On the second Sunday of 2023, the Supreme Court of Brazil, a beautiful glass building, was invaded and looted by a violent mob of Bolsonaro supporters who, raising the national flag, also took over the Congress and the Presidency, in Brasilia, in the most serious attack against Brazilian democracy since the dictatorship. The highest court met this Wednesday with the solemnity of important occasions to hold the first trial against the coup plotters. They started with four defendants arrested red-handed on January 8, part of the shock troops. The prosecution accuses them of attempted coup d’état against the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who that day had been in power for a week. “They tried to depose a legitimately elected Government with the pretext of electoral fraud,” recalled the number two of the Attorney General’s Office, Carlos Federico Santos, in his statement. The four defendants face sentences totaling 30 years in prison and compensation for moral damages of 100 million reais (19 million euros).
Some 1,300 more people are charged in this mega case that is in the hands of the Supreme Court and is advancing at enormous speed. In a country that is very respectful towards the accused, almost 130 people have been imprisoned for eight months for an attack whose images went around the world.
The Prosecutor’s Office and the investigating judge of the case, Alexandre de Moraes, have made it clear that they intend to impose exemplary sentences on the most violent among the mob with a view to deterring anyone who dares to emulate the Bolsonaristas who imitated the Trumpists. “We want to show the world that Brazil is no longer a banana republic, that it is a serious rule of law, that the coups d’état are a closed page in our history,” said the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office after warning that “the Fake news continues to circulate and we have to clarify [lo ocurrido] once and for all”.
The defendants in this first trial (a computer scientist who was a civil servant, a forestry engineer and two deliverymen) were not in the room. They are between 24 and 52 years old and come from the cities of São Paulo and Paraná. The crimes they are accused of, like hundreds of those accused, are violent abolition of the rule of law, coup d’état, armed criminal association and damage to property. Three of them have followed him by videoconference from prison; The first asked to be present at the trial but was not authorized. The fourth is on parole.
Former President Bolsonaro, who was in the US that day, is being investigated as an instigator. That Sunday culminated a systematic campaign by Bolsonarism to delegitimize institutions, question the electoral process and sow doubts about Lula’s victory.
During the trial, the videos that the accused recorded that day were shown, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “federal military intervention” and announcing that he would defecate in Congress. He had arrived there from São Paulo by bus with a group called patriots. During the hearing, other images of the assault were also shown, including some recorded in that same room on the day in question, when a crowd of Bolsonar supporters destroyed the place where the robes have the last word on justice in Brazil. The Supreme Court is the building that was most viciously attacked, where the repairs have cost the most.
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The first day was not enough to conclude even the trial of the first accused. The session has been marked by the dialectical hand-to-hand combat between Judge Moraes and Aécio’s defense lawyer Lucio Costa Pereira, 51 years old. From the rostrum, the lawyer has proclaimed that this “is a political trial” and “the court is illegitimate.” And, perfectly aware that the hearing is broadcast live on television, he has stressed that his client has been in prison for eight months without being able to see his wife and children because prison rules require a vaccination card and they have decided not to. get immunized. “I consider it psychological torture,” he said.
Moraes has used irony to counter the story that the accused was going in peace to defend his freedom. “We are talking about coup plotters,” the judge stressed. “Because in that denialist story, it seems that on January 8th we had a crowd in the park on a Sunday that suddenly said: ‘Hey, let’s invade a little!’” Famous for the superpowers that have been granted to him in the name of defending democracy and for his sheriff’s methods, Moraes wants to make sure to neutralize the risk that Brazilian democracy will suffer a new attack.
As the deliberations of the highest court are also public, the vote of the first two justices has made it clear that there is no unanimity in the court on the harshness of the sentence. Moraes asks for 17 years for the first, while one of his colleagues requests 2.5 years because he only punishes him for damaging assets and absolves him of coup crimes. The session continues this Thursday with the remaining votes.
The trials for the antidemocratic acts have begun with four accused of carrying them out. Ordinary citizens who, intoxicated by an overdose of falsehoods, many of them vigorously agitated by the far-right Jair Bolsonaro from the Presidency. The idea is that, later on, those who contributed to the riot sit in the dock, but without dirtying their hands: the intellectual authors, the financiers and the authorities who stepped down from their duties. Recently, the entire leadership of the military police in Brasilia was arrested and imprisoned. And his immediate boss, Anderson Torres, who was Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister, is on parole.
Once Lula’s triumph was made official on October 30, thousands of followers of the defeated ultra president camped in front of barracks throughout Brazil demanding that the military prevent a third term for Lula. Already in January, assailants arrived at the Three Powers Square in Brasilia on foot, escorted by uniformed men, from the Army Headquarters.
During the tense months of the electoral campaign, the elections and the failed uprising, Judge Alexandre de Morares, the member of the Supreme Court who presided over the Electoral Court, enjoyed enormous powers to shortcut the most extreme Bolsonarism in the name of defense of democracy. He is the instructor of the mega-cause against the coup plotters. His career is reminiscent of that of another judge, Sergio Moro, instructor of the Lava Jato anti-corruption case, who was considered the savior of the country before falling from grace; He now takes refuge in a Senate seat.
Judge Moraes and the Prosecutor’s Office have tried to refute the defenses, who maintain that the accusation documents do not identify what exactly each of the hundreds of people involved did. “It was a mass crime. The important thing is not to know who broke a window, a door or a work of art, but the result of those mass acts,” said the prosecutor.
In the room, many seats in the audience were empty despite the fact that several of the judges described the occasion as historic. Among the audience, there were lawyers for other of the hundreds of defendants to personally see how the first hearing goes, because they suspect it will lead the way, and law students.
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