What happened
Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro of conspiring to thwart his 2022 presidential election loss by plotting a coup. The justices, who found Bolsonaro guilty in a 4-1 vote, sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison. They also handed down long sentences to four of Bosonaro’s seven co-conspirators, including two former defense ministers and a former spy chief.
Who said what
The verdict made Bolsonaro the “first former Brazilian president to be convicted of attempting a coup” in a country that has endured several successful ones, The Associated Press said. The 70-year-old former army captain has “never hid his admiration for the military dictatorship that killed hundreds of Brazilians between 1964 and 1985,” Reuters said.
Brazil “almost returned to its 20-year dictatorship because a criminal organization, comprised of a political group, doesn’t know how to lose elections,” Justice Alexandre de Moraes said before casting his guilty vote. “And the evidence is abundant.” The coup plot, detailed in a two-year police investigation, envisioned dissolving the Supreme Court, giving sweeping powers to the military and assassinating the election winner, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, plus Moraes and other officials.
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Bolsonaro maintained his innocence, but “as the trial marched toward a verdict over the last two weeks,” he “found himself abandoned by some allies accused of plotting the coup alongside him,” The New York Times said. He “also faced damaging testimony from his personal secretary and records showing that the assassination plot was printed out and brought to the presidential palace.” The expected guilty verdict led Bolsonaro to “place his faith in a Hail Mary from abroad,” President Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully “sought to force Brazil to drop the case” by imposing “eye-watering 50% tariffs” and hitting Moraes with “some of the harshest sanctions the United States has at its disposal.”
What next?
As “many Brazilians began celebrating” the verdict, “authorities braced for a backlash from the White House,” The Wall Street Journal said. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media that the Trump administration “will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”
