Brazilian police formally accuse ex-President Bolsonaro of 2022 coup attempt

Jair Bolsonaro in a yellow soccer shirt speaks into a microphone

By Gabriela Sá Pessoa and Mauricio Savarese

Published Nov. 21, 2024 Updated Nov. 22, 2024 1:47 PM PT

SÃO PAULO — Brazil’s federal police have formally accused former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people for allegedly attempting a coup to keep the right-wing leader in office after his defeat in the 2022 elections. Already barred from running again in 2026 for a different case, he could now land in jail and see his influence further diminished.

Police said their sealed findings were being delivered to Brazil’s Supreme Court, which will refer them to Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet, who will decide whether to formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial, or toss the investigation.

Bolsonaro told the website Metropoles that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the accusation, reportedly about 700 pages long. But he said he would fight the case and dismissed the investigation as being the result of “creativity.”

The former president has denied all claims he tried to stay in office after his narrow electoral defeat in 2022 to leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has faced a series of legal threats since then.

Police said in a brief statement that the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were accused “to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news.”

Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides were on the list, including Gen. Walter Braga Netto, who was his running mate in the 2022 campaign; former army commander Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; Valdemar Costa Neto, the chairman of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party; and his veteran former advisor Gen. Augusto Heleno.

Other investigations focus on Bolosnaro’s alleged roles in smuggling diamond jewelry into Brazil without properly declaring it and in directing a subordinate to falsify his and others’ COVID-19 vaccination statuses. Bolsonaro has denied involvement in either.

Another investigation found that he had abused his authority to cast doubt on the country’s voting system, and judges barred him from running again until 2030.

Still, he has insisted that he will run in 2026, and many in his orbit were heartened by the recent U.S. election win of Donald Trump despite his own felony criminal conviction and indictments.

But the far-reaching investigations already have weakened Bolsonaro’s status as a leader of Brazil’s right wing, said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in São Paulo.

“Bolsonaro is already barred from running in the 2026 elections,” Melo told the Associated Press. “And if he is convicted, he could also be jailed by then. To avoid being behind bars, he will have to convince Supreme Court justices that he has nothing to do with a plot that involves dozens of his aides. That’s a very tall order,” Melo said.

A formal accusation of an attempted coup means the investigation has gathered indications of “a crime and its author,” said Eloísa Machado de Almeida, a law professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in São Paulo. She said she believed there were legal grounds for the prosecutor general to file charges.

Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress have been negotiating a bill to pardon rioters who stormed government buildings in the Brazilian capital on Jan. 8, 2023, in a failed attempt to keep the former president in power. Analysts have speculated that lawmakers want to extend the legislation to cover Bolsonaro himself.

However, efforts to push a broad amnesty bill may be “politically challenging” given recent attacks on the judiciary and details emerging in investigations, Machado said.

On Tuesday, Federal Police arrested four military officers and a Federal Police officer accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a means to overthrow the government following the 2022 election.

And last week, a man carried out a bomb attack in the capital, Brasilia. He attempted to enter the Supreme Court and threw explosives outside, killing himself.

Pessoa and Savarese write for the Associated Press.