Brazil Supreme Court Convicts Bolsonaro on Coup Attempt, Hands Down 27-Year Sentence
Sept. 15—Four out of five Supreme Court justices in Brazil found that ex-President Jair Bolsonaro was guilty of trying to stage a coup d’état in 2022, to prevent the winning candidate President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from assuming the Presidency. A fifth judge voted to acquit. The five charges were: attempting to stage a coup, leading an armed criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, and two more charges related to the damage of property during the storming of buildings in Brasília Jan. 8, 2023, including to the Presidential Palace itself.
Bolsonaro’s attempt to prevent Lula from taking office, after Lula had won the 2022 elections, was, in fact, a sequel to the U.S. Justice Department’s coup d’état against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the 2018 jailing of then ex-President Lula, as part of the Lava Jato (Clean Hands) “corruption” operation, run by the infamous Judge Sergio Mouro. When Bolsonaro’s 2022 attempted coup got support from only some, but enough, of the Brazilian military, they instead unleashed the storming of government buildings by Bolsonaro’s supporters Jan. 8, 2023. Although the media have gone to great pains to try to compare Brazil’s Jan. 8, 2023 with the Jan. 6, 2021 events at the U.S, Capitol used against Trump, the developments were not comparable: the former was actually an attempted coup; the Jan. 6 events in Washington were nothing of the sort.
It is widely reported that the U.S. State Department stepped in at the point that the buildings were stormed in Brasilia, to allow Lula to take office, both because they lacked the leverage to carry out a successful coup and also in exchange for what they expected to be a perennial debt of gratitude owed to them by Lula, and his subservience to whatever the Biden Administration asked of him in the future. Whatever deal may have existed completely fell apart with Brazil’s growing role in the BRICS and Lula’s commitment to organizing a new global economic architecture.
BBC reported that Bolsonaro “has been under house arrest since the beginning of August after a police report alleged that he and his son, Eduardo, had tried to interfere in the trial.”
President Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of Bolsonaro, and in fact imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil in response to his trial and also sanctioned Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. After the conviction, Trump stated: “It’s very much what they tried to do with me, but they didn’t get away with it at all. He was a good man, I don’t see that happening.” Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who now lives in Miami and is a good friend of sometime Trump advisor Steve Bannon, told Reuters news agency that he expected the U.S. would take further measures in the wake of the verdict. “We are going to have a firm response with actions from the U.S. government against this dictatorship that is being installed in Brazil,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X after the conviction that “the political persecutions by sanctioned human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes continue, as he and others on Brazil’s supreme court have unjustly ruled to imprison former President Jair Bolsonaro. The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”
Nota bene: Typical of attempted “color revolutions,” the Bolsonaristas held their own protest march in São Paulo on Brazil’s Sept. 7 Independence Day, in which the marchers carried above the crowd a gigantic 40 x 60-foot American flag.
President Lula has condemned Trump’s pressure tactics, accusing Washington of having “helped stage a coup” and vowing that Brazil “will not forget it.”