Bolsonaro’s Conviction is a Win for Democracy and Accountability

“By God above, I will never be imprisoned!” former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told members of the Brazilian business community in May 2022. He often made such declarations in public, as if to chase away a fear common to autocrats. Three years later, that fear has become reality. On September 11, Brazil’s Supreme Court Justices convicted Bolsonaro, 4-1, and sentenced him to 27 years and 3 months in prison for conspiring against democracy; taking part in an armed criminal organization; organizing a coup; and damaging government property and protected cultural heritage assets.

These crimes were committed in connection with the January 8, 2023 storming of Congress and other government buildings by Bolsonaro’s hard-core supporters after he lost the 2022 election to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.

While we don’t yet know when and if Bolsonaro will be incarcerated, his conviction is a monumental victory for democratic visions of justice and an example of what accountability looks like. The convictions of five military officials who were his co-conspirators are also a landmark event in a country that had a military coup in 1964 and suffered through twenty-one years of dictatorship. It is the first time in Brazilian history that military officials have been punished for trying to overthrow a democratic government.

The aggressive and multi-pronged reaction of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to these developments only underscores how damaging these acts of democratic justice are to the cause of autocracy and the perceived right of strongmen to stay in power by any means.

The United States government is deploying diplomatic warfare (the revocation of entry visas of eight judges on Brazil’s Supreme Court and their immediate family members, as well as other officials), economic warfare (the Treasury Department imposed a 50% tariff on many Brazilian goods and sanctions on several government officials), and information warfare to spin the conviction as a “witch hunt” and the end of the rule of law in Brazil. To that end, Justice Alexandre de Moraes has also been subjected to Magnitsky Act sanctions on grounds that he is a “human rights abuser” engaging in “political persecution,” as Rubio wrote.

An Assassination Plot and Other Revelations about the Coup Attempt

From the start, the new Lula government took prompt action and cast a wide net in its attempt to hold Bolsonaro and his enablers accountable for the January 2023 coup attempt. This included arresting thousands of rioters, suspending the powerful Brasilia governor Ibaneis Rocha, a Bolsonaro ally with oversight of the police in his area, for 90 days, and investigating those who funded the foot soldiers. The Supreme Court also ramped up its investigations into Bolsonaro’s use of misinformation to convince the public that Brazil’s election system was rife with fraud.

If this sounds familiar, it should: since election fraud claims were rare in Brazil, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who is his father’s liaison to MAGA, held meetings in America in 2021 and 2022 with Steve Bannon and Jason Miller. They became consiglieri to the Brazilians, who sought to discredit their country's electoral systems in the public mind.

Bolsonaro had always flattered Trump by positioning himself as Trump’s biggest defender in Latin America. In February 2020, that meant putting on a sycophantic performance: livestreaming himself watching Trump celebrate his 2020 acquittal by the Senate in his impeachment trial.

Bolsonaro gives the MAGA thumbs-up sign as he livestreams himself watching Trump’s post-acquittal speech, February 2020.

When Bolsonaro was convicted in June 2023 of spreading claims of election fraud, barred from holding public office for eight years, and put on house arrest with an ankle monitor, Trump returned the favor, demanding that the charges be dropped.

As it turns out, the election fraud claims and the siege of government buildings were only part of the story. The conspiracy included a plan to assassinate Lula, de Moraes, and others, but the army command refused to go along with it. This sent Bolsonaro into such a tailspin that he left for Florida rather than attend Lula’s inauguration. As the Economist recounts, a Roman Catholic priest Bolsonaro consulted during this period later gave police this profane assessment of the defeated president’s situation: “If he doesn’t do [the coup], he’ll get fucked and the people will also get fucked; if he does this, he won’t get fucked, but the people will get fucked and then fuck him over.”

In the end, Bolsonaro’s coup failed, and Lula and de Moraes lived to oversee the case against him. To paraphrase the priest, Bolsonaro took a hit, but the people did not. Brazilians were saved from another coup and the authoritarian government that would have likely come out of that.

Lula knows that the danger is not over. He knows that the United States is trying to discredit him and weaken his legitimacy so he can be defeated in the next election and replaced with a pro-Trump Bolsonaro proxy. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who moved to the United States temporarily to lobby for American actions against Lula’s government, would be a likely choice.

That is why Lula issued this warning in a recent New York Times interview and opinion essay "Brazil's democracy and sovereignty are not on the table,” he said. “The democratic state of law for us is a sacred thing. Because we have already lived through dictatorships, and we don’t want any more.”