Rot at heart of Brazilian democracy exposed amid dark charges against Bolsonaro and military

The formal accusation made this week by police against Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro that he plotted a coup in 2022, while shocking, is not exactly that great a surprise.
The details laid out by investigators this week only add greater context to the existing public record – that Bolsonaro and the generals surrounding him worked ceaselessly to annul his defeat to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, culminating in the ransacking of state buildings in the capital Brasília by his supporters eight days after Lula was sworn in.
Now federal police say those events were just the public face of a far more sinister effort that saw some of Bolsonaro’s inner circle plot to murder Lula, his running mate Geraldo Alckmin and supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who, as head of the electoral authority, had refused to bend to efforts by the military to cast doubt on the validity of Lula’s victory.
Among the 36 people named as co-conspirators with Bolsonaro, 25 are former or serving officers in the military who now stand accused of attempting the violent abolition of the constitutional state. Brazil’s chief federal prosecutor will shortly receive the police report and decide whether to formally press charges against the accused.
Bolsonaro’s eventual legal fate is impossible to know. Brazil’s judicial system is chronically slow and in high-profile cases such as these easily swayed by prevailing political winds. But this week’s events are a devastating setback for the former president. In all likelihood they bury his attempts to have an amnesty bill passed in congress that would overturn his ban on running for office before 2030 for his public attacks against the voting system two years ago.
For the reputation of Brazil’s armed forces this week’s accusations are a severe blow that could bring institutional instability in their wake. Among those charged are some of the most illustrious military figures of recent generations, men such as the highly decorated retired general Augusto Heleno, who once led the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
Though it never apologised for the crimes committed during its last dictatorship, the military had worked hard since it returned to barracks in the 1980s to present itself as a modern, professional outfit now dedicated to democracy. But Bolsonaro actively sought to drag “my army” back into domestic politics during his term in office.
Many serving and retired officers were only too happy to acquiesce in his effort, either because they shared his far-right nationalist ideology or were tempted by the high salaries lavished on those holding senior positions in Brazil’s bureaucracy.
The resulting politicisation of the military eventually saw generals break military regulations to openly campaign for Bolsonaro, become involved in his administration’s corruption and, after it looked like he would lose his bid for re-election, engage in his campaign to undermine Brazil’s electoral process in favour of their boss. Now according to the federal police charges the rot ran much deeper and saw serving and retired generals lead an effort not just to overthrow the 2022 election but to murder the victors and the judge who oversaw the whole process.
The military’s public efforts in 2022 at undermining confidence in the electoral system already laid bare how tenuous among significant sectors of the armed forces was their supposed commitment to being a non-political institution in a democratic state. These new charges if proven would raise serious questions about the military’s commitment to democracy given the senior ranks of many of those accused of coup plotting this week.
The current high command can of course point to the fact that a majority of senior officers did not get involved. But that does not answer the question of what they knew and if they did anything to block it given the evidence so far indicates they knew enough. Part of the fascination about the investigation is that it shines a light on the normally opaque internal machinations of the military’s upper echelons. This appears to reveal a radicalised minority furious at the inertia rather than principled democratic resistance of most of their comrades.
The current crisis might now lead to the purging of the radicals. But that would go against Brazil’s military tradition in which senior commanders cover up wrongdoing among the ranks in order to preserve the supposed reputation of the institution. Bolsonaro himself benefited from this culture, allowed to retire with the rank of captain rather than be charged with insubordination for his cack-handed plan to place bombs as part of a campaign for greater pay in the 1980s.
The risk now is the armed forces, which clearly have many bolsonaristas within their ranks, will drag its heels on confronting these anti-democratic elements. Instead the affair and the damage it has wrought on its reputation might only see the military, its pride wounded, turn inward, further alienating it from the country’s democratic institutions.