A majority of Brazil’s supreme court judges have voted to convict the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a military coup, leaving the far-right populist facing a decades-long sentence for leading the criminal conspiracy.
Justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha ruled on Thursday that Bolsonaro – a former paratrooper who was elected president in 2018 – was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election, meaning three of the five judges involved in the trial had found Brazil’s former leader guilty.
Delivering her decisive vote, Rocha denounced what she called an attempt to “sow the malignant seed of anti-democracy” in Brazil – but celebrated how the country’s institutions had survived and were fighting back.
“Brazilian democracy was not shaken,” Rocha told a court in the capital, Brasília, warning of the spread of “the virus of authoritarianism”.
On Tuesday, two other judges, Alexandre de 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.
View image in fullscreen Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court (STF) minister Carmen Lucia. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP
“Jair Bolsonaro was leader of this criminal structure,” Moraes said during a five-hour address in which he offered a comprehensive account of the slow-burn 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, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, took power.
A fourth judge, Luiz Fux, voted to absolve Bolsonaro on Wednesday, claiming there was “absolutely no proof” the former president had been aware or part of an alleged plot to assassinate Lula and Moraes in late 2022, or had tried to stage a coup.
Fux called the 8 January 2023 uprising – when hardcore Bolsonaristas ransacked the supreme court, presidential palace and congress – a “barbaric act” that had caused “damage of an Amazonian-scale”. But the judge, who also controversially argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over the case, claimed there was no proof Bolsonaro was to blame for inciting the riots.
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