Brazilian police have officially charged Bolsonaro with an attempted coup. What’s next?

SAO PAULO (AP) – Police have officially charged of Brazil the former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other coup attempts to keep the right-wing leader in office after his electoral defeat in 2022. Their allegations threaten to torpedo Bolsonaro’s hopes of returning to politics.

Brazil’s Supreme Court said on Friday that the police findings had been submitted to Judge Alexandre de Moraes, who will forward them to Attorney General Paulo Gonet next week. He will decide whether to formally charge Bolsonaro or cancel the investigation.

Bolsonaro told the Metropoles news website on Thursday that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the roughly 700-page police report, but that he would fight the case. He dismissed the inquiry as a result of “creativity”.

The former president denies trying to stay in office after his narrow electoral defeat in 2022, to the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has since faced a series of legal threats.

The fact that police are seeking formal charges indicates that the investigation has found evidence of “a crime and its perpetrator” and there are likely legal grounds for the attorney general to file charges, said Eloísa Machado de Almeida, a law professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. , a university in Sao Paulo.

On Friday, the lawyer for Bolsonaro’s former right-hand man, Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, said in a live television interview that his client had informed the Supreme Court that Bolsonaro was aware of the coup plot.

“The president at the time knew everything. In fact, he led this organization,” said Cid’s lawyer, Cezar Bitencourt, for the GloboNews network. A few minutes later, Bitencourt partially retracted his statement. “I didn’t say that Bolsonaro knew everything. “Everything” is a lot. It was obvious that he was aware of some things.”

The police said the Supreme Court had agreed to release all 37 names from the police report “to avoid the spread of incorrect news”.

Among them are dozens of former and current Bolsonaro advisers, including: General Walter Braga Netto, who was his candidate in the 2022 campaign; former army commander General Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; Valdemar Costa Neto, president of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party; and his former veteran adviser, General Augusto Heleno.

Braga Netto’s lawyers said they would wait to officially receive the police documents before making any comments. The retired general shared his statement on X late Thursday.

Bolsonaro is already separately accused of smuggling diamond jewelry in Brazil and guided Lt. Col. Cid to falsify his and others’ COVID-19 vaccination status. Bolsonaro denied these accusations.

Another probe found him abused his authority questioning Brazil’s electoral system, and judges at the first electoral court barred him from running again until 2030.

Still, he insists he will run in 2026, and many in his orbit were encouraged by President-elect Donald Trump’s recent election victory, despite his legal problems.

Local media are reporting that Gonet is already under pressure to move forward with more investigations into the former president, and politicians say that if Bolsonaro, 69, goes on trial, his allies and rivals will scramble to and take influence over voters.

“Bolsonaro is no longer the only leader of the right. He is coming off a mayoral election in which most of his candidates lost. All these probes are not helping him at all,” said Carlos Melo, a professor of political science at Insper, a university in Sao Paulo.

“The governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, the radical candidate for mayor of Sao Paulo, Pablo Marçal, the governor of the state of Goias, Ronaldo Caiado… There are politicians lining up to judge Bolsonaro’s voters,” Melo said.

Creomar de Souza, a political analyst at Dharma Political Risk and Strategy, said the official charge is “obviously bad” for Bolsonaro, but it may not stop him if he decides to run for office again.

“This could give those targeted a chance to come forward as being persecuted,” de Souza said, adding that it could benefit them.

Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress negotiated a bill to pardon the people who stormed the Brazilian capital and rioted on January 8, 2023, in an attempt to keep the former president in power. Analysts have speculated that lawmakers want to expand the legislation to cover the former president himself.

However, efforts to advance a comprehensive amnesty bill would be “politically challenging” in light of the new allegations against Bolsonaro and others, Machado said.

On Tuesday, federal police arrested four soldiers and a federal police officer, accused of conspiracy to assassinate Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes in an effort to topple the government after the 2022 elections.

Last week, a man tried to enter the Supreme Court in the capital Brasilia with explosives, but was blocked by guards. He threw the explosives outside the buildingkilling himself.