** 8/28/25 - Economist - The untold story of Bolsonaro’s weird and wild coup attempt - How Brazil’s ex-president and his cronies tried to take down democracy......
Buzz Sawyer
"Over the past year, I have pored over hundreds of pages of police reports and conducted dozens of interviews to reconstruct how Bolsonaro and his allies tried to discredit Brazil’s electoral system, pressed military commanders to annul the 2022 election and even plotted to assassinate his rivals.
On September 2nd Bolsonaro and seven of his closest associates will stand trial on charges that they tried to orchestrate a coup. If convicted, several of them face up to 43 years in prison. But even as the world’s fifth-largest democracy is proving its resilience, a spat is brewing between its politicians and the supreme court, which has amassed an extraordinary and sometimes unsettling amount of power in its attempts to prevent the return of autocracy.
Bolsonaro’s allies are now set on next year’s election, when they hope to win enough senate seats to impeach Moraes and neuter the courts. If they succeed, then Bolsonaro will have achieved his aim—without his name even appearing on the ballot."
The untold story of Bolsonaro’s weird and wild coup attempt
How Brazil’s ex-president and his cronies tried to take down democracy
By Ana Lankes
In 1968 Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil’s most celebrated architect and a communist, put his principles aside to design the headquarters of the armed forces, which had recently seized power in a coup. Today the modernist marvel hulks like a spaceship in the centre of Brasília. But in the first week of January 2023, its clean lines were disturbed by hundreds of tents haphazardly arranged outside the building. Was some kind of festival taking place? The camp was dotted with stalls handing out beer, grilled ribs and bowls of rice with salted beef, known as arroz carreteiro.
But this wasn’t a carnival—it was the start of an attempted insurrection. The protesters had congregated in support of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right leader, who had narrowly lost his presidential re-election bid at the end of October 2022 to his left-wing nemesis, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula. Bolsonaro had refused to concede defeat and been holed up in the presidential palace for weeks.
By December, his supporters were feeling restless. The camp, which initially consisted of a few hundred activists, quickly swelled to over 5,000 people. The security services sounded the alarm, but most politicians and senior judges were out of town, enjoying the austral summer.
On the afternoon of January 8th the tension exploded. Wearing the canary-yellow jerseys of the national football team, thousands of protestors marched down Brasília’s central avenue. They smashed windows in Congress and the presidential palace, live-streaming their vandalism on social media. But they saved their greatest venom for the Federal Supreme Court. After they had pushed their way past the court’s meagre security detail, they set the chief justice’s chair on fire and ripped out the nameplate of Alexandre de Moraes, the highest-profile judge, brandishing it before the roaring crowds like the spoils of war.
Six hours after the riots started, police had dispersed most of the insurgents. Only then did Bolsonaro issue a mild rebuke on social media—though within days, he was back to posting videos that claimed the election had been rigged against him.
Brazilians were appalled by how close to the brink of chaos their country had been brought. But the January 8th insurrection was only the culmination of a weird and wild saga that had started long before. Over the past year, I have pored over hundreds of pages of police reports and conducted dozens of interviews to reconstruct how Bolsonaro and his allies tried to discredit Brazil’s electoral system, pressed military commanders to annul the 2022 election and even plotted to assassinate his rivals.
On September 2nd Bolsonaro and seven of his closest associates will stand trial on charges that they tried to orchestrate a coup. If convicted, several of them face up to 43 years in prison. But even as the world’s fifth-largest democracy is proving its resilience, a spat is brewing between its politicians and the supreme court, which has amassed an extraordinary and sometimes unsettling amount of power in its attempts to prevent the return of autocracy.
The January 8th insurrection was only the culmination of a weird and wild saga that had started long beforeAs Brazil gears up for another general election next year, antiliberal forces will have a powerful ally. Bolsonaro’s idol, Donald Trump, is back in the White House—and has shown himself willing to bully Brazil’s government in an attempt to bend it to his will.
Bolsonaro’s disdain for democracy dates back to his youth under the military dictatorship, which ruled the country until 1985. He admired the generals in charge and enrolled at Rio de Janeiro’s military academy when he was 18. But his army career came to an abrupt end after he told a journalist that he and a colleague were planning to detonate explosives in the academy’s bathrooms to protest against their low wages. In 1988 he moved into politics.
