SAO PAULO – Police indicted Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 others for allegedly attempting a coup to keep the right-wing leader in office after his defeat in the 2022 election. Already barred from running again in 2026 for a different case, he could now land in jail and see his influence further diminished.
Brazil's federal police said the sealed findings in Thursday's indictment 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.
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Gonet is already under pressure from his legal peers to move forward with the various investigations related to the ex-president, local media have reported. And politicians say if Bolsonaro does stand trial at the Supreme Court there will be a race among his allies and rivals to seize his influence with voters.
“Bolsonaro is no longer the sole leader of the right-wing. He is coming out of mayoral elections in which most of his candidates lost. All these probes don't help him at all,” said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at the Insper university in Sao Paulo.
Melo added that “the governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas, the radical candidate for Sao Paulo mayorship Pablo Marcal, the governor of Goias state, Ronaldo Caiado ... There are politicians lining up to court Bolsonaro voters.”
Bolsonaro told the website Metropoles that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the indictment, 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 indicted “to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news.”
Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides also were indicted, 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 adviser, Gen. Augusto Heleno.
Other investigations led to indictments for Bolsonaro's alleged roles in smuggling diamond jewelry into Brazil without properly declaring them and in directing a subordinate to falsify his and others’ COVID-19 vaccination statuses. Bolsonaro has denied any involvement in either.
Another probe 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 swirling legal threats.
Creomar de Souza, a political analyst of Dharma Political Risk and Strategy, said the indictment is “obviously bad” for Bolsonaro, but added the right-wing leader could still continue his bid to run again sooner than he is currently allowed to. He is barred from running in the 2026 elections.
"The idea of due legal course is a struggling one in the political arena these days. This could give those targeted a chance to portray themselves as being persecuted," de Souza told the AP. “We can't rule out that the tension from indictments like this might well favor Bolsonaro to some extent.”
An indictment over the alleged coup attempt means the investigation has gathered evidence of "a crime and its author,” said Eloísa Machado de Almeida, a law professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo. She said she believed there was enough legal grounds for the prosecutor-general to file charges.
Bolsonaro's allies in Congress have been negotiating a bill to pardon individuals who stormed the Brazilian capital and rioted 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 the former president 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 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 elections.
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.