After Bolsonaro’s conviction, Brazil already considers his amnesty

Former president Jair Bolsonaro greets supporters at a rally in Copacabana beach Jan. 8, 2023. Brazil’s top court sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison. The nation’s Congress is already debating how to free him. (Dado Galdieri/The New York Times)

By JACK NICAS

On live television for the past two weeks, Brazil has watched five Supreme Court justices convict former President Jair Bolsonaro of attempting a coup and sentence him to 27 years in prison. He could report to prison next month.

At the same time, in private meetings across a plaza from the trial, some members of Brazil’s Congress have been discussing how to free him.

The debate is over whether to grant Bolsonaro and his fellow defendants amnesty — absolving them of their crimes of trying to overturn the 2022 election — and it has been churning in Brazil for weeks, casting a shadow over a young democracy with a long history of coups.

Members of Congress have been circulating legislation, television commentators have been speculating about the chances, and dueling protesters on each side have been chanting for and against it. Activists have even projected “No amnesty” with the Brazilian flag on Tower Bridge in London.

Amnesty has quickly become so central to the national conversation in Brazil that as Bolsonaro was being tried this past week, it was the elephant in the courtroom: Sure, the former president was about to be convicted — but for how long?

It is far from certain that Bolsonaro will be absolved, and the legislative and legal process has a long way to go before that could happen. But that amnesty had become such a prominent topic, even before a verdict, says much about Brazil, its politics and its history.

“Amnesty is a tradition in our country,” said Ciro Nogueira, Bolsonaro’s former chief of staff, who as a leader in the Senate is now pushing for amnesty. “It has been a way to bring peace and turn the page on the conflicts. Otherwise, you remain stuck with them forever.”

Brazil emerged from a monarchy in 1889, via a coup. Between then and 2022, the nation experienced another 14 military coups, half of them successful. In every failed attempt, the plotters were granted amnesty and were never prosecuted.

That means Thursday was the first time that Brazil has convicted leaders of an attempted coup with links to the military. In addition to Bolsonaro, the Supreme Court convicted seven other men, including Bolsonaro’s running mate, defense minister, national security adviser and navy commander. Nearly all face lengthy prison sentences.

“It is totally unprecedented,” said Carlos Fico, a Brazilian historian and author of “Brazilian Authoritarian Utopia,” a book on Brazil’s history of coups. “There has never been punishment for the plotters of a military coup.”

Instead, Brazilian leaders have repeatedly reached for amnesty after destabilizing moments, a bid to ease unrest and move on, Fico said. Yet that has come with consequences.

“The lack of punishment for coup attempts only brings a temporary pacification because it actually encourages a new coup attempt,” said Fernando Gabeira, a former Brazilian member of Congress and prominent political analyst. “It doesn’t work because people feel encouraged to try again.”

Gabeira has his own history with amnesty.

In 1964, Brazil’s military carried out its most consequential coup, launching a dictatorship that lasted two decades. Five years later, Gabeira helped kidnap the U.S. ambassador to Brazil to protest America’s support for the dictatorship. His leftist group secured the release of 15 political prisoners before releasing the ambassador.

But he never faced significant consequences for the kidnapping. That is because in 1979, Brazil passed a broad amnesty law for political crimes. It paved the way for the peaceful end to the dictatorship — but it also meant that few faced justice for their actions during the dictatorship, including the democratic activists who fought back with violence and the military officials who kidnapped, jailed, tortured and disappeared political opponents.

By contrast, neighbors including Argentina, Chile and Uruguay experienced similar dictatorships but have prosecuted many of the military leaders who carried them out.

Brazil’s approach reflects its political culture of conciliation. The current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was once imprisoned on a corruption conviction for 580 days, but the case was later thrown out, and he returned to power.

Now many people wonder if it all could happen again with Bolsonaro.

“If amnesty passes, then that old saying that many people repeat — that Brazil is the country of impunity — will truly become reality,” Martele Pereira da Silva, 62, a nutritionist, said this past week at a protest against amnesty in Rio de Janeiro.

The answer now lies with Brazil’s Congress. Much of the debate will focus on whether to grant amnesty to Bolsonaro and his co-conspirators, or only to people convicted of ransacking Brazil’s halls of power in January 2023 in a riot intended to provoke a military takeover.

The rioters’ sentences have been widely criticized as overly harsh, including a 14-year sentence given to one woman who used lipstick to vandalize an outdoor statue. The Supreme Court, one of the main targets of the riots, handed down the sentences.

Brazilians are divided. Just over half said they opposed broad amnesty for the leaders of the most recent attempted coup, while 47% said they supported it, according to an opinion survey in August.

That has helped stoke the debate in Congress. There appears to be enough votes for amnesty in Brazil’s lower chamber of Congress, but there are many hurdles after that.

Support is less clear in the Senate, the upper chamber, with the Senate’s president saying he would not bring the issue to a vote. Lula would almost certainly veto any amnesty, though Congress could overturn that. And then the law would also have to survive a likely challenge in the Supreme Court, which has spent years prosecuting Bolsonaro.

Another route would have Congress pass a law to reduce sentencing requirements for Bolsonaro’s crimes, requiring a reduction in his sentence.

Hovering over the debate is next year’s presidential election. Bolsonaro is ineligible to run, but he remains the most popular politician on Brazil’s right.

Analysts speculate that congressional and party leaders could be offering Bolsonaro amnesty in exchange for his endorsement of a more moderate candidate in the election. Nogueira