Brazil's left celebrates as court sentences ex-President Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison

The former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup against his political opponent in the South American democracy. On Thursday, Justices Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha and Cristiano Zanin ruled that Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper and far-right politician, was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election to Brazil’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The Brazilian politician, who became the country’s president in 2018, was accused of being involved in crimes including coup d’état and violently attempting to abolish Brazil’s democracy on Thursday night. “[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state … ​the greatest consequence ​[of which] … would have been the return of dictatorship to Brazil," the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said at the hearing.

Delivering her decisive vote, Rocha denounced what she called an attempt to “sow the malignant seed of anti-democracy” in Brazil but went on to laud how the country’s institutions survived. “Brazilian democracy was not shaken,” Rocha told a court in the capital, Brasília, warning of the spread of “the virus of authoritarianism."

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Bolsonaro is accused of plunging Brazil back into a dictatorship

The recent ruling came days after two other judges, Moraes and Flávio Dino, also declared the 70-year-old politician guilty of leading what the former called “a criminal organisation” that had sought to plunge the South American country back into dictatorship.

“Jair Bolsonaro was the leader of this criminal structure,” Moraes said during a five-hour address in which he offered a comprehensive account of the slow-burning conspiracy against Brazilian democracy. “The victim is the Brazilian state,” said Moraes, claiming the plot had unfolded between July 2021 and January 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters rampaged through Brasília after the election’s leftwing winner, Lula da Silva, took power.

Meanwhile, a fourth judge named Luiz Fox voted to absolve Bolsonaro on Wednesday, claiming there was “absolutely no proof” the former president had been aware of or part of an alleged plot to assassinate Lula and Moraes in late 2022. However, he maintained that the January 8 uprising, orchestrated by Bolsonar’s supporters, was a “barbaric act” that had caused “damage on an Amazonian scale”.

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Fux also voted to convict two of Bolsonaro’s closest allies – his former defence minister, Gen Walter Braga Netto, and his former aide-de-camp, Lt Col Mauro Cid – for the crime of violently attempting to abolish Brazilian democracy. Left-wing groups in the country celebrated the move outside the Brazilian Supreme Court.

“Today, Brazil is making history,” Lindbergh Farias, the leader of Lula’s Workers’ Party in the lower house of Congress, said as he emerged from the building. “Brazil is saying: ‘Coups are a crime!’” Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro, called the verdict political persecution, and US President Donald Trump said the conviction was “very surprising”.

“That’s very much like they tried to do with me. But they didn’t get away with it at all,” said the American president, who has spent recent months trying to pressure Brazil’s supreme court and government into halting Bolsonaro’s trial with a campaign of tariffs and sanctions. “The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt,” tweeted the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, calling the conviction “unjust”.