A day after being placed in preventive detention, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro alleged this Sunday that he tried to burn the anklet that controlled his house arrest in a moment of “paranoia” and denied any attempt to escape.
The former far-right president (2019-2022) was sentenced in September to 27 years in prison for an attempted coup against the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after losing the elections in 2022.
After months under house arrest and just days before the deadline to file an appeal against his sentence, the former president was taken to a federal police complex in Brasilia on Saturday after he partially damaged the device with a welder.
Bolsonaro, 70, said that “he had ‘a certain paranoia’ from Friday to Saturday due to medications (…) then decided, with a soldering iron, to manipulate the electronic anklet,” according to the document obtained by AFP.
During a custody hearing held this Sunday in Brasilia, the former president told a judge that “he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some listening device on the anklet,” details the minutes of the proceedings.
The court ratified the preventive arrest order against Bolsonaro.
The former president, for his part, said at the hearing “that he had no intention of fleeing and that there was no break in the strap” that tied the anklet to his body.
“Mental confusion”
Later, his lawyers asked the court to reconsider preventive detention and for Bolsonaro to return to “humanitarian house arrest” due to his “mental confusion.”
The former president experiences “side effects due to the different prescribed medications, beginning to have persecutory thoughts that are far from reality,” they explained in a letter addressed to the supreme court.
He fell into that state due to the medications he takes to relieve the “hiccups” that have plagued him for months.
Bolsonaro has the consequences of a stab wound he suffered during a campaign event in 2018 and has undergone several intestinal surgeries since then.
This Sunday he received his first visitors in prison: two lawyers, his trusted doctor and then his wife, Michelle Bolsonaro.
The far-right leader told the court that he had spent Friday afternoon trying to open the anklet until he “came to his senses” around midnight and stopped.
Police arrived at Bolsonaro’s residence shortly afterward to conduct an inspection.
The former president, at first, said he had hit the anklet against a staircase, according to the trial documents.
But he later admitted trying to burn her with a soldering iron out of “curiosity,” according to a video released by the court on Saturday.
“sovereign country”
On Saturday, in arguing the risk of flight, the supreme court noted that the US embassy is located near Bolsonaro’s residence.
The former Brazilian president is an ally of US President Donald Trump, who months ago denounced a “witch hunt” against him and responded by imposing a punitive tariff on Brazil.
“Too bad!” Trump responded on Saturday when he learned of Bolsonaro’s imprisonment. The president withdrew a good part of the tariffs on Brazil after meeting with Lula in October.
This Sunday, the Brazilian president was questioned about the possibility that the arrest of his greatest opponent will affect rapprochements with Washington.
“It has nothing to do with it,” Lula said during a press conference at the G20 meeting in Johannesburg.
“Trump has to know that we are a sovereign country, that our justice decides and what is decided here is decided,” he added.
Bolsonaro’s imprisonment leaves the right without a candidate for the 2026 presidential elections, while Lula has already announced his intention to run for a fourth term.
The former president has already filed an appeal against his conviction for coup and it was rejected by the supreme court. You have until Monday to file a second appeal.
