In 2022, Brazilian voters kicked president Jair Bolsonaro out of office. He responded with an attempted coup. Now, he's been convicted for it, and sentenced to 27 years in prison:
Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup and seeking to “annihilate” the South American country’s democracy.Good. This is how democracies with a functioning legal system, like Brazil and Korea, respond to coups: with law and criminal charges. Meanwhile, the US, which purports to be the "world's greatest democracy", has not only failed to hold Trump to account for his coup attempt on January 6, 2021 - it re-elected him, and he is now threatening Brazil with tariffs and sanctions for upholding the law and defending their democracy from fascism. Which kindof makes it clear which side he's on, doesn't it?Justices Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha and Cristiano Zanin ruled on Thursday that Bolsonaro – a former paratrooper who was elected president in 2018 – was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election, meaning four of the five judges involved in the trial had found Brazil’s former leader guilty.
Announcing Bolsonaro’s sentence for crimes including coup d’etat and violently attempting to abolish Brazil’s democracy on Thursday night, the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said: “[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state ... the greatest consequence [of which] ... would have been the return of dictatorship to Brazil.”