For most of his 27 years in Congress, Bolsonaro was dismissed as a rabble-rouser who failed to propose a single important bill. Then came his big break. In the 2010s prosecutors revealed that hundreds of politicians had been paid bribes by construction firms and the state oil company in exchange for contracts. Nicknamed “Operation Car Wash”, it was one of the biggest corruption cases ever uncovered and landed Lula—a titan of the left who had been president from 2003 to 2010—in jail. Many Brazilians yearned for a leader who appeared to share their fury.
Sensing an opportunity, Bolsonaro threw himself into the 2018 presidential race. It was a good time to be an anti-establishment conservative. Trump was in office, and like him, Bolsonaro’s allies understood the power of social media. Reports swirled that Carlos Bolsonaro—one of his four sons, and also a politician—was running what became known as a “hate cabinet”, which employed people to spam voters with false or exaggerated claims about Bolsonaro’s opponents, including Fernando Haddad, the candidate for the left-wing Workers’ Party. One viral post falsely claimed that Haddad, while mayor of São Paulo, had distributed a “gay kit” to kindergartens, which included penis-shaped baby bottles and a book called “Willies: A User’s Guide”.
Bolsonaro cruised to victory in the run-off in October 2018. Soon after, he held a joint press conference with Trump at the White House, in which they gleefully bashed “gender ideology”, “political correctness” and “fake news”. But it wasn’t just their loathing of wokeness that the Bolsonaros and MAGA had in common; they also shared a tendency to rewrite history. Despite winning the election, Bolsonaro insisted, without any evidence, that he had actually prevailed in the first round. It was a glimpse of what was to come.
Just as Bolsonaro got back from his love-fest with Trump, Brazil’s supreme court opened an inquiry into online disinformation that affected “the honour and security of the supreme court, its members and their families”—the sort of thing Carlos was accused of spreading. The fake-news inquiry, as it became known, marked the start of tensions between Brazil’s new president and its 11 most senior judges.
Brazil’s supreme court is both extraordinarily visible and extraordinarily powerful (see Briefing). Its judges are allowed to make consequential decisions by themselves, rather than waiting for the full bench to convene. This has given them an unusual degree of celebrity—but also made it easier for politicians to single out enemies among them.
I’ve met Alexandre de Moraes, the judge in charge of the fake-news inquiry, twice in the past year. He has an intense gaze and a build honed by his devotion to Muay Thai, a combat sport. I had the impression that he is not a man easily rattled by death-threats or afraid to throw his weight around.
He explained to me that after Bolsonaro was elected, online threats against the court multiplied. One judge’s travel itinerary was posted on the dark web, with a caption encouraging people to stab him at the airport; another plan described putting bombs in the court’s plant pots. “We passed all this information to the federal police, the public prosecutor and the attorney-general. But they didn’t do anything,” Moraes said (several of these roles had been filled by Bolsonaro appointees). If they had, the “supreme court wouldn’t have opened the inquiry.”
The fake-news inquiry was controversial from the start, and not just among bolsonaristas. Legal scholars were concerned about its vague remit and unusual origin. Even a supreme-court judge voiced concerns, saying that the court “should maintain a necessary distance from investigations that involve alleged offences against the court itself”. The criticisms didn’t faze Moraes. Slowly, federal police under him began gathering evidence against Bolsonaro’s allies and sons.
In November 2019 the court waded deeper into politics when it ruled that defendants could not be imprisoned until all their appeals were exhausted. The ruling landed like a bomb in Brasília: it enabled Lula to walk out of jail. Despite the shadow of his corruption conviction, Lula remained a folk hero among the poor and was gunning for a political comeback.
Bolsonaro became convinced that the court was conspiring against him. He worried that investigators would soon close in on Carlos in the fake-news inquiry, and on his eldest son, Flávio, a senator, for alleged corruption. On April 22nd 2020 he called a meeting with his ministers. “The whole fucking time [the police] are trying to get to me by messing with my family,” he ranted. “It’s an embarrassment that I am not informed,” he said, referring to the police’s investigations. “I can’t work like this…That’s why I’m going to interfere. Full stop.”
Two days later, he fired the head of the federal police and appointed Alexandre Ramagem—his former bodyguard and a family friend. Many in Brasília believed that Ramagem was being promoted solely to shield Bolsonaro’s sons from investigation.
Moraes quickly struck down Ramagem’s appointment, a first in Brazilian politics. In response Eduardo Bolsonaro—the most politically gifted of Bolsonaro’s sons, who is close to Steve Bannon—fired a warning salvo. “What Alexandre de Moraes did is a crime,” he said. “When it gets to the point where the president has no way out and strong measures are needed, [my father] will be labelled a dictator.”
