The moment that so many Brazilian democrats, so many left-wing activists and so many relatives of coronavirus victims dreamed of has arrived. Former Brazilian president Jair Messias Bolsonaro, 70, is already technically in jail. This Tuesday the far-right began serving his 27-year sentence, but without moving one meter from the room where he is being held, in Brasilia. The judge in the case has decided, presumably, considering his age, that he remain at the main police headquarters in Brasilia, where he was transferred on Saturday after trying to monitor his movements.
The main leader of the Brazilian right is, therefore, detained in conditions similar to those granted in 2018 to the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and therefore avoids being interned in a maximum security prison or a military prison.
The Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, instructor of the case and whom Bolsonarism considers its worst enemy, has not responded to the defense’s request to allow him to serve the punishment. The Army captain in the reserve suffers from recurring gastrointestinal crises and hiccups, a consequence of a stab wound he suffered in 2018.
The magistrate accuses him of trying to escape last weekend. Since Saturday, Bolsonaro remains in a room of about 12 square meters in the Superintendency of the Federal Police in the capital. It has a bed, a table, television and air conditioning. This morning two of his children visited him and the day before his wife did, who cooks homemade dishes with which the former president feeds, who has preferred not to try the Federal Police menu for prisoners.
The highest court, established in recent times as the great defender of democracy, has asked the Armed Forces to remove the stripes from those convicted. President Lula has defended throughout the delicate judicial process that Bolsonaro’s presumption of innocence has been scrupulously respected. He, however, proclaims himself a victim of political persecution.
If former President Bolsonaro had to serve his entire sentence behind bars, he would get almost 100 years in prison. Brazilian criminal legislation, very focused on social reintegration, contemplates that in a serious case like that of Bolsonaro, the prisoner serves 25% in a closed regime (which translates to six years for him) before moving on to semi-freedom that allows him to go out to work. The ultra was disqualified from participating in the elections since 2023. And, since last August, under house arrest and banned from using social networks.
The disappearance from the public scene and the silence imposed by the judge has weakened him politically. The efforts of his children and his party to promote, in Congress, an amnesty law that would free him from the prison sentence or soften it have been unsuccessful for the moment.
President Donald Trump’s formidable pressure, in the form of threats, tariffs and tariffs, has failed to save his ally and prevent him from being held accountable for attempting to subvert the constitutional order and planning the assassination of Lula, his vice president, Geraldo Alckmin and Judge Moraes. Brazilian institutions have shown enormous firmness in the face of threats and attacks from the most powerful politician in the world. “It’s a shame,” the American responded on Saturday when he learned, from journalists, that the Trump of the tropics He had been taken to a police station due to the judge’s suspicion that he wanted to take refuge in the US Embassy.
The three generals (Walter Braga Netto, Augusto Heleno and Pedro Paulo Nogueira) and Admiral Almir Garnier) convicted with Bolsonaro for plotting a coup plot against Lula are also already imprisoned, in their case in military facilities. Sentenced to between 24 and 19 years in prison, they are the first high-ranking soldiers in Brazil, dotted with successful and unsuccessful riots. The generals were ministers with Bolsonaro, the admiral headed the Navy. A fifth convict, police officer and former minister Anderson Torres, entered the wing intended for officers of a civil prison. Another of the condemned, a police commissioner who directed espionage and is a congressman, fled weeks ago to the United States, to Miami. The Supreme Court has asked Congress to remove him from his seat.
“The coup plotters always went unpunished, both in power and out of it. Now, for the first time, the officers who betrayed the Constitution will begin to pay for their crimes,” columnist Bernardo Mello Franco has written in The Globe.
For a president to be imprisoned is less unusual in Brazil. Bolsonaro is the third in this democratic stage, after Lula, whose sentences were annulled, and Fernando at home for a few months. Michel Temer was detained a couple of times in 2019 but was never tried.
The ruling against Bolsonaro, adopted 4-1, convicted him of five crimes: attempted coup d’état, attempted democratic abolition of the rule of law, leading a criminal organization, damage to public property and protected heritage.
The Prosecutor’s Office maintained that the plot led by Bolsonaro to remain in power after losing the elections, in 2022, against Lula failed due to the opposition of two of the three members of the leadership of the Armed Forces.
