Jair Bolsonaro ordered to start 27-year prison term for plotting Brazil coup | Jair Bolsonaro
Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been ordered to begin serving his 27-year sentence in a 12-square-meter bedroom at a police base in the capital Brasília after he was found guilty of plotting a coup.
The far-right populist, who led Latin America’s largest democracy from 2019 to 2022, was sentenced in September after the high court found him guilty of leading a criminal conspiracy to prevent leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from seizing power.
The plot to assassinate Lula and his deputy, Geraldo Alckmin, collapsed when military chiefs refused to participate and the court later convicted Bolsonaro and six of his accomplices of trying to “destroy” Brazilian democracy and plunge the country back into dictatorship.
On Tuesday, high court judge Alexandre de Moraes ruled that Bolsonaro must begin serving his sentence after the case officially ends following the appeal period. Bolsonaro has been under house arrest since August and was taken into preventive custody on Saturday after unsuccessfully trying to cut off his electronic wrist tag with a soldering iron.
Six of Bolsonaro’s accomplices were also ordered to begin their sentences.
Former defense minister General Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira and former institutional security minister General Augusto Heleno were arrested and imprisoned at the Planalto Military Command in Brasília. They were sentenced to 19 and 21 years in prison respectively.
It was reported that former navy commander Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, who was sentenced to 24 years in prison, was arrested by navy officials and held at a naval base.
Bolsonaro’s former defense minister, General Walter Braga Netto, who was sentenced to 26 years in prison, was already in custody following his arrest last December.
former justice minister, Anderson Torres, who was sentenced to 24 years in prison, was expected to be sent to the prison called Papudinha in Brasília, where police officers and other “special” prisoners were kept.
Former spy chief Alexandre Ramagem was sentenced to 16 years in prison but recently fled to the US to avoid prison.
Bolsonaro’s imprisonment sparked jubilation among progressive Brazilians who remember his four-year government as a devastating spell of environmental destruction, international isolation and hostility toward minorities. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have died during the Covid pandemic. Bolsonaro has been accused of gross mishandling with his anti-science stance.
Mustafa Baba-Aissa, the owner of a record store in Rio de Janeiro, painted the store’s facade with the slogan “Bolsonaro is in prison!” He celebrated the historical event by decorating it with a white banner that read:
“A despicable man who has done nothing in his life but live on public money… “I have no idea how he was elected,” said the business owner, who covered his shop windows with homemade posters celebrating Bolsonaro’s downfall.
Bolsonaro supporters have condemned the jailing of their paratrooper-turned-politician leader, who was elected in 2018 and poses as South America’s answer to Donald Trump.
“He’s been kidnapped,” complained Ronny de Souza, a 43-year-old Bolsonaro activist, as he stood outside the federal police base where the politician, who was arrested last weekend on suspicion of fleeing to a foreign embassy, was taken.
Amazonian politician Lenildo Mendes dos Santos Sertão, who uses the pseudonym Delegado Caveira (“Police chief Skull”), claimed that his ally was the victim of a witch hunt. “He fought against the system, and now the system has imprisoned him unfairly and illegally,” Sertão said.
The Bolsonaristas have vowed to continue fighting even though the helmsman of their movement is in prison and out of the political game. “He represents millions of people in our country,” Souza said, predicting that large numbers of followers would flock to Brasília to protest Bolsonaro’s situation.
But so far there have been no signs of mass protests or unrest; Only small groups of Bolsonaristas were demonstrating and praying in front of the federal police building where he had spent the last three nights.
Experts say the former president’s influence has waned dramatically in recent months, especially after he was arrested for tampering with Bolsonaro’s wrist tag.
Political scientist Camila Rocha, who studies Brazil’s new right, said recent polls reveal a clear decline in support for Bolsonaro both on the streets and on social media. One study found that only 13% of voters now support Bolsonaro “no matter what.” Nearly 2,000 people attended a rally organized by Bolsonaro’s family in Brasília last month; that number was far fewer than the massive crowds the former president mobilized at the height of his power.
“Could there be more protests? Of course. But I think this downward trend is established,” said Rocha, who sees Bolsonaro in “a stalemate situation.”
Rocha believed that Bolsonaro’s arrest was good news for right-wing politicians hoping to inherit his votes, as well as for voters hoping for a “reduction of anti-democratic extremism” in Brazil.
Not all pro-Bolsonaro plotters convicted over the coup can be jailed on Tuesday. Abin Ramagem, the former head of Brazil’s intelligence agency, recently left the country despite his passport being revoked.
“I am safe in the United States,” Ramagem said in a social media video on Monday, urging Bolsonaristas to take to the streets to defend “our greatest leader.”
As the conspirators began serving their sentences Tuesday afternoon, there was no sign that citizens would heed his call.
“He is psychologically devastated,” Carlos Bolsonaro told reporters after visiting his father earlier in the day.
