Bolsonaro ordered to begin serving 27-year prison sentence for attempted coup

By Max Saltman, Julia Vargas Jones, CNN

(CNN) — Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro must begin serving his 27-year prison sentence for plotting an attempted coup, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ruled Tuesday.

The former president’s defense team had chosen not to file a final appeal after his conviction for plotting a coup in 2022 to overthrow his successor, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. As a result, Moraes requested that the conviction be deemed final, quashing any chance of further appeals and triggering Bolsonaro’s 27-year sentence.

Bolsonaro has been jailed in Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters since Saturday, after police took him into custody for tampering with his court-ordered ankle monitor. On Tuesday, Moraes said Bolsonaro would serve out his sentence at the headquarters.

On Saturday, Bolsonaro’s lawyers described the former president’s arrest as “unjustifiable” and claimed that his health is at risk while imprisoned. Later, the Supreme Court released a video, which it says shows Bolsonaro admitting to tampering with his ankle monitor with a soldering iron. He allegedly said that he did so not as an attempt to escape from house arrest, but rather because new medications had caused him to hallucinate.

The case that landed Bolsonaro in prison began shortly after he lost his 2022 re-election bid to Lula da Silva. Federal authorities say that the former president and his co-conspirators almost immediately began mapping out an illegal path to retain the presidency, with one result being a dramatic January 8, 2023 attack on government buildings in Brasilia by Bolsonaro supporters.

After US President Donald Trump – a Bolsonaro ally – was reelected in 2024, the United States soon began commenting on the case as a matter of foreign policy. In July, Trump even imposed steep tariffs on some Brazilian exports, urging Brazil to drop what he called a “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.

By the time Bolsonaro was taken into custody over the weekend, however, the White House had carved out tariff exceptions for Brazil’s biggest exports. Asked about Bolsonaro’s arrest on Saturday, Trump told reporters he hadn’t heard about it but that it was “too bad.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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