Donald Trump’s not the only former president under investigation for plotting to overthrow the democracy he once presided over.
In a bombshell development, Brazilian federal police on Thursday launched a dragnet targeting dozens of Jair Bolsonaro affiliates and now-accused abettors, including military personnel and former government officials.
The aggressive operation was carried out in connection with a lengthy court order alleging a sprawling conspiracy. Bolsonaro, federal police said, was determined to remain in power in Brazil irrespective of how the 2022 election played out.
Among other things, he personally reviewed a proposal to detain a Supreme Court justice and sought to marshal support among the military for an outright coup, police claimed. At least four people were arrested on Thursday, including a couple of army officers.
The allegations, while incendiary, are hardly surprising. Bolsonaro’s a military man in a region famous for coups and authoritarian militarism. His supporters staged their own version of the 2021 US Capitol riots two years later in Brasília, where an angry mob stormed the congress and government buildings following Lula’s inauguration. (Bolsonaro was in Orlando at the time.)
Still, Thursday’s events marked an escalation in efforts to hold Bolsonaro accountable for seeking to undermine the country’s democratic processes. The allegations suggest his advisors hatched a scheme to hold new elections if he lost. Bolsonaro also had judges tailed and animated the crowd which ultimately descended on Brasília 13 months ago.
Suffice to say Bolsonaro’s plan to stay in office was considerably more elaborate than previously known, or at least if you buy the accusations from the court order. As The Washington Post put it, citing people familiar with the probe, Bolsonaro’s scheme “involved logistical and tactical planning and entailed the involvement of the most senior officials in the Brazilian government.”
Bolsonaro, whose passport was seized Thursday, said he’s a victim of political “persecution.” He’s forbidden from speaking to his alleged co-conspirators, who apparently include Brazil’s former head of intelligence and the country’s former defense secretary, as well as the former justice minister and Bolsonaro’s running mate.
To recycle some familiar language, Bolsonaro wielded power in Brazil much like the would-be dictator that he is, and worked hard to maintain his reputation as an unapologetic misogynist, racist and everything-phobe. He was brash, he was divisive and, like Trump, he made being on the wrong side of nearly every debate a point of pride.
Ahead of the vote in 2022, Bolsonaro trafficked regularly in conspiracy theories that sounded almost identical to those pushed by Trump in 2020. He also claimed Brazil’s 2018 election was rigged against him despite having won. That too should sound familiar to Americans.
The new allegations against Bolsonaro’s defeated government suggest the preemptive effort to undermine voters’ faith in the integrity of the election process was just one dimension of a multi-faceted plot, which ultimately anticipated a full-blown military takeover in the event Lula won the election.
Bolsonaro spoke to Folha de S.Paulo on Thursday. “Forget about me,” he said. “There’s someone else running the country already.”