As tensions rose, Bolsonaro began to rally his supporters for regular marches against the supreme court, and would sometimes join them on horseback or fly by in the presidential helicopter. But Brazil’s judges were unrelenting. In March 2021 they tossed out Lula’s convictions on a technicality, allowing him to run in the following year’s presidential election.
The ruling in Lula’s favour made Bolsonaro more resolute. He began to purge his cabinet of people he did not consider sufficiently loyal. First to go was his defence minister, General Fernando Azevedo e Silva, who had refused Bolsonaro’s request to allow soldiers to join in the marches against the supreme court. The heads of the army, air force and navy resigned in protest at the firing.
The resignations worried foreign diplomats—especially those in Joe Biden’s administration. After Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6th 2021, Bolsonaro had warned that Brazil was “going to have a worse problem” if it kept using electronic voting machines. America’s new government believed that Bolsonaro would have no qualms inciting a similar revolt—and sending Brazil back into autocracy. “We didn’t want to risk losing one of our major democratic allies in the global south,” one former Pentagon official told me.
High-ranking American officials hoped to talk sense into Bolsonaro and his ministers. In July 2021 Bill Burns, then the director of the CIA, had a private meeting with Ramagem, who by then was running Brazil’s intelligence agency, and General Augusto Heleno, Bolsonaro’s bumbling national-security adviser. Weeks later Biden’s national-security chief, Jake Sullivan, flew to Brasília to meet with Bolsonaro himself.
The visits were a flop. “Bolsonaro was of the view that there was this vast communist conspiracy in Latin America and that he was the only one who could save Latin America,” one former White House official told me. “We left pretty alarmed.”
Even members of Bolsonaro’s government were concerned. At an event in New York, vice-president General Hamilton Mourão—whom many bolsonaristas considered a lukewarm disciple—got into a lift with a former American ambassador to Brazil. On the journey down, the ambassador said that he was worried. Mourão quietly responded: “I’m worried, too.”
Mere days after Burns’s visit Bolsonaro livestreamed a conversation with Heleno on YouTube and Facebook, in which he reiterated his claim that the voting machines could be hacked (independent electoral officials have consistently said there is no evidence for this). Police later found Heleno’s diary, in which he brainstormed how to spread disinformation about the machines, including tips to appeal to a broader audience such as “Don’t make any references to homosexuals, blacks, queers, etc”.
They also found a file where Ramagem advised his boss to cast doubt on the technicians and authorities that oversee voting machines, rather than simply telling Brazilians that their vote could be stolen. In a lapse that would make trained spooks blush, the document was repeatedly edited by the user “aram...@yahoo.com”.
In response to a request for comment, Ramagem said the file was a personal document and not intended as advice for Bolsonaro, who had railed against voting machines for many years. He also alleged that the judiciary conspired against Bolsonaro, and therefore blocked his appointment as head of the federal police. He denied taking part in a coup and said that the events of January 8th were simply a demonstration that ended in disorder. In any case, he was out of government by then.
Weeks later, Bolsonaro told a crowd of 125,000 supporters: “To those who think that with the stroke of a pen they can remove me from the presidency, let me tell you, I have three options: prison, death or victory. Let the scoundrels know, I will never be imprisoned!”
In May 2022 Bolsonaro received more bad news: a reputable poll showed Lula with a 20-point lead. Bolsonaro called another fateful cabinet meeting, in which he declared that the voting machines would be rigged to give Lula such a wide margin of victory. He told his ministers that if they didn’t repeat this claim in public, they would be dismissed.
Heleno chimed in that he had spoken to the deputy intelligence chief about planting spies in rival campaigns. This appears to have disconcerted even Bolsonaro. “I ask you not to…I ask you not to speak, please. Don’t, don’t continue with your…with your observation,” he stammered. “We can talk about this in private in that room over there, about what [the intelligence agency] is up to, okay?” Unabashed, Heleno continued: “If we have to turn the tables, it’s before the elections…there will come a point when we won’t be able to talk any more. We’re going to have to act.”
Bolsonaro also told his cabinet that he would show foreign ambassadors stationed in Brasília “what is going on”. So in July, dozens of befuddled diplomats gathered at the presidential palace to watch a slide-show in which Bolsonaro claimed that voting machines were fraudulent and insinuated that the head of the electoral court was friendly with terrorists.
