O Brasil na Foreign Affairs de setembro de 2025:
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What is unfolding in Brazil these days—and what is about to unfold—is of extraordinary importance.
On September 2, Brazil’s Supreme Court opened the final phase of the trial against former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Alongside him stand seven other defendants, including senior military officers and former cabinet members.
This marks a turning point in Brazilian history.
A verdict is expected by September 12. Should Bolsonaro be convicted—as appears likely given the weight of evidence—he faces more than forty years in prison.
Since early August, the former president has been under house arrest. Security around his residence in Brasília has been reinforced after Justice Alexandre de Moraes warned of a serious risk of flight. Investigators discovered a letter addressed to Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei, in which Bolsonaro sought political asylum.
At 70 and in fragile health, Bolsonaro has also been barred from using phones or social media, approaching foreign embassies, or maintaining contact with foreign authorities.
The charges against him are fivefold: armed criminal conspiracy, attempted coup d’état, violent subversion of the rule of law, aggravated damage, and destruction of public property.
The most serious accusation concerns the failed coup he allegedly orchestrated to prevent Lula da Silva’s inauguration and thus cling to power.
The operation, code-named Green and Yellow Dagger after the colors of Brazil’s flag and detailed in a lengthy report by federal police, allegedly included assassination plots.
An elite army unit was tasked with killing—or poisoning—President Lula, as well as murdering Vice President Geraldo Alckmin. Plans also involved kidnapping, and likely killing, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, long a central figure in investigations into Brazil’s far right and now presiding over Bolsonaro’s trial.
The plan, culminating in the storming of Brazil’s institutions in January 2023, ultimately collapsed largely because parts of the military withheld support, and because international backing—particularly from the United States—never materialized.
For the first time in Brazil’s democratic history, a former president is on trial.
More unprecedented still, members of the armed forces are facing justice. Unlike Argentina, which prosecuted military leaders for dictatorship-era crimes, Brazil never put its officers on trial. Victims’ families were denied justice, and the army retained an aura of impunity and latent power over democracy.
This trial alters the equation: Brazil is declaring that no one, not even those in uniform, is above the law. It is the first time political and military leaders face prosecution for coup-related crimes, despite the country’s history of repeated golpes.
The case is historic because it reaffirms that democratic principles and the rule of law, though fragile, remain alive. It also signals that ex-presidents cannot consider themselves legibus soluti —free from the law — but must be held accountable like all other citizens (the allusion to Donald Trump is anything but accidental).
