Jair Bolsonaro led a criminal organisation that sought to plunge Brazil back into dictatorship with a murderous power grab involving special forces assassins and a vast disinformation campaign, the supreme court judge presiding over the former president’s trial has claimed as he voted for Bolsonaro’s conviction.
Alexandre de Moraes was the first supreme court justice of five to announce his decision on Tuesday, as the trial of Bolsonaro and seven alleged co-conspirators – including four senior members of the military and the former head of Brazil’s answer to MI6 – entered its final stretch.
“The defendant, Jair Bolsonaro, was leader of this criminal structure,” the judge told a courtroom in the capital, Brasília, during a five-hour speech detailing what he called Bolsonaro’s “authoritarian project”.
Bolsonaro has denied involvement in a coup plot. But Moraes said there was “ample evidence” that the far-right populist, who governed the South American country from 2019 until the end of 2022, had tried to cling to power after losing that year’s election to his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“Brazil nearly went back to being a dictatorship … because a criminal organisation made up of a political group doesn’t know how to lose elections,” Moraes told the court. “Because a criminal organisation made up of a political group led by Jair Bolsonaro doesn’t understand that the alternation of power is a principle of republican democracy.”
Later in the day, a second judge, Flávio Dino, also voted for Bolsonaro and his alleged accomplices to be found guilty, although Dino argued that some of the defendants had higher levels of culpability than others. Bolsonaro’s level of guilt was “rather high”, the judge claimed, indicating he would support a tougher sentence for the former president.
Three more supreme court justices are due to cast their votes in the coming days, with Bolsonaro’s conviction widely considered a foregone conclusion. If found guilty of crimes including leading an armed criminal organisation and a coup d’etat and violently attempting to abolish Brazil’s democracy, the former president faces a sentence of up to 43 years. A verdict is expected by Thursday. While Bolsonaro has denied the charges, he has admitted seeking supposedly constitutional ways of remaining in power.
Explaining his vote, Moraes claimed the alleged coup plot began in June 2021, the third year of Bolsonaro’s government, when the then president and close allies launched a deliberate and criminal attempt to undermine Brazil’s electronic voting system and intimidate its judiciary by spreading “criminal lies” through a huge campaign of online disinformation. Their goal was to convince millions of Brazilians of the possibility of election fraud and justify an illegal power grab if Bolsonaro lost the presidential election in October 2022.
The conspiracy allegedly accelerated in November 2022, after Bolsonaro was narrowly defeated by Lula. In a series of post-election meetings with the leaders of the armed forces, Bolsonaro allegedly tried to convince them to stage a military intervention to prevent Lula from taking power. The head of the navy, who is also on trial this week, allegedly agreed while the army and air force commanders declined to take part. Moraes said the latter two deserved “respect and admiration” for helping thwart Bolsonaro’s alleged coup attempt.
At the same time, a parallel plot to cause social chaos by using a hit squad of special forces assassins to murder Lula, the vice-president-elect, Geraldo Alckmin, and Moraes also began to unfold, although it was allegedly aborted at the last minute.
That subplot – a copy of which Moraes said was printed out at the presidential palace by an army general and then delivered to the presidential residence – was supposedly intended to justify the imposition of a state of exception that would allow Bolsonaro to retain power.
“This [plan] wasn’t printed out in a cave. It wasn’t printed out hidden away in a room of terrorists. It was printed out in the presidential palace. It was printed out in the seat of the Brazilian government,” Moraes told the court, adding that he was certain Bolsonaro was aware of the plan. It was impossible to believe that the general who printed out the roadmap for the assassinations and took it to the presidential residence did so with the intention of using the document to make “a paper boat”, Moraes said.
The failed putsch allegedly culminated on 8 January 2023, one week after Lula’s inauguration, when hardcore Bolsonaro supporters ran riot in Brasília, vandalising the presidential palace, the congressional building and the supreme court building where this week’s trial is being held.
Bolsonaro has denied inciting those attacks, noting how he had flown to the US at the end of December 2022 to avoid having to hand the presidential sash to Lula. But Moraes rejected the former president’s attempts to distance himself from the violence. “When the mafia foot soldier commits a crime on the orders of the mafia capo, the head of the criminal organisation isn’t [physically] there. But he answers for [the crime] because he ordered it,” Moraes said.
“What happened on 8 January was not spontaneous combustion,” Moraes added. Rather, he said, it was the conclusion of a long-running plot to stay in power “at any cost” carried out by “a political group that, regrettably, transformed itself into a criminal organisation”.
That organisation of “criminal coup mongers”, led by Bolsonaro, hoped “to keep itself in power irrespective of the result of the elections”, Moraes said.
The judge also voted for the seven other defendants to be convicted. They include the former defence ministers Gen Walter Braga Netto and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, the former minister for institutional security Gen Augusto Heleno, and the former navy commander Adm Almir Garnier Santos. The conviction of that quartet of military men would represent a historic moment for Brazil, where members of the military top brass have never before been held to account for staging a coup. All four men deny being part of the alleged power grab.
Bolsonaro is under house arrest and did not attend Tuesday’s hearing. But his senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro, said there was “no proof at all” of his father’s guilt and called claims that his father was involved in a plot to murder Moraes, Lula and Alckmin “fiction”.
