A new legal aspect risks opening for Jair Bolsonaro. A parliamentary commission in Brazil gave its authorization, Wednesday October 18, for a report containing new accusations against the former Brazilian president (2019-2022) to be sent to justice. The document calls for the indictment of a total of 61 personalities – civilian and military – including former ministers of Mr. Bolosonaro, according to the press.
At the end of the examination of this text of more than 1,300 pages, it will be up to the office of the attorney general to decide whether or not to charge the former president with four crimes: attempted coup d’état, attempted violent abolition of the rule of law, political violence and criminal association. If convicted, he faces up to twenty-nine years in prison, according to parliamentarians.
With twenty votes for and eleven against, the panel of thirty-two deputies and senators judged Mr. Bolsonaro responsible as “author, intellectual or moral, of the attacks perpetrated against the institutions”.
They culminated on January 8, 2023 when thousands of supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro ransacked places of power in Brasilia, calling for military intervention to dislodge left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from power, a week after his inauguration. The damage was considerable, in scenes reminiscent of the assault on the Capitol in Washington by supporters of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.
“This is nonsense.”
“We cannot grant amnesty to the perpetrators of the coup,” MP Jandira Feghali said during the debates. For his part, Jair Bolsonaro denied any involvement in the riots, which took place more than a week after the far-right leader discreetly left the country to go to Florida, refusing to attend the inauguration of Lula. “It’s completely biased,” the ex-president told reporters Wednesday about the investigation. “This is nonsense,” he said.
Mr. Bolsonaro narrowly lost the October 2022 election to left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (49.1% of the vote to 50.9%). The 68-year-old ex-president is also the subject of an investigation by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) which declared him, at the end of June, ineligible for eight years for “abuse of political power” after criticizing without evidence the reliability of electronic ballot boxes, a few months before the presidential election.
On Wednesday, he appeared before federal police as part of an investigation into businessmen advocating a coup in WhatsApp conversations.