RIO DE JANEIRO (news agencies) — Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro on Wednesday dismissed as vague accusations that he orchestrated an attempted coup to stay in office despite his 2022 election defeat and said the charges were the result of an authoritarian regime manufacturing internal enemies.
Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet on Tuesday charged Bolsonaro with devising a multi-pronged scheme to remain in power despite his loss to current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, including a alleged plan to poison Lula and shoot dead Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a foe of the former president.
Lula on Wednesday said the current stage was “only the indictment” and said Bolsonaro and the other 33 people facing charges of plotting a coup would have every right to defend themselves.
Bolsonaro took to X and Instagram say that “the trick of accusing democratic opposition leaders of plotting coups is not something new.”
“Every authoritarian regime, in its lust for power, needs to manufacture internal enemies to justify persecution, censorship and arbitrary arrests,” Bolsonaro said. He compared his legal woes with problems faced by opposition leaders in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, all led by left-leaning leaders.
“The playbook is familiar: they fabricate vague accusations, claim to be concerned about democracy or sovereignty, and persecute opponents, silence dissenting voices and concentrate power,” Bolsonaro said.
The charges filed against Bolsonaro are based on a Federal Police investigation, concluded in November. In that 884-page report, police described a multi-step scheme, substantiated by evidence and testimony, to keep Bolsonaro in power.
The plan included systematically sowing distrust of the electoral system among the populace, drafting a decree to give the plot a veneer of legal basis, pressuring top military brass to go along with the plan, and inciting a riot in the capital.
Top military personnel’s refusal to endorse the coup was essential in its failure, police say.
The prosecutor’s report is important “to distinguish between individual conduct and that of the Armed Forces,” Brazil ’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement Wednesday, adding that Minister José Mucio Monteiro believes the charges are another step towards accountability.
Bolsonaro’s reaction to the accusations is “a strategy that is part of the political game” that attempts to discredit the report by describing it as political persecution, said Antônio José Teixeira Martins, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University. “But the fact is that it is an indictment very much based on facts and legal aspects, dealt with in detail.”
Responding to journalists’ questions about Tuesday’s charges, Lula on Wednesday said that everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
“If they prove that they did not attempt a coup, and if they prove that they did not attempt to kill the president, the vice president and the president of the Supreme Electoral Court, they will be free,” Lula said. “If when judges trial they come to the conclusion that they are guilty, they will have to pay for the crime they committed.”
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