Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – Brazilian police on Thursday called for the indictment of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro over a 2022 “coup” plot to prevent current leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office. A police statement said its investigators concluded that Bolsonaro and 36 others planned the “violent overthrow of the democratic state.”
“Federal police concluded on Thursday the investigation into the existence of a criminal organization that acted in a coordinated way in 2002 in an attempt to maintain the then-president in power,” the statement said. “The final report has been sent to the Supreme Court with the request that 37 individuals be indicted for the crimes of the violent overthrow of the democratic state, coup d’etat and criminal organization,” it added.
It is up to Brazil’s attorney general to decide whether the allegations are substantiated enough to warrant criminal charges being laid. Charges for attempting a coup carry sentences of up to 12 years in prison. The alleged plot was hatched in the final months of Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 presidency. Lula, a left-winger who was previously president between 2003 and 2010, won the October 2022 elections to succeed the far-right Bolsonaro, who is an admirer of US President-elect Donald Trump.
The police statement did not draw a direct link between the alleged plot and an insurrection that took place in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed the capital’s presidential palace, the Congress building, and the Supreme Court. Investigations continue into that upheaval, which echoed scenes from the United States two years earlier, when Trump supporters protesting President Joe Biden’s election win attacked the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.
The list of alleged co-conspirators in the Bolsonaro case included the names of three elite soldiers and a police officer arrested on Tuesday for allegedly plotting to assassinate Lula and a Supreme Court judge, in a separately announced case. Bolsonaro is the target of several investigations, but the one announced on Thursday is the most dramatic in political terms for him. He says he is innocent and the victim of “persecution.”
© 2024 AFP
