Former Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro, 70, began serving his 27-year sentence on Tuesday for leading a coup attempt but not moving a meter from the cell where he is being held in Brasilia. The judge in the case decided, presumably taking into account his age and fragile state of health, to detain him at the police headquarters in Brasilia, where he was transferred on Saturday after trying to remove the electronic anklet that monitored his movements. The main leader of the Brazilian right is, therefore, detained in conditions similar to those granted in 2018 to the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and therefore avoids being interned in a maximum security prison or a military prison.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes did not respond to the defense’s request to allow him to serve his sentence under house arrest. The magistrate accuses him of attempting to escape last weekend. Since Saturday, Bolsonaro has been in a room of around 12 square meters in the Superintendency of the Federal Police in the capital. It has a bed, a table, television and air conditioning. This morning two of his children came to visit him and the day before his wife, who cooks the dishes the former president eats at home, went to visit him.
Even the generals convicted together with Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against Lula are already imprisoned, in their case in military facilities. They are the first high-ranking soldiers convicted and imprisoned in Brazil’s history, peppered with successful and unsuccessful uprisings. Another of the convicts, a police commissioner who directed the espionage and is a member of parliament, fled weeks ago to the United States, to Miami.
On the other hand, it is more common for a president to be imprisoned. Bolsonaro is the third after Lula, whose sentences were annulled, and Fernando Collor de Mello, who has been serving his sentence at home for a few months.
The Prosecutor’s Office argued that the plot hatched in 2022 by Bolsonaro to stay in power after losing the elections failed due to the opposition of two of the three members of the Armed Forces leadership.
(News in development).
