Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro and seven of his allies, including four senior members of the military, have gone on trial for allegedly attempting to stage a coup – the first time in Brazilian history such powerful figures have faced justice for seeking to topple the country’s democracy.
Bolsonaro, a paratrooper turned far-right populist who governed from 2019 until 2023, stands accused of masterminding a failed power grab after losing the 2022 election to the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro and his seven alleged co-conspirators, including three army generals and the former head of the navy, face decades in jail if found guilty of being the driving force behind the unsuccessful plot.
On Tuesday morning, the supreme court began what is expected to be a two-week judgment of the group. Over the course of eight televised hearings held between 2 and 12 September, five supreme court judges will decide their fate.
The judge presiding over the trial, Alexandre de Moraes, kicked off the hearing describing how an anti-democratic plot to impose “a veritable dictatorship” had been foiled thanks to the strength of Brazilian society and institutions. A failure to punish that crime “would mean encouraging new attempted coups d’etat,” Moraes told the court, adding: “History teaches us that impunity, omission and cowardice do not lead to pacification.”
The prosecutor general, Paulo Gonet, told the court it was essential those behind the “frightening and shadowy” conspiracy be held to account.
Brazil has suffered more than a dozen attempted putsches and coups d’état since 1889, when it became a republic after its last emperor, Pedro II, was overthrown. The last successful power grab came in 1964, when US-backed generals deposed the then president, João Goulart, supposedly to thwart a communist threat and ushering in 21 years of brutal military rule.
But the historian Danilo Araújo Marques said that never before had top military leaders or a former president been tried for attacking democracy. “This truly is unprecedented and historic,” said Marques, who is part of a research unit at the Federal University of Minas Gerais called Projeto República.
“Whenever there was an attempted coup, and the coup didn’t succeed, there was always an amnesty – and now we’re seeing precisely the opposite,” Marques added, hailing the trial as tribute to the maturity of Brazil’s institutions and democracy, which was restored in 1985. “Our democracy is going through an acid test and it’s possible it will come out of this strengthened.”
On the eve of the trial, the US president, Donald Trump, has attempted to sabotage proceedings with what analysts called an unprecedented pressure campaign that has thrown US-Brazil relations into disarray.
Claiming Bolsonaro was the victim of a “witch-hunt”, Trump slapped 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports and sanctioned Alexandre de Moraes, the judge presiding over the case. Other supreme court justices and Lula officials have been stripped of their US visas. Bolsonaro’s congressman son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, has moved to the US to lobby Trump officials to take up his father’s fight.
“It’s a political intervention with an economic cudgel,” Thomas Shannon, a former US ambassador to Brazil, said of Trump’s tariffs campaign.
Shannon believed Trump had a clear political objective: to scupper Bolsonaro’s prosecution, resuscitate the Brazilian populist’s flagging political career, and allow Bolsonaro – who is currently banned from seeking office – to challenge Lula in next year’s presidential election.
But the ex-ambassador, who was based in Brasília from 2010 to 2013, believed the US president was mistaken if he believed he could help Bolsonaro escape punishment and “storm back into power” – just as Trump did last year.
“It [shows] such a cartoon-like understanding of Brazil – and I think what the president is doing at the behest of the Bolsonaros is actually going to harm the Bolsonaros in a really significant way,” Shannon said, noting how polls showed support for the ex-president falling.
In contrast, support for Lula appears to be increasing, with Brazil’s president using Trump’s offensive to position himself as a flag-waving patriot defending Brazilian interests from a foreign onslaught. Lula has started wearing a blue, Maga-style cap emblazoned with the words: “Brazil belongs to the Brazilians.”
Asked last week if he would be tuning into his rival’s coup trial, Lula shrugged: “I’ve got better things to do.”
Those in the dock alongside Bolsonaro include some of the best-known figures in his administration: the former defence ministers Gen Walter Braga Netto and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; the former minister for institutional security, Gen Augusto Heleno; the former navy commander, Adm Almir Garnier Santos; the former security minister, Anderson Torres; the former spy chief Alexandre Ramagem; and Bolsonaro’s former assistant, Lt Col Mauro Cid.
The accusations against them relate to an alleged conspiracy to launch a pro-Bolsonaro coup in the months between the October 2022 election and the far-right uprising in Brasília on 8 January 2023 – a week after Lula took power.
Bolsonaro denies plotting a coup but has admitted seeking “alternative” ways to stop Lula taking office. All of the other defendants also maintain their innocence, apart from Cid. He has collaborated with investigators as part of a plea deal and hopes to receive a reduced sentence.
In an editorial marking the start of the trial, the O Globo newspaper said 2 September would go down in history as the day Brazil finally broke its “humiliating tradition” of failing to prosecute coup-mongering presidents and generals.
The judgment was celebrated as a “huge civilizatory leap forward” by the conservative O Estado de São Paulo:
“Perhaps this is why Trump is using the enormous power of the US to attack the supreme court and save Bolsonaro from his penal fate. Not out of friendship [for the Bolsonaros], but to stop an example of democratic resistance flourishing in Latin America’s biggest nation, that reinforces the contrast with the genuflection of American institutions to Trumpism.”
Bolsonaro has been under house arrest since early August after the supreme court ruled he had violated a court order banning him from social networks. Police have been stationed outside his mansion amid fears he could flee to the nearby US embassy. Earlier this month police claimed they had found a document on a phone seized from the ex-president indicating he had planned to abscond to Argentina and seek asylum from its rightwing president, Javier Milei.
On Sunday – Brazil’s independence day – Bolsonaro’s supporters are expected to stage a show of force, rallying in major cities to demand he be absolved. Security has been stepped up around the supreme court, presidential palace and congress to avoid a repeat of the 8 January uprising, when all three buildings were ransacked by Bolsonaro supporters.
Marques predicted there were likely to be lively days ahead as Brazil’s 40-year-old democracy notched up another landmark moment. “This is an important cycle that is closing,” he said of the decade-long rise and fall of Bolsonaro, a once obscure politician who shot to prominence during the 2016 impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, was elected in 2018, and now faces political annihilation.
“But the future is full of surprises,” Marques added. Even if Bolsonaro was convicted and jailed, “new chapters” could still be written, such as congress approving an amnesty, or a future rightwing president granting Bolsonaro a pardon. “Let’s see what the future has in store for us.”
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