THE RISKY TRIAL OF JAIR BOLSONARO / THE FINANCIAL TIMES BIG READ

The risky trial of Jair Bolsonaro

Brazilian authorities want justice over an alleged coup plot, but the case against the former president risks boosting his popularity — and dividing the country

Michael Stott and Michael Pooler in Brasília

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is facing trial after judge Alexandre de Moraes, background, launched an investigation. Many protesters are calling for ‘no amnesty’ © Carolina Vargas/FT montage/Bloomberg/AFP

The five Brazilian supreme court judges delivered their ruling unanimously to a divided nation: former far-right president and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro must stand trial on charges of plotting a military-backed coup to overthrow one of the world’s biggest democracies.

Bolsonaro was indignant. 

“It seems they have something personal against me,” the former army captain retorted after the decision was announced on March 26. 

He had not attended court that day because “obviously I knew what was going to happen”.

The criminal case, which is likely to begin later this month, has split Latin America’s biggest nation, echoing events eight years ago, when Bolsonaro’s bitter rival, leftist current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stood trial on corruption charges and was jailed. 

His convictions were later annulled because of procedural flaws.

Then, as now, opponents are demanding that justice be done, while supporters decry what they see as political persecution by biased judges. 

Fifty-one per cent of Brazilians believe Bolsonaro plotted a coup and 48 per cent believe he is innocent, according to a poll last week by AtlasIntel.

In the middle stands Brazil’s supreme court, an institution that has accumulated extraordinary power over the past decade, and one of its most controversial judges, Alexandre de Moraes. 

De Moraes was one of the alleged victims of the plot, yet he also launched the investigation into the alleged coup, was part of the panel that agreed to hear the case and will now help judge Bolsonaro.

The accusations against the former president and his 33 alleged co-conspirators, who include senior active and retired military officers, are outlined in a 272-page indictment submitted to the supreme court by attorney-general Paulo Gonet. 

Based on the police investigation launched by de Moraes, its evidence includes data from seized mobile phones, witnesses, audio recordings and documents.

Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Congress and other key government buildings in Brasília on January 8 2023 before being removed by police and arrested © Fotoarena/Sipa USA/Reuters

Bolsonaro and his election running mate, General Walter Braga Netto, as well as his former defence and justice ministers, are in the first group to be brought to trial. 

Charged with plotting a coup, criminal conspiracy, criminal damage and overthrow of the rule of law, they face up to 43 and 30 years in jail, respectively, if convicted.

Bolsonaro claims that the prosecution’s real aim is to clear the way for his nemesis Lula to run for a fourth term in 2026. 

“They want to remove any possibility of my name being on the ballot next year,” he tells the Financial Times in an interview at the headquarters of his Liberal party (PL) in Brasília. 

The judiciary, he adds, is “completely aligned” with Lula.

The two men lead opposing political tribes: Lula, a former trade union boss and darling of progressives, and Bolsonaro, the idol of Brazil’s “beef, Bible and bullets” conservatives.

Their battle has now acquired an international dimension, with Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a congressman in Brazil, taking a leave of absence to go to Washington to rally support from the Trump administration to help his father.

His efforts appear to be paying off. 

“The indictment of former President Jair Bolsonaro is not about justice — it is about eliminating political competition through judicial lawfare, just as President Trump was targeted before making the greatest political comeback in history,” Republican members of Congress Rich McCormick and Maria Elvira Salazar wrote in a letter to the US president last month calling for visa bans and economic sanctions against de Moraes.

The Brazilian authorities are determined that there should be a judgment on the alleged coup well before campaigning begins for the next presidential election, so that there is none of the legal ambiguity that surrounded Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in 2024. 

But by putting Bolsonaro on trial, they risk raising his political profile — and even turning him into a martyr.

“The threat to democracy itself has become a political football,” says Christopher da Cunha Bueno Garman, managing director for the Americas at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

He believes Bolsonaro’s popularity is unlikely to suffer. 

“It’s similar to what happened with Trump and January 6,” he says, referring to the 2021 insurrection in Washington. 

“That didn’t prevent Trump from winning a second time round.”

In March 2021, a Brazilian supreme court judge annulled Lula’s corruption convictions, ruling that the case had been tried in the wrong jurisdiction. 

The decision cleared the way for Bolsonaro’s great political adversary, who had already been released from jail on appeal, to run against him in 2022.

Prosecutors allege that the then president began plotting to stay in power, regardless of the forthcoming election result.

“I have three alternatives for my future,” Bolsonaro told evangelical Christian allies in August 2021. 

“To be imprisoned, to be killed — or victory.” 

Losing an election, it seemed, was not among them.

Adopting a tactic that had been used by Trump, Bolsonaro stepped up a campaign to discredit Brazil’s electronic voting system — the same mechanism that delivered him victory in 2018 — claiming that it was prone to fraud. 

Those claims were laid out in a televised meeting with ambassadors in Brasília in July 2022 — an action that has already earned Bolsonaro a disqualification from running in elections until 2030 on the grounds of abuse of power.

