Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in Davos (Switzerland) EFE
Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office just Friday afternoon asked the Supreme Court to include former President Jair Bolsonaro in the probe into the attack on the Three Powers perpetrated by thousands of his radical supporters last Sunday. The petition is based on the fact that the ultra-right published a video on social networks this week, which he deleted shortly afterwards. The clip showed a Bolsonaro prosecutor questioning the outcome of the last election, which Bolsonaro lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president, for 13 days. Prosecutors note that although the disclosure occurred after the vandalism files, “the existence of a conclusive link between the ‘facts contained in the video’ and the broader subject matter of this investigation is not disputed . For this reason, the worldwide investigation of the events carried out before and after January 8, 2023 is justified by the aforementioned,” said number two of the organization Carlos Frederico Santos in his decision.
The far-right ex-president, who is in the United States, lost his immunity on January 1st. This will tighten the judicial fence around the president, who left Brazil two days before the handover ceremony to Florida. He was there when thousands of his supporters, wrongly believing that the courts and electoral authorities had stolen their leader’s election, forcibly entered the offices of the Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court. Many of them camped outside army barracks across the country for two months, urging the military to intervene to prevent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from running for the mandate given by voters in the elections.
Investigations into what happened in the Plaza de los Tres Poderes have already led more than 1,200 people to prison. Supreme Court Justice presiding over the trial, Alexandre de Moraes, has ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who was Bolsonaro’s justice minister and changed his position to minister of public safety for the federal district with the end of his mandate. Therefore, he was the political chief of the police forces accused of collusion with the putschists. Torres is also in Florida, and Brazilian police found a draft decree at his home on Thursday for Bolsonaro to intervene before the Supreme Electoral Court to “correct the outcome of the elections held in October.”
Santos of the Attorney General’s Office is also asking the Supreme Court to immediately order Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to post the video on Wednesday 11th on the former President’s profile on the social network Facebook and to delete it. By the way, Bolsonaro continues to present himself as the President of Brazil on his social networks, although his term ended on New Year’s Day, when Lula took office.
The Brazilian judiciary is investigating Sunday’s serious events in various ways. They look for the material perpetrators as well as for the intellectual authors and financiers. Indeed, a majority of the thousands of people who came to Brasilia to take part in the march that led to the attempted coup came from other states, particularly from São Paulo, Paraná and Minas Gerais.
[Información en desarrollo. Habrá actualización en breve]
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe to
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.