaro was convicted of all five charges, including “the attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law” and “leadership of a criminal organisation”.
Prosecutors said the group orchestrated a large disinformation campaign against Brazil’s voting system and planned for special forces to assassinate Lula, his running mate Geraldo Alckmin and supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Bolsonaro denied the charges, saying he did no more than engage in conversations to explore “constitutional” alternatives to his election defeat. Already under house arrest for his efforts to undermine the trial, the 70-year-old former army captain could face more than 40 years in prison.
The verdict puts an end to Brazil’s notorious leniency in dealing with military men seeking to overthrow democratically elected governments.
Historically, military plotters have been granted amnesties under pressure from the armed forces, a response historians say only encouraged future putsch attempts. “This is a historic moment. It is the first time Brazilians have established such a punishment for an attack on the democratic state,” said Paulo Cunha, a historian of the military’s involvement in Brazilian politics.
It also signals a new chapter in civic-military relations in the country, given the armed forces have silently looked on as the trial of some of their most decorated officers proceeds without engaging in their customary effort to have the prosecutions dropped. Bolsonaro had assiduously sought to tie the military to his government, giving thousands of its personnel responsibility for huge swathes of the federal administration. But while his alleged coup attempt did involve military men, he failed in his efforts to win institutional backing for it from the armed forces.
“There were military personnel involved, but after the attempt failed it became clear that it failed because the armed forces as a whole didn’t support it,” notes Cunha. “The military’s response now will be, ‘Some of our members messed up but as an institution we had nothing to do with it. We are washing our hands of these people.’ And in fact if the armed forces had been involved as an institution the coup would have succeeded. This has to be acknowledged.”
But as the trial proceeded in the capital Brasília, just across from the Plaza of the Three Powers, in congress Bolsonaro’s supporters were feverishly pushing ahead with efforts to have everyone charged with coup plotting granted an amnesty, from Bolsonaro himself to his ordinary supporters who ransacked the capital a week after Lula’s inauguration.
They still face considerable hurdles, and many jurists say congress does not have the constitutional right to undo a conviction in the supreme court. If Bolsonaro’s supporters manage to pass an amnesty measure it would be likely to set congress on yet another collision course with the judiciary, just as relations between the two institutions are already at their lowest ebb in years.
A more realistic, if still fraught, route to amnesty for Bolsonaro is the electoral one. Though his support has eroded since the coup attempt he remains the commanding figure on the Brazilian right. Any right-wing candidate seeking to beat Lula in next year’s presidential election will need his endorsement to be competitive, and Bolsonaro has made clear he will demand a promise of amnesty before giving it.
This explains the recent radical turn by Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo state and the right’s leading contender in advance of next year’s contest. Having entered politics in the left-wing administration of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, he has promised that his first act if elected president would be a pardon for Bolsonaro. During the trial in Brasília he also engaged in attacks on the judiciary, accusing supreme court justice Moraes, who handled the coup case file, of “tyranny”, telling one interviewer: “Unfortunately today I cannot say that I trust the justice system because of everything we have seen.”
Another possible signal that the ground is being prepared for a later effort to spring Bolsonaro from prison was the vote of supreme court justice Luis Fux, the only one so far who voted to absolve. This was even though he had voted in favour of severe punishments for more than 600 of the rioters who ransacked the capital in January 2023.
When delivering his long and torturously argued verdict on Wednesday, he said the case should never have come before the court. Many jurists interpreted this as Fux providing legal cover for a future attempt to have a guilty supreme court verdict vacated and the case retried in a lower court. Fux, who faces compulsory retirement from the court in April 2028, is being discussed as a possible future minister for justice should Tarcísio win next year’s presidential election.
Further complicating Brazil’s efforts to hold Bolsonaro and his co-conspirators to account is unprecedented pressure from the US.
President Donald Trump has already imposed 50 per cent tariffs on many Brazilian imports and sanctioned the members of the supreme court, with the exception of the two Bolsonaro appointees and Fux, in retaliation for what he sees as a “witch hunt” against his Brazilian ally.
The question being asked by Brazil’s diplomats now is how the US administration might respond to a Bolsonaro conviction. “There is apprehension. A reaction from Washington is expected because they promised there would be one if the trial went ahead,” said Dawisson Belém Lopes of the Brazilian Centre for International Relations.
“The level of interference in Brazilian domestic politics by the US was never so high. Previously Washington acted discreetly, undercover. Now the threat of intervention is direct. Trump’s tone is imperial: ‘Do this. Do that.’”
This aggressive approach by Washington in support of Bolsonaro is further polarising Brazilian politics. Lula has sought to turn the trial into a matter of national dignity. But on Sunday, at pro-Bolsonaro rallies to mark Brazil’s Independence Day, his supporters flew US flags and carried placards with slogans such as ‘SOS Trump’.