In September 2022, the then president rallied supporters in the capital on Brazil’s independence day, organising a military parade, denouncing polls showing him trailing Lula as a “lie” and framing the forthcoming election as a “battle between good and evil”.

Brazil has enjoyed free and fair elections since the end of military rule in 1985. 

But when the October 2022 election went to a closely fought second round, Bolsonaro and his plotters “put into practice their plan to prolong the leader’s stay in power”, prosecutors argue. 

They allege that the conspirators mapped areas where first-round voting for Lula had been strongest and then illegally ordered highway police to erect roadblocks there to prevent voters from casting second-round ballots.

Despite the alleged shenanigans, Lula narrowly defeated Bolsonaro and at this point, the prosecution says, the plotters stepped up preparations for a coup to prevent the scheduled handover of power at the start of 2023.

Bolsonaro, the indictment says, “formed a structured criminal organisation with other civil and military personalities” to advance his plans.

Among the evidence is what prosecutors describe as the draft of a coup decree. 

They say the document was presented by Bolsonaro to military chiefs at a meeting in the presidential palace on December 7 2022, less than a month before he was due to hand over power.

The decree would have declared a state of emergency, imprisoned the head of the senate and two supreme court justices and called fresh elections to prevent Lula from taking office, according to the indictment. 

The military commanders were divided: Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, Bolsonaro’s navy chief, allegedly supported the plan but the head of the army, General Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, refused to back it.

Prosecutors say Bolsonaro then ordered changes to the draft and his defence minister Paulo Sérgio Nogueira presented a second version to the heads of the three branches of the armed forces, including air force chief Brigadier Carlos Baptista Júnior, a week later, attempting to secure their agreement. 

A copy of this draft was later found in the home of Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, Anderson Torres, according to the indictment.

Former defence minister Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, third from left, will stand trial for allegedly trying to get the heads of the three branches of the armed forces to back a draft of a coup decree © Mateus Bonomi/AGIF/Reuters

One of the key prosecution witnesses is Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp Mauro Cid, who has made extensive allegations against his old boss and has accepted a plea bargain © AP/Eraldo Peres

After the air force chief flatly rejected the idea, Bolsonaro’s running mate Braga Netto allegedly sent a text message to a subordinate calling Baptista Júnior a “traitor to the country”, with an order to “make his and his family’s lives hell” — and to “praise Garnier”.

One of the key prosecution witnesses is Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cid, who has made extensive allegations against his old boss and has accepted a plea bargain. 

As well as giving details of the December meetings with the military chiefs, prosecutors say messages in Cid’s phone show that Bolsonaro was aware of a “green and yellow dagger” plot that month — named after the colours of the Brazilian flag — to murder Lula, de Moraes and vice-president elect Geraldo Alckmin.

De Moraes is a hate figure for conservatives after his repeated orders during the election campaign to take down adverts and social media posts on the grounds they were false, actions which the right saw as disproportionately targeted at Bolsonaro’s camp.

Cid also testified that Bolsonaro and his inner circle encouraged supporters to set up protest camps outside military bases across Brazil after the election with the aim of putting pressure on the generals commanding units to support a coup.

Bolsonaro describes the allegations as far-fetched, saying he did meet military chiefs to discuss “illegalities” committed by the supreme court and to consider measures within the constitution to deal with them. 

“They say they got this draft which is supposed to be a draft of the coup but they don’t show this draft of a coup,” he tells the FT. 

“Where is this draft?” 

(The supreme court has released a police document containing the text of what they say is the coup decree.)

Cid, he claims, was “blackmailed” by prosecutors to invent testimony in order to win clemency for his wife who was facing investigations over allegedly falsified Covid vaccination records. 

Bolsonaro’s lawyers have asked for the former aide’s testimony to be disregarded after video was published showing de Moraes threatening Cid while interrogating him.

Prosecutors say that after the attempted coup in December 2022 failed because of a lack of support from the army chief and other generals, there was a final attempt to overthrow Lula in January 2023, a week after he had taken power.

Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters gathered in the centre of Brasília and stormed key government buildings on a Sunday when they were empty, occupying and ransacking Congress, the presidential palace and the supreme court before being removed by police and arrested.

Bolsonaro was in Orlando, Florida, at the time and says he had no connection to what he derisively calls a “Disney coup” or to the alleged plan to assassinate Lula and de Moraes. 

“It’s a completely infantile affair,” he says in his trademark gruff bark. 

“We’re going to kidnap and poison [them]? 

For God’s sake! 

Even a child could have done better.”

With the supreme court justices moving at speed to avoid the case dragging on into an election year in 2026, a verdict is likely by December.

Bolsonaro’s supporters, however, have already made up their minds. 

At a rally on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beachfront in March, around 20,000 people demanded the release of “political prisoners” jailed for their part in the January 2023 insurrection, an amnesty campaign which critics say could also benefit Bolsonaro.

