The former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) explained on Sunday the reasons that led him to manipulate, early Saturday morning, the electronic anklet that monitors his movements, an incident that raised suspicions that he was about to escape and for which the judge ordered to replace house arrest with preventive detention at the Brasilia police headquarters. The far right said during the custody hearing held this afternoon that he tried to break the device because, under the influence of drugs, he thought it was hiding a microphone. “The witness stated that he suffered from hallucinations about the presence of some type of listening device on the ankle monitor and that (for this reason) he attempted to open the lid,” reads the minutes of the hearing, quoted by the Brazilian press.
Bolsonaro denied in the hearing that he wanted to flee, as the judge claimed. The prisoner said that, due to the bad combination of drugs prescribed by several doctors, early on Saturday morning he had “a hallucination”, “a paranoia”, which made him believe that a microphone had been planted on him and for this reason he tried to open the device with a soldering iron.
The people who were with him in the house, his daughter, his older brother and a counselor, did not help him, he said. In a video recorded while an official inspects the damaged anklet, Bolsonaro says he did it “out of curiosity.”
Bolsonaro spent his first night in pre-trial detention after more than three months under house arrest, a measure decreed by Judge Moraes in August to prevent him from fleeing before the trial.
President Lula commented on Bolsonaro’s preventive detention in Johannesburg, where he participated in the G20. “Justice has decided and is decided. Everyone knows what it has done”, the president told the press, who insisted, as he systematically does, on respect for Bolsonaro’s right to the presumption of innocence.
The judge authorized Michelle Bolsonaro’s visit to her husband. The lawyers also requested permission for three of the political sons: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who called a vigil in front of the patriarch’s chalet which triggered the alarm and which, after his incarceration, gathered around a hundred people; Councilor Carlos, under investigation for organizing disinformation campaigns on social networks, and Councilor Jair Renan, accused of money laundering. They do not include the deputy Eduardo, accused of extortion at the highest court of the United States, where he has taken refuge for months, and Laura, 15 years old, the only one out of politics.
In ordering his transfer to Federal Police facilities, the judge mentioned the manipulation of the anklet and the vigil called this Saturday in front of his house as main indications that keeping the convicted coup plotter in his home represented a “high risk of flight”, according to Judge Alexandre de Moraes, of the Supreme Court, who is handling the case.
He also mentioned the proximity of the US embassy and the recent escape to Miami of another major prisoner. Last September, the former president and soldier was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup against his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In a few days, when the last appeal is resolved, he should start serving his sentence.