The meeting, which was broadcast publicly, infuriated the Biden administration. “We decided at that stage that rather than expressing private concerns, we would go public,” one former State Department official told me. A week later, Biden’s defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, joined a conference of defence ministers in Brazil. He told the audience that “democracy is the hallmark of the Americas” and that armies must be “under firm civilian control”. In diplomatic terms, this was a rebuke. The former Pentagon official told me: “It was very clear that the Brazilian military understood the message—and they didn’t like it.”
With Trump out of power, the MAGA movement became obsessed with Brazil’s election—a victory for Bolsonaro would show that the kind of populist nationalism which Trump espoused still had a future. On his podcast “War Room”, Bannon mentioned Brazil in at least 10% of the episodes aired in the year running up to the election, according to Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative news outlet. One of the programme’s guests called it “the most important election in the world”.
When the results came in from the first round, on October 2nd 2022, bolsonaristas breathed a sigh of relief. Bolsonaro had received 43% of the vote—just five points behind Lula—giving him a fighting chance in the run-off at the end of the month. His team resolved to win, by any means necessary.
According to police, on October 4th an army colonel texted Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s closest aide, asking him if the government had found evidence of fraud. Cid responded: “Nothing.” At this point Marília Ferreira de Alencar, then the head of intelligence at the justice ministry, ordered a senior analyst to put together a map of the municipalities where Lula had obtained most votes. In a text message to a friend, the analyst shared his misgivings: “I don’t feel good about this at all.” But he sent the data anyway. (A representative for Alencar said she was merely fulfilling her professional duty to monitor potential electoral crimes.)
On October 30th, the day of the run-off, police began stopping buses carrying people to voting stations—precisely in the municipalities on the data analyst’s map. Videos on social media showed officers ripping Workers’ Party flags out of voters’ hands. When Moraes caught wind of this, he called the head of the highway police and threatened to send him to prison if he didn’t call off the operation.
Lula ended up winning the run-off with 51% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49%—the tightest result in Brazilian history. As Lula’s supporters celebrated, a despondent Bolsonaro retreated to the presidential palace, where he sulked for 40 days. Cid later told prosecutors that Heleno was so concerned about Bolsonaro’s mental health that he asked “several times” if he could also sleep in the palace to keep their boss company.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s supporters sprang into action. Lorry-drivers blocked highways across Brazil, and encampments formed outside military garrisons to put pressure on the army to back Bolsonaro. Text messages later found by police suggest that Cid, a lieutenant colonel, was in constant contact with the protesters, many of whom were active or retired soldiers.
The protesters soon grew worried that the situation was stagnating. One retired colonel sent a desperate message to Cid: “The people are where [Bolsonaro] asked them to be…I know you guys tried to see it through to the end without an institutional breakdown, but the other side played outside the law. Enough, brother!”
Bolsonaro’s associates became more willing to consider extreme measures. According to police, some began to hatch an assassination plot codenamed Operation Green and Yellow Dagger (after Brazil’s national colours), targeting Moraes, Lula and the incoming vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin.
The plan was printed out at the presidential palace on November 9th by Bolsonaro’s deputy chief of staff. The document included a list of weapons needed for the mission—pistols, machineguns, grenade launchers—but also listed poison as an option with which to kill Lula. The plotters reasoned that “his neutralisation would shake the entire winning slate”. Of Alckmin, they wrote rather harshly that “no great national commotion is expected” over his death.
In the following days the plan—which the plotters judged as having a “medium tending towards high” chance of success—was set into motion. Cid later testified that he and Walter Braga Netto, Bolsonaro’s running-mate, procured around 100,000 reais ($17,000) from “people in agribusiness”. Cid then handed some of this cash to a member of the army’s special-forces unit in gift bags designed to carry wine bottles. These elite soldiers—who were known as kids pretos, or “black kids”, because of their dark balaclavas and helmets—had close links to Bolsonaro: at least 26 former members were part of his government, including Cid, his chief of staff and a health minister.
Two kids pretos then travelled to Brasília to start watching Moraes. A spreadsheet was later found on the computer of one of the hitmen, which included an outline of how new elections would be called. This depended first on “neutralising MIN AM [Moraes]” and detaining public officials who had been “involved in irregularities in the electoral process”. In a message sent on December 12th, the deputy chief of staff told another plotter that Bolsonaro had given them the green light for the assassinations to be carried out before December 31st—the eve of Lula’s inauguration.
