The First Class of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) begins on Tuesday (2) to judge former President Jair Bolsonaro and seven former advisors, all accused by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) to try to consume a coup in Brazil. 
The five ministers of the first class – Alexandre de Moraes, Cristiano Zanin, Luiz Fux, Cármen Lúcia and Flávio Dino – will judge based on the evidence presented by accusation and defenses during the process instruction.
In the case of the prosecution, the Attorney General of the Republic, Paulo Gonet, presented its final allegationsthe definitive version for the facts investigated on July 15, when it requested the conviction of the eight defendants for five crimes, whose maximum penalties, may exceed 40 years in prison.
All were accused of the following crimes:
- lead or integrate armed criminal organization;
- violently pay against the Democratic Rule of Law;
- coup of state;
- damage qualified by violence and serious threat and
- Deterioration of union listed heritage.
Gonet described what, for PGR, would be several typical acts, that is, acts or omissions of the defendants that characterize crime. Under the attorney, however, are complex crimes, executed in order not to be discovered or proven.
For this reason, Gonet evaluates that the typification of the imputed crimes is equally complex, being formed from a series of behaviors in an elongated time space, not from isolated acts.
“An attempted coup, breaking the essential elements of the rule of democratic law and the ruin of independence of powers, does not give understanding without articulating multiple facts and events, extended over time, which conform the behavior punished by law,” explains the PGR in his accusation.
January 8
To characterize the crimes, Gonet gave crucial importance to undemocratic attacks of January 8, 2023, when supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, dissatisfied with his defeat in the attempt of reelection in 2022, invaded and depredated the headquarters of the three powers.
“The dramatic event helped resignify a whole series of past events, which previously seemed disconnected from each other,” the PGR wrote in the final allegations.
“Acts that, until then, could seem disapproving only from the moral or electoral point of view, were fitted within a larger plan of institutional rupture,” he adds.
Gonet states that the violent acts were the result of the coup plot and only occurred by the encouragement of Jair Bolsonaro, who expressed support for the camps who, since the end of the election, asked for military intervention, incitement that is already a crime provided for in the Penal Code.
The Attorney General of the Republic presents, for example, messages exchanged between Colonel Mauro Fernandes, former executive secretary of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, in which the military seems to make the bridge between the Planalto Palace and leaders of the protesters camped in front of the Army Headquarters in Brasilia.
In conversations, the word “barbecue”, according to Gonet, is used as a code for the coup d’état. One of the messages received by Fernandes, from one of the camp leaders, says, for example, “We’re going there to the Esplanade, to the Esplanade manifestation, ok? Yeah … And I need to talk urgently to you, about that … that barbecue.
Such communications, for Gonet, make it “evident that the movements of Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s supporters were not spontaneous, but the result of prior orientation of the criminal organization.”
The prosecutor also cites the trip of General Walter Braga Netto, former minister of the Civil House and Defense, who was deputy on the Bolsonaro plate in 2022, until the camp at the Army HQ on January 4, 2023, where he transmitted a message of hope about the coup.
Regarding Bolsonaro specifically, the prosecutor states that the events of January 8 only happened due to the “social commotion” fueled by the former president, who since mid-2021 has questioned the electoral process, with attacks, without evidence, against the operation of the electronic ballot boxes.
Gonet describes what would be coordinated Bolsonaro’s speech, and says that a “sequence of acts – threatening public statements, dissemination of falsehoods over the electoral system, reiterated attacks on Supreme Court ministers, articulation with military allies, and manipulation of inquiries – composes gear of institutional delegitimation, whose central objective was the early rejection of the electoral result.”
From then on, the prosecutor states that Bolsonaro began to act coordinated with the coup criminal organization in order to keep his supporters dissatisfied in advance with the outcome of the polls.
“This scheduling of discursive aggressiveness was neither episodic nor improvised. It was part of the execution of a plan oriented to the progressive corrosion of public trust in democratic institutions,” says the prosecutor.
Also according to Gonet, messages exchanged by the defendants even indicate guidance on how protesters could use bars such as stairs and fire hoses in a coordinated manner in the alleged “barbecue”.
The Attorney General of the Republic claims that the defendants were necessary for the defendants to be in person in the Praça of the Three Powers so that they can be responsible for violent acts and the damage caused to public buildings, which were estimated at more than $ 30 million.
Defense
Defense lawyersin general, they claim that Gonet did not present even documentary proof that places his clients in the scenario of crimes committed on January 8, 2023. For them, the fact that the prosecutor has not indicated the specific act of damage committed directly against public buildings prevents defendants from being guilty of the events of that day.
Bolsonaro’s team of lawyers, for example, states that the PGR narrative deals with an “imagined blow,” and that even if the former president has considered, in a kind of brainstorm, some kind of institutional rupture, the PGR has not brought to the file any full proof that connect Bolsonaro to undemocratic acts of 8 January.
The defendants of core 1 of the coup plot, which will be tried from this Tuesday:
- Jair Bolsonaro – Former President of the Republic;
- Alexandre Ramagem – Former director of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin);
- Almir Garnier- Former Navy Commander;
- Anderson Torres-former Minister of Justice and former Security Secretary of the Federal District;
- Augusto Heleno – former Minister of the Institutional Security Office (GSI);
- Paulo Sérgio Nogueira – Former Defense Minister;
- Walter Braga Netto – former minister of Bolsonaro and candidate for deputy on the 2022 plate;
- Mauro Cid-former Bolsonaro orders of orders.
