Brazil’s ultra-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, recently banned by a Brazilian elections court from running for elected office until 2030, “still faces other investigations that could put him behind bars” even if election-court matter did not result in jail time, Mexico City-based La Jornada reported.
One possible reason that Bolsonaro, widely known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” could end up behind bars is that he is alleged to have engaged in “criminal efforts to fake Covid-19 vaccination records in order to travel to the U.S.,” the Guardian reported in early May, when Brazilian federal police searched Bolsonaro’s mansion and arrested one of his closest aides and two of his security guards. The Guardian added:
Bolsonaro is facing an assortment of investigations into suspected crimes and transgressions and no longer enjoys immunity from prosecution having left power at the end of last year.
Among Bolsonaro’s alleged illegal acts – in addition to the alleged involvement of him and some members of his inner circle in the January 8 attack on the Brazilian capitol by his yellow sports jersey-clad supporters and his alleged Covid-vaccination fraud – are his reported failure to take even the most basic preventative steps during the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in the deaths of 700,000 Brazilians. That death toll has been characterized in Brazil as a “veritable genocide.” Bolsonaro also is alleged to have been involved in financial mischief and to have been linked to the murder of a Rio de Janeiro council member in 2018. The online Brazilian publication that detailed such reported wrongdoing calls for his “immediate” detention.
To be fair, just as with Trump, the idea that Bolsonaro may face prison is not exactly new. An August 2022 New York Times opinion column ticks off several instances of reported Bolsonaro-related criminality, including his alleged “direct and relevant role” in promoting disinformation and his and two of his sons’ allegedly having taken salaries of ghost employees while holding government positions, along with, as reported elsewhere,
his family’s alleged links to the the heavily armed and notoriously violent paramilitary gangs that control large swaths of Rio de Janeiro.
At the time the NY Times column was penned, the then-recent sentencing to 10 years in prison of Jeanine Áñez — a former television “presenter” and right-wing Christian fundamentalist who, “brandishing a giant bible,” ascended to the presidency of Bolivia in 2019 via a deadly coup d’etat — hung “heavy in the air.” (According to Wikipedia, Bolsonaro offered Áñez political asylum shortly after she was sentenced.)
A Spanish columnist yesterday advocated that Bolsonoro should be imprisoned, and it was reported in Brazil that “evangelical digital influencer” Irmã Mônica at a July 1 show in Brasilia said she was “praying for prison for Jair Bolsonaro and Michelle. Let’s be done with that gang, amen?”
Do we in the U.S. have a prayer of seeing Trump spend serious time in prison for his many, widely publicized acts of wrongdoing?
As reported on DK here and here, in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s plodding response to the January 6, 2021 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, it took barely half a year after Bolsonaro’s supporters attacked the seat of power in Brasilia for the nation’s Superior Electoral Court, or TSE in its Portuguese-language initials, to conclude that Bolsonaro had abused his power by casting unfounded doubts on the nation’s electronic voting system and to ban him from running for elected office until 2030, effectively destroying his further presidential ambitions. (My June 30 report misnamed the court. The court that barred Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030, the TSE, is the highest election-related court in Brazil.)
Also in contrast to the J6 response, Brazilian leaders and news outlets in Latin America, a region that has experienced its fair share of U.S.-backed coup plots, did not hesitate to refer to those involved in the January 8, 2023 attack as terrorists, coup-plotters and criminals.
After the January 8 attack, Bolsonaro scampered off to Florida, where he stayed for three months. In early February Time reported on Bolsonaro’s “bizarre new life as a Florida Man,” describing the man who days earlier had been the leader of the world’s fifth largest country (by territory) and 10th largest economy as
wandering around Florida supermarkets, eating fried chicken alone at fast-food restaurants, and holding court for supporters from the driveway of a modest home owned by a former ultimate-fighting champion in a gated community south of Orlando.