Brazil’s hard-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, facing coup charges that could land him in jail, has called for “support from abroad” to rescue his country from what he claims is a slide towards a Venezuelan-style leftist dictatorship.
The former army captain, accused by prosecutors of conspiring to remain in power after losing re-election in 2022, told the Financial Times that “American help is very welcome” and expressed his thanks to President Donald Trump for closing USAID, which he said had “interfered” in Latin America’s most populous democracy.
Brazil’s supreme court will decide this week whether to put Bolsonaro on trial. He stands accused of a plot involving senior military figures that allegedly included plans to assassinate the election’s winner, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Proceedings could open within a couple of weeks and lead to a verdict before the end of the year.
“We have a problem of dictatorship, a real dictatorship,” Bolsonaro said in a wide-ranging interview in the offices of his Liberal party in Brasília. “Brazil doesn’t have a way out of this situation on its own. It needs support from abroad.”
The 70-year-old, who is still the pre-eminent conservative leader in Brazil, refused to say what he wanted Trump to do. But his congressman son Eduardo claimed in an FT interview last month that Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the investigation into the coup plot, met conditions for US sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, originally designed to punish Russian human rights abusers.
The former president singled out de Moraes for particular criticism, alleging the judge “was in a hurry to find me guilty”. “He already has the sentence for me, 28 years in prison.” But he added: “I don’t think they want me in jail, they want me dead. That’s what’s at stake in Brazil.”
Hundreds of people have been convicted and some given long prison sentences for involvement in the riots of January 8 2023, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters ransacked government buildings in Brasília, claiming that the presidential election had been rigged.
The non-profit Freedom House has marked no change on the level of democratic freedoms in Brazil since Lula took office in 2023.
With his father’s legal woes worsening, Eduardo has spent much of this year in Washington lobbying US members of Congress and the Trump administration over what the Bolsonaros call threats to freedom of speech in Brazil, including court orders against X and a recent ban of Rumble, a video-sharing platform that hosts Trump’s Truth Social network.
De Moraes, who has long been a hate figure among Brazilian conservatives, is part of a five-judge panel that will decide whether the supreme court puts Bolsonaro on trial over the coup plot allegations.
Prosecutors say the 2023 riot was the last gasp of a coup plot and formally charged Bolsonaro and 33 others last month in a 272-page indictment. One of the accusations was that the plotters planned to poison Lula and shoot de Moraes dead.
Bolsonaro dismissed the charges as “ridiculous”. His supporters describe the rioters as political prisoners and are calling for an amnesty, which the right-winger’s opponents argue could benefit the ex-president.
Bolsonaro has been banned from competing in elections until 2030 because of claims he made to ambassadors at a televised meeting in 2022 that Brazil’s electronic voting machines were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.
“Me not being on the ballot is a negation of democracy,” Bolsonaro said. “It’s the end of democracy.”
He compared his situation to that of the opposition in Venezuela, whose top leader was banned by revolutionary socialist President Nicolás Maduro from running in elections last year.
“The only banner Lula has is the false banner of defending democracy,” he said. “He’s the same person who rolled out the red carpet for Maduro” in Brasília in 2023.
With Bolsonaro facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in jail, Eduardo and his allies are circulating a dossier among Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers to rally them against the Brazilian supreme court, according to a person with knowledge of the campaign.
The 1,000-page dossier, first reported by the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, attempts to outline actions allegedly taken by de Moraes against US citizens such as Elon Musk and former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, as well as US-based Brazilians. Eduardo last week announced he was taking a leave of absence from his congressional duties and might request political asylum in the US.
The aim of the lobbying is to show that Brazil’s top court has violated the first amendment freedom of speech guarantees by targeting people on US soil, therefore warranting sanctions such as visa bans and asset freezes.
De Moraes has been placed at the centre of the Washington campaign. The shaven-headed judge briefly blocked X in Brazil in 2024 over its failure to appoint a legal representative in Brazil before its owner Musk backed down.
Bolsonaro said de Moraes had also tilted the playing field against him in a previous role as head of Brazil’s top election court during the 2022 election campaign by banning some of his campaign adverts and issuing injunctions against supporters. “There was interference in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in favour of Lula,” he said.
De Moraes has justified his moves against X and other sites by saying democracy is at risk unless social media platforms are regulated. The supreme court rejected an attempt by Bolsonaro’s lawyers to have de Moraes removed from the coup case on impartiality grounds.
There are signs that the Trump administration is taking notice of the Bolsonaro family’s campaign. The state department said last month that “blocking access to information” or imposing fines on US companies is “incompatible with freedom of expression”, adding that “respect for sovereignty is a two-way street with all US partners, including Brazil”.
The post prompted Brazil’s foreign ministry to accuse the state department of “distorting the meaning” of Brazilian supreme court decisions.
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