Former president Jair Bolsonaro does not renounce actively participating in Brazilian politics although he is disqualified from running for elections until 2030, he is not a deputy and he is being investigated for instigating a coup against his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The retired far-right military man led a rally this Sunday on the iconic Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro, in which, according to the local press, he praised tycoon Elon Musk as a great symbol of freedom of expression, he defended an amnesty for those involved in the assault on the headquarters of the three powers in Brasilia, in January 2023, and has attacked the Supreme Court judge who is directing most of the investigations against him, Alexandre de Moraes.
Bolsonaro, wearing a yellow shirt from the soccer team, has harangued his people on the country's most famous seafront promenade in Brazilian style, from the roof of an open bus. He was in Rio, where one of his sons is a councilor and the city that for the last 30 years has been his main source of votes, especially among members of the security forces and the troops of the Armed Forces. . In any case, the influx has been about 32,000 people, five times less than the followers he gathered in February in São Paulo to proclaim his innocence shortly after the police announced that they were investigating him for coup plotting.
The previous president has insisted on his thesis that the violent acts in Brasilia a week after Lula's inauguration were mere vandalism, not an attempt to break the constitutional order instigated by himself and some of the generals who accompanied him. as ministers during their mandate. “No one tried to take power in Brasilia using weapons. Those people had the green and yellow flag [la enseña de Brasil] on their back and many had a Bible under their arm,” the former president recalled.
The Police and the Supreme Court judges maintain, however, that the ultimate goal of the protesters who attacked the Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court was to sow chaos so that the military would intervene and Lula would be removed from power.
Bolsonaro has demanded, during the rally in Rio, that the judges release the hundreds of those prosecuted for the assault on January 8 in Brasilia: “They do not want to condemn a huge number of people because some made the mistake of invading and vandalizing properties , as if they were terrorists, as if they were coup plotters.”
Antonio Lacerda (EFE)
Bolsonaro has attacked Lula, Judge Moraes and has praised Musk, owner of democracy although criticism for its excesses also intensifies. “They have brought the biggest thief in the history of Brazil back to the crime scene [en referencia a la victoria electoral de Lula]. A defender of dictatorships. What they want is a dictatorship, with social control of the media,” Bolsonaro proclaimed.
The former president has continued in this line of praising Musk. “Now they accuse the richest man in the world, owner of a platform whose objective is to make the entire world free, which is X, our old Twitter. He is a man who preserves freedom for all of us, who had the courage to show with all the evidence where our democracy was headed.” The American businessman, who does not hide his political sympathy for leaders like Trump or Bolsonaro, has publicly accused Brazilian judge Moraes of being a first-rate censor and has threatened to violate his judicial decisions, something that Bolsonaro already did and that was one of the reasons that led to his political disqualification for the next six years.
The other main protagonist of the rally was his wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, who as the judicial problems for her husband multiplied, has gained prominence in the public sphere. Mrs. Bolsonaro, an evangelical and good speaker, has made a speech with countless biblical and religious references in general that she has started with a call to make “a feminine, not a feminist, politics.”
The judges who accuse Bolsonaro of plotting a coup d'état confiscated his passport and have prohibited him from communicating with the rest of the suspects, so that at the Copacabana rally he had to avoid meeting two of the participants in the political event. , who was his Minister of Defense and candidate for the vice presidency, retired general Walter Braga Netto, and with the president of his party, Valdemar Costa Neto.
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