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The judges in the Superior Court of Brazil are debating if former President Jair Bolsonaro should be tried for allegedly trying to organize a coup against the current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
A panel of five members of the Supreme Court will weigh evidence presented by the Chief Prosecutor, who accuses Bolsonaro of leading a plot to prevent his rival Lula from assuming the position after the latter won the 2022 elections.
Bolsonaro, 70, says he is the victim of “political persecution” aimed at preventing him from running again for president in 2026.
The judges are expected to decide before the end of Wednesday if there is enough evidence to make the case judged.
Bolsonaro is already prohibited from running for a public office until 2030 For falsely stating that the Brazilian voting system was vulnerable to fraud, but has declared its intention to fight that prohibition so that it can run for a second term in 2026.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and admirer of US President Donald Trump, ruled Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022.
He left for little a runoff of presidential elections in October 2022 against his leftist rival, Lula.
Bolsonaro never publicly recognized his defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camping outside the Army Barracks in an attempt to convince the military to prevent Lula from being sworn as president as scheduled on January 1, 2023.
A week after the inauguration of Lula, on January 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters assaulted government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, in what federal investigators say was an attempt at the coup d’etat.
Parts of the buildings were looted and the police arrested 1,500 people.
Bolsonaro was in the United States at that time and has always denied the links with the uproar.
A Federal Police investigation into the riots and events prior to them was launched.
The researchers said they had found evidence that there was “a criminal organization” that had “acted in a coordinated way” to keep the then president Bolsonaro in power.
His 884 pages report, which was revealed in November 2024, claimed that “the then President Jair Messias Bolsonaro planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organization with the aim of launching a coup d’etat and eliminating the democratic government of the law.”
Brazil Attorney General Paulo Gonet went further in his report published last monthin which he accused Bolsonaro of not only being aware, but of leading the criminal organization that, according to him, sought to overthrow Lula.
According to Gonet’s report, the alleged plot included a plan to poison Lula and shoot Alexandre de Moraes, one of the five judges of the Supreme Court now in charge of deciding whether the case should proceed to trial.
The panel of five members will now have to determine if there is enough evidence to put Bolsonaro and seven others accused of being their conspirators in trial.
Bolsonaro has denied having acted all the time and on Monday he maintained that he was innocent.
Speaking in a radio podcast, the former president said that “he was not worried about the accusations” and that he had “good lawyers” that represented him.
