Brazil crossed the line on Thursday that it had never dared to have courage. The Supreme Court found former President Jae Bolsonaro guilty of planning to overthrow democracy and pronounced him in prison for more than 27 years. At 70, the sentence faces the prospect of him spending the rest of his life behind the bar.
This decision marks an extraordinary break from the country’s history of postponing justice in the name of peace. For decades, generals, coups and torturers have walked freely under the shield of the amnesty law passed after the 21 dictatorship. Now, once the same institution was threatened by authoritarian power, declared that the former commander had cancelled the 2022 election, assassinated his rival and eventually conspired to take power to unleash the chaos on the streets.
The Brasilia event has echoed beyond Brazil. The trial became a global flashpoint seized by the right-wing movements in the US and Europe as evidence of what they call judicial overreach. Just a few days before the verdict, a huge American flag was spread out over the sea of Borosonaro supporters marching through Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo on Brazil’s Independence Day. This is an impressive symbol of a deep symbolism that a slice of the Brazilian population is a visual manifestation between American counterparts and magicians.
The connection became even more apparent when President Donald Trump told reporters hours after the decision that he was “very surprised” by the outcome, they told him “they tried to do it with me, but they didn’t run away at all.” The White House has already slapped 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports in response to the Bolsonaro prosecution, and Trump branded the “witch hunt” in a letter to Brazilian authorities in July. Earlier this week, the judges had already started reading their decisions, so White House press chief Karoline Leavitt was asked about Bolsonaro during a briefing, saying Trump would not be afraid to use the US economic and military force to protect freedom of speech around the world.
All of these developments were celebrated by prominent Bolsonaro supporters from Brazil and abroad as a result of a long-standing campaign to garner support for their cause in Trump’s inner circle. Over the past few years, Maga Media has occasionally attracted attention in the investigation and trial of Bolsonaro, as the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk said on a YouTube show in March, “as a precursor to what should come” and “as a precursor to what’s coming.”
“What they’re doing to Bolsonaro is what they wanted to do with President Donald Trump,” Kirk said. Kirk had been opposed to the investigation of Bolsonaro for years, but Bolsonaro introduced himself at the Turning Point USA event in Florida in 2023. In that March broadcast, Kirk directly urged Trump to punish Brazil with tariffs and sanctions on what the Supreme Court calls “reckless and immoral behaviour.”
But despite tariffs and rhetoric from the White House, the courts loomed. The historic ruling in Brasilia unfolds a day after Kirk was fatally shot at a Utah rally. Judge Flavio Dino, in his own opinion from the bench, called Kirk’s death a “serious political crime.” He contemplated the effects of pardon on those who flocked to the US Capitol on January 6th.
After Kirk’s death, Bolsonaro’s allies paid tribute to social media and frawn him as a martial artist in the same global struggle.
But in Brasilia, the court told a different story: evidence of a few months of coup and the echo of the country still haunted by the ghosts of its dictatorship. The calculations with Bolsonaro in Brazil are inseparable from the longer struggle to confront the authoritarian past. For 40 years, the country lives under the shadow of a regime that ended in 1985 without trial or prison time for those who were tortured, forced dissidents, exiles and executions. In 1979, Congress passed a regular amnesty law that protected both the enforcers of the administration and their enemies from the prosecution. This measure was presented as a step towards “national reconciliation,” but in reality it meant immunity. Coup plotters, generals and torturers walked freely, many living on full military honor and pensions.
The Democratic government that followed left the bargain intact and chose stability over justice. It was only in 2012 that the nation had tried to formally investigate past crimes, with the creation of the National Truth Commission. The committee appointed 377 officials responsible for torture and murder, documenting more than 200 cases of loss and death. However, it had no prosecution power, and its central recommendation, a reconsideration of its 1979 amnesty law was ignored. The new democratic institutions were fragile, and the military still had enough influence to block meaningful accountability.
Brazilian society has since created a culture of forgetting, where “turning the page” was treated as an act of peace rather than an evasion. The failure to punish past crimes left deep scars, but it also created an appetite for today’s justice.
As Judge Cármen Lúcia pointed out in this week’s decisive vote, the Bolsonaro case is “a encounter in Brazil’s past, present and future.” “We have a depressing history of too few Republicans in our Republic,” she adds, highlighting the 40th anniversary of its return to civilian rule, Brazil must show that it can defend democracy.
The lawsuit against Bolsonaro continued in the United States as it appears to be very familiar. The capital’s mob claims of election fraud. However, Brazilian judiciary chose to act decisively. In doing so, it drew an implicit comparison and perhaps a challenge with its northern counterparts.
In March, Kirk said, “Brazil is a canary of coal mines.” As Bolsonaro is now convicted and declared, the warning has become a rallying cry for American rights, but it also highlights differences between the two countries. For Brazil, the verdict is evidence that even a former president can be accountable. For the US, it is a reminder that roads are not being taken.