As Lula’s supporters celebrated, a despondent Bolsonaro
retreated to the presidential palace, where he sulked for 40 days
According to testimony and contemporaneous records, lawyers close to Bolsonaro now drew up a decree that would have granted him emergency powers. A separate document anticipated that a “crisis cabinet”—made up mostly of military officers, such as Heleno and Braga Netto—would be established to organise new elections. Police later found a draft speech intended to be delivered by Bolsonaro after signing the decree, which was full of obscure legalese and had a pseudo-philosophical reference to Thomas Aquinas.
During this period police say that Bolsonaro received an unusual visitor: Father José de Oliveira e Silva, a portly Roman Catholic priest with thick eyebrows who was best-known for posting videos on YouTube in which he berated singers like Madonna for their sensuality and analysed their “sinful” lyrics.
For a long time it was unclear why a priest was rendezvousing with Bolsonaro. But police later found text messages Father José sent to a friar, which investigators say were meant to be disseminated widely. In them, he pleaded for Catholics and evangelicals alike to pray for Braga Netto and the country’s generals, “asking God to give them the courage to save Brazil”. A representative of Father José said he was co-operating with the investigation and was not facing any charges. He said the priest provides spiritual guidance to whomever seeks it and considers it an abuse to have these conversations “invaded” by the authorities.
Father José also sent a confusing message—probably not intended for a wider readership—in which he mused, in less metaphysical terms, about how events might play out. “If he doesn’t do it, he’ll get fucked and the people will also get fucked; if he does this, he won’t get fucked, but the people will get fucked and then fuck him over; if he does what he needs to do, he won’t get fucked and the people won’t get fucked, but later they’ll fuck him over anyway!”
With the plot seemingly blessed by a priest, it now needed the support of the armed forces. On December 7th Bolsonaro called in the head of the army, General Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, and the head of the navy, Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, intending to discuss the martial-law decree. A shocked Gomes told Bolsonaro that the army would not participate in any ruse “aimed at reversing the electoral process”. Bolsonaro reassured him that he would make some edits to the decree.
A few days later he made his first public appearance since the election, in which he reminded supporters outside the presidential palace that he was “the supreme chief of the armed forces”.
Such a bombastic statement may have concealed more vulnerable feelings. Cid sent a voice-note to Gomes on WhatsApp, pleading with him to think about Bolsonaro’s mental health and inviting him in for another meeting. “He likes to chat, you know?” Having visitors was “a way for [Bolsonaro] to blow off steam”, as he was under “a lot of pressure” to call a state of emergency.
On December 14th Gomes, Santos and Brigadier Carlos de Almeida Baptista Júnior—the head of the air force—met with Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, the defence minister. Nogueira presented them with a slimmed-down version of the decree. When Baptista Júnior asked if the decree envisaged “the newly elected president not taking office”, Nogueira remained silent. Baptista Júnior got up and left the room; Gomes followed him out.
Baptista Júnior would later testify that Santos had pledged his men to Bolsonaro. Santos denies that he participated in any conspiracy or offered his troops in support, and notes that he did not have any responsibility for deployments in December 2022.
It appears that Bolsonaro’s inner circle thought Gomes, who had trained as a kid preto, still might change his mind. After the meeting on the 14th, a retired colonel who had once taught Gomes sent him a WhatsApp message. “Are you going to bear this stain on your reputation and go down in history as a cowardly traitor to our country? Unfortunately there’s no other way to read it my friend!” Gomes ignored him.
Braga Netto was incensed by the failed meeting. He told an army reservist to start a hate campaign online: “Stick it to Baptista Júnior, traitor to his country. Make his life and that of his family hell.” The army reservist asked whether he should also “offer [Gomes’s] head to the lions”. Braga Netto replied: “Offer his head. Fucker.”
Meanwhile, the assassination plot got under way. According to the police, in early December the hitmen bought “burner” phones, registered them under false identities and created a group on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, called “World Cup 2022”. They picked codenames of countries with football teams—Germany, Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Japan and Ghana.
The assassins planned to kick things off by arresting or murdering Moraes on December 15th on his way home from the supreme court. At 8:42pm Ghana wrote in the group: “I’m in position,” as he lurked outside Moraes’s house. Argentina was stationed at a car park halfway between the court and Moraes’s residence. Brazil asked: “What’s the situation?” Germany and Japan responded: “Hold. We’re in position.” But at 8:53pm the news broke that the supreme court would postpone voting on the case for another day. The assassins seemed to lose Moraes’s whereabouts. At 8:57pm, Austria asked, “Are we going to cancel the game?” Germany replied: “Abort…Austria…return to landing site…Ghana…proceed to rescue with Japan. Brazil has already gone to the rescue point.”