“He’s being persecuted by those vagabonds in the supreme court,” says Alfredo, a protester from the coastal town of Rio das Ostras who did not give his full name because of fear he could be targeted for arrest. 

“The election was stolen, Bolsonaro is the elected president of our country.”

Nedi, a retired army parachutist who is also worried about repercussions, says he knew Bolsonaro personally from the time they both served in uniform. 

“It’s obvious that he’s an upright person and was an excellent president,” he adds. 

“So we are here to support him and to do all we can for him to return to power.”

Some observers in Brazil, while agreeing that Bolsonaro should be prosecuted, are uncomfortable about aspects of the supreme court’s actions.

While much of the evidence against Bolsonaro appears solid, the connection with the Brasília riots appears “very weak”, says Davi Tangerino, professor of criminal law at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

Unusually, compared with other countries, in Brazil, top justices can initiate and run their own criminal investigations if they believe there is a threat to the institution itself.

De Moraes’s involvement has led to accusations of a conflict of interest because he was a target of the alleged plot. 

Bolsonaro says the judge is biased in favour of Lula and driven by a personal ambition to become president himself.

Accusations of bias have been fuelled by the fact that Lula’s former personal lawyer Cristiano Zanin and his former justice minister Flávio Dino are also part of the supreme court panel hearing the case. 

“We want a justice system that is impartial,” says Nikolas Ferreira, a leading Bolsonarista congressman. 

“They cannot at the same time be the victim and judges of the case . . . How can you say this is impartial justice?”

Hairdresser Débora Rodrigues faces a possible 14-year prison term for scrawling graffiti on a statue outside the supreme court during the unrest on January 8 2023 © Gabriela Biló/Folhapress

De Moraes, left, who requested the sentence for Rodrigues and will hear the case against Bolsonaro, pictured in September with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and supreme court president Luís Roberto Barroso, right © Charles Sholl/BPP/Reuters

It is not the first time the court has come under fire. 

“The supreme court, in the figure of Alexandre de Moraes, has received criticism on many occasions at an institutional level from important members of congress or the press,” says Lucas de Aragão, of political risk consultancy Arko Advice.

He cites the case of Débora Rodrigues, a hairdresser for whom de Moraes requested a 14-year jail sentence because she had scrawled graffiti on a statue outside the supreme court building during the Brasília insurrection. 

He also noted that the case against Bolsonaro will be heard by a five-judge panel rather than the full 11-member court.

The public image of Brazil’s supreme court has been hurt by its contentious decisions, including Lula’s conviction and subsequent annulment, the overturning of other high-profile corruption convictions and now the Bolsonaro case. Forty-three per cent of respondents described the court’s performance as bad or awful in a survey by Poder Data in December, with only 12 per cent praising it as good or very good.

“The supreme court has in recent years lost credibility in the eyes of the population,” says lawyer Sérgio Rosenthal, a former president of the São Paulo lawyers’ association and former head of the Brazilian Institute of Criminal Sciences. 

“The justices speak excessively in public outside of [judicial] procedures, generating a popular backlash that harms the institution.”

The court rejects any suggestion of bias or irregularity, saying it has followed legal and constitutional procedures to the letter. 

Prosecutors insist that their case is robust.

“The narrative that the Brazilian supreme court has ever had an authoritarian or censorious stance does not correspond to the real facts or the truth,” court president Luís Roberto Barroso tells the FT.

The court case against Bolsonaro will cast a long shadow over next year’s Brazilian presidential and congressional elections.

As with Lula in 2018, a popular former president is likely to be imprisoned and unable to run, enraging his supporters who claim a miscarriage of justice and a political stitch-up.

Jair Bolsonaro — pictured with a signed copy of Donald Trump’s book of letters he’s received from celebrities and politicians — enjoys close ties with the US president © Arthur Menescal/FT

During an interview with the FT in March, Bolsonaro had on the table a list of what he said were people convicted for their part in the January 8 2023 riots and the length of their sentences © Arthur Menescal/FT

But this time Brazil’s internal political battles may have international ramifications, given the close links between the Bolsonaro and Trump camps and the vigorous lobbying being conducted by Eduardo in Washington.

Trump has so far not made major policy moves on Brazil but “if he thinks more about Brazil, it will be through the prism of the Bolsonaristas”, says one senior Brazilian diplomat. 

“He will assimilate their reading of the situation.”

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has criticised Lula as an “extreme left” leader who has made alliances with communist China. 

He chided Brazil last year for “authoritarian” actions against Elon Musk when de Moraes forced the billionaire businessman to back down after briefly blocking his social media site X in Brazil.

“The verdict will not be accepted [by the public],” Garman says of the case against Bolsonaro. 

“There has been an unfortunate politicisation of the court.”

But as the supreme court prepares to put the former president on trial, its president Barroso is unrepentant: “We were one of the rare cases in the world in which a court, with the support of civil society, the press and a large part of the political class, managed to prevent a democratic rupture.”