Brazil’s Bolsonaro finds novel way to reduce 27-year sentence: reading books | Jair Bolsonaro
Jair Bolsonaro’s lawyers have apparently been studying the country’s criminal code and have found a way to help their client reduce the 27-year prison sentence he received last year for plotting a coup: by reading a book.
There’s just one problem: The former far-right Brazilian president has never been known as a bibliophile. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to read,” Bolsonaro once said. “It’s been three years since I read a book.”
There is a literary device in Brazilian law that allows prisoners who read books to shorten their sentences by four days for each book they read. On Thursday, a Supreme Court judge authorized the disgraced former president to participate in the program, at the request of his legal team.
Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper famous for his hostility to democracy, minorities, the Amazon rainforest and the arts, is unlikely to appreciate the approved reading list. It includes Brazilian studies of indigenous rights, racism, the environment, and violence committed by the country’s 1964-85 dictatorship (a regime that Bolsonaro openly supports).
The title of Ana Maria Gonçalves’ 950-page Um Defeito de Cor (A Color Defect) tells “the history of Brazil… from the perspective of a Black woman.”
Also featured Democracy!A non-fiction children’s picture book by British-born author-illustrator Philip Bunting.
Some of the books on the list are over 1,000 pages in length, such as War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Bolsonaro once appeared publicly with a similarly sized tome (Winston Churchill’s Memoirs of World War II, which runs to more than 1,000 pages), but it is unclear whether the former president has read it.
In order to benefit from the sentence reduction, prisoners must prove that they have actually read the books by submitting a written report to prison authorities.
Bolsonaro, who was asked to name his favorite book during the 2018 presidential elections, answered one by one Carlos Alberto Brilhante UstraA notorious colonel accused of torturing hundreds of prisoners during the dictatorship. “A true story about Brazil… with facts, with data, with places where real events took place,” said Bolsonaro, who was transferred this week to a maximum security prison in the capital Brasília after spending Christmas detained at a federal police base.
Ustra’s book is not on the justice system’s reading list, but it does include Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s I’m Still Here, which describes the plight of prisoners missing in such torture centers.
