Since at least 2020, The Brazilian Report warned readers about the threats to democracy posed by the former Jair Bolsonaro administration. Now, for the first time, the country’s Federal Police have shed light on the former president’s direct involvement in plotting a coup to overturn the 2022 election and stay in power.
Mr. Bolsonaro and key members of his defunct administration — including former cabinet members, active and retired high-ranking military officials, and the chair of Mr. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party — engaged in coordinated efforts to set the stage for an old-fashioned coup that, if successful, would have led to the jailing of perceived political enemies and the control of politics by military force.
Since leaving office, Mr. Bolsonaro has found himself embroiled in several investigations — that have led to police searching his home and the former president being subpoenaed and questioned by federal marshals on several occasions.
These investigations range from producing fake vaccination records and misappropriating government property, to maintaining a “parallel” intelligence service during his presidential term (2019-2022) and inciting a failed insurrection.
Now, a court order unsealed Thursday ties together several threads of various putschist initiatives that had previously been uncovered piecemeal.
The feds mapped efforts led by Mr. Bolsonaro to overthrow democracy after the 2022 election, when he lost re-election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a razor-thin margin.
Investigators identified six groups that made up the criminal enterprise by flooding public discourse with false allegations to discredit Brazil’s electronic voting system, recruiting military officials to support a coup, drafting legal arguments that would support their claims, inciting supporters to riot, and spying on judges and political opponents.
This putschist campaign culminated in the riots of January 8, 2023, when hordes of Bolsonaro supporters stormed and ransacked government buildings — desperately trying to create the conditions for a state of emergency that they believed would allow the military to restore Mr. Bolsonaro to power.
While investigating who instigated, organized, and financed the riots, Brazil’s Federal Police found a draft of a putschist decree in the home of Anderson Torres, who served as Mr. Bolsonaro’s justice minister.
Although unconstitutional, the document was apparently drafted to give Mr. Bolsonaro the power to overturn the 2022 presidential election. The former president has publicly denied any knowledge of the draft, saying last year that coups are made with “rifles, not paper.”
The new findings show that another version of that decree was given to Mr. Bolsonaro by his former international adviser, Filipe Martins, and discussed at the presidential residence in late 2022, after the election and before Lula took...
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