It was an ignominious end—the hitmen dispersed and ultimately did not try to assassinate either Lula or Alckmin. Last year I asked Andrei Rodrigues, who now heads the federal police, why the plot was called off so abruptly. “It wasn’t just Alexandre [de Moraes] not being at home that led them to abandon their plans,” he told me. “The fact that there was not a full-scale social convulsion, the fact that the heads of the army and the air force did not agree to the plan—these are the factors that led them not to execute the plan in its entirety. Had they not received those signals, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that they would have carried out the plan fully.”
After the plan failed, Bolsonaro fell into a funk. Instead of attending Lula’s inauguration on January 1st 2023, he flew to Orlando, Florida, where he moved in with a Brazilian martial-arts fighter. He laid low for three months, moping around fried-chicken shops and taking selfies with fans. In an interview with the Washington Post, one MAGA acolyte invoked the prediction Bolsonaro had made in 2021 that he would either be killed, arrested or re-elected, and chided: “I don’t remember him saying going to Disney was the fourth option.”
Because Bolsonaro no longer had presidential immunity—and investigators had greater access to intelligence reports now that Ramagem was out of his job—the police were able to dig into his activities. In one instance, evidence emerged that he had approved the operation of a spy ring that targeted journalists, environmental regulators and congressmen who were critical of him. Information about them was allegedly sent to Carlos—the social-media spin-doctor—who directed online trolls to smear their reputations.
Within months Bolsonaro faced over a dozen judicial investigations on charges ranging from mismanaging presidential property to inciting the January 8th riot. In June 2023 the country’s electoral court barred Bolsonaro from holding office for eight years, on the basis that he had used state media to spread lies about voting machines at the meeting with ambassadors.
As Bolsonaro’s political cachet began to crumble, so did the loyalty of his right-hand man. In August 2023, Cid entered into a plea deal with the police. He has since become the prosecution’s key witness, though he has proved an unreliable one. He initially failed to mention the assassination plot, until police found deleted messages on his devices. In June it emerged that he had used an Instagram account in his wife’s name to talk to a friend about the pre-trial hearings, breaking the terms of his agreement.
Following months of testimony-gathering, Bolsonaro’s trial begins on September 2nd. He and seven of his closest associates, including Heleno, Braga Netto and Ramagem, face decades in prison. They deny all charges.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers say there is no proof he is connected to January 8th or the assassination plot. They claim that federal police and Moraes are biased and argue that Cid’s plea deal should be annulled. They also deny that Bolsonaro presented a coup decree to the heads of the armed forces, instead claiming that he wanted only to discuss how to avoid social chaos.
The assassins seemed to lose Moraes’s whereabouts.
At 20:57, Austria asked, “Are we going to cancel the game?”
Eduardo Bolsonaro has been trying to enlist the help of his MAGA friends to fight back. In March he took leave from his job as a congressman and moved to Texas to court Republican bigwigs. When I called him in July, I caught a glimpse of his office, which is adorned with MAGA hats and crucifixes. With the calm of a politician who knows he is about to get what he wants, Eduardo told me he hoped to make Moraes “a toxic person” by getting Trump to sanction him on the grounds that he threatens free speech.
Just days after our interview Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, revoked the entry visas of eight judges on Brazil’s Supreme Court and their immediate family members, as well as those of the public prosecutor and Rodrigues, the police chief (the three justices who were spared are Bolsonaro’s allies or appointees). On July 30th the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Moraes. And on August 6th, a 50% tariff on many Brazilian goods came into effect, with Trump citing the “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.
Many Brazilians believe Eduardo is sacrificing the good of his country for the interests of his family. But criticism of the supreme court is also growing. The fake-news inquiry is now in its sixth year. Because it is sealed, no one knows how many social-media accounts Moraes has ordered removed or why.
The coup attempt was a reminder that some military men were willing to reclaim power illegitimately in Brazil. But, as Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, pointed out to me, the most successful recent cases of autocratic takeover have come from democratically elected leaders, not army coups. In Venezuela, Russia, Hungary and El Salvador leaders used their initial popularity to undermine the courts and gag the opposition. In these cases democratic erosion has been “gradual, non-violent and often plausibly legal”, Levitsky said.
Bolsonaro’s allies are now set on next year’s election, when they hope to win enough senate seats to impeach Moraes and neuter the courts. If they succeed, then Bolsonaro will have achieved his aim—without his name even appearing on the ballot. ■
Ana Lankes is The Economist’s Brazil bureau chief.