Bolsonaro, His Fall

It is difficult to recall a time when, across the Anglosphere, Brazil was held up as a paragon of democracy, yet thanks to the independence of its Supreme Court, that’s now the case. Last Thursday it found former president Jair Bolsonaro and his confederates in the military guilty of plotting to assassinate President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva and overthrow his democratically elected government on 8 January 2023.

Bolsonaro received a sentence of 27 years. Two former ministers of defence, General Walter Braga Netto and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, were sentenced to 26 and 19 years respectively. General Augusto Heleno, a former head of institutional security, got 21; Bolsonaro’s former head of intelligence, Alexandre Ramagem, and a former head of the navy, Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, both got 24; Anderson Torres, a former justice minister received 16. Bolsonaro’s secretary and go-between, Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cid, got two years of house arrest.

The verdict was historic in the strong sense: unlike in Argentina and Uruguay, there has been no judicial reckoning with dictatorship in Brazil until now; there was no Truth Commission until 2014.

For the generation that lived through the coup in 1964 – the history of which Bolsonaro and his military government tried to rewrite – then watched the military skate free during the transition to constitutional democracy in 1986, with impunity built into the 1988 Constitution, the time to celebrate had come – there were champagne corks popping in my building in Salvador da Bahia. Younger generations joined in. The doorwoman and cleaning man were smiling and laughing on Friday morning as they hosed off the front steps, discussing how Trump, Bolsonaro and the Brazilian military had met their match in Brazil’s Supreme Court.

On Friday night people were out celebrating in bars, in the streets and squareswith samba and song and an unusual degree of ebullience. On Saturday, late in a long set, Ifá, a local band, took a moment to celebrate the lengths of the sentences and demand the conspirators go to jail rather than enjoy home arrest (unlike the former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, Bolsonaro’s a flight risk). The crowd went wild. On Sunday, at the Lighthouse in Barra, it was like Carnaval as floods of people headed to hear local act after local act in the punishing afternoon sunshine and on into the evening.

The fishermen at Porto da Barra agreed that the verdict was historic and celebrated all weekend. They have been in an uproar over Trump for weeks now. Some of the men who carry umbrellas and chairs down to the beach told me that Brazil’s largest organised crime faction had finally gone down; they, too, talk about how Trump needs to be put in his place. There was much mirth at the thought of Bolsonaro’s life in prison.

Even though he’s a federal deputy, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo has been in the US for months, lobbying on his father’s behalf – with some success, as evidenced by the 50 per cent tariffs the US has imposed on imports from Brazil, and the attacks, including sanctions, on Alexandre de Moraes, whom Trump accuses of persecuting his ‘friend’ Jair Bolsonaro. Marco Rubio called the Supreme Court trial a ‘witch hunt’ and said the US would ‘respond accordingly.’

Eduardo is afraid to come home, asking his father if he would become a prisoner, too. His brother Carlos Bolsonaro is also under investigation. An estimated 42,000 Bolsonaro supporters crowded the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo with a giant American flag the week before the ex-president was sentenced, but it made no difference. Not this time.

Until Trump began attacking Brazil and its judiciary, Lula was tanking in the polls with his own base – people who earn less than twice the minimum wage, especially in the north-east – despite historically low unemployment and significant progress on inequality. Now, thanks to Trump’s hostility, Lula has a massive lead in the polls ahead of next year’s election.

Historians speak of unintended consequences, psychoanalysts of perverse behaviour producing the opposite of desired outcomes. Justice Alexandre de Moraes has become a global superstar. Justice Cármen Lúcia stole the show, however, with her 400-page written opinion, condensed into a two-hour exposition of impeccable legal reasoning. (In contrast to Justice Luiz Fux, who took twelve hours to argue – speciously – that the Court was not competent to try the case.) ‘This criminal case,’ Lúcia said, ‘is an encounter between Brazil and its past, its present and its future.’

Given Trump’s attacks, and the unlikelihood of them ceasing, Lula’s willingness to stand up to him is widely perceived as a defence of Brazil itself. National sovereignty, or the lack of it, is manifestly at stake. The far right has no credible candidates: Michelle Bolsonaro, tainted by a smuggling scandal (an aide was caught by customs returning from Saudi Arabia with undeclared jewellery worth more than $3 million), and Tarcísio de Freitas, who is busy privatising and militarising São Paulo, Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous state, have limited appeal at the national level.

Freitas has been in Brasília trying to drum up support for an amnesty law, in the hope of positioning himself as the leader who can put Humpty Dumpty back together ahead of 2026. His idea is to get the Centrão – the bloc of unaligned parties in Congress – to establish a quid pro quo whereby they hold Lula’s development projects hostage until Bolsonaro and the generals are given amnesty. The consensus among politicians, journalists and academics in Brasília is that Freitas faces very long odds, given the transactional nature of Brazilian politics.

The Federal Republic is not presidentialist: Congress has extraordinary power to shut down executive initiatives through its control of purse strings. But the Centrão has more to gain by continuing to do business without Bolsonaro than it does by trying to raise him from the dead politically. Resisting calls for amnesty is unlikely to cost Centrão politicians at the polls, either.

Bolsonaro’s ship appears to have sailed, though there is an appeal process still to play out. Assuming Trump’s political rigor mortis holds or deepens, he will not back off from attacks on Brazil. The shots fired so far have either landed wide of the target or backfired.

As long as Trump’s tariffs are in place, Brazil will sell more of its oil, soy, beef, gold, emeralds, cacao, hardwoods, coffee and orange juice to Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, India and the EU. Even if the tariffs are repealed down the road, Brazil may never depend on US consumer markets to quite the same extent again. And if domestic support for Lula stays at current levels (though that’s a big if), he could even win next year’s presidential election in the first round.