Bolsonaro convicted of plotting Brazil coup

A majority of Brazil's supreme court judges have voted to convict the country's former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a military coup, leaving the far-right populist facing a decades-long sentence for leading the criminal conspiracy.

- Tom Phillips

Justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha ruled yesterday that Bolsonaro - a former paratrooper elected president in 2018 - was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election, meaning three of the five judges involved in the trial had found Brazil's former leader guilty.

Delivering her decisive vote, Rocha denounced what she called an attempt to "sow the malignant seed of anti-democracy" in Brazil but celebrated how its institutions had survived and were fighting back.

"Brazilian democracy was not shaken," Rocha told the court in the capital, Brasília, warning of the spread of "the virus of authoritarianism".

On Tuesday, judges Alexandre de Moraes and Flávio Dino, also declared the 70-year-old guilty of leading what Moraes called "a criminal organisation" that had sought to plunge the country back into dictatorship. "Jair Bolsonaro was leader of this criminal structure," Moraes said during a five-hour address in which he offered a comprehensive account of the conspiracy against Brazilian democracy.

"The victim is the Brazilian state," said Moraes, claiming the plot had unfolded between July 2021 and January 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters rampaged through Brasília after the election's leftwing winner, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, took power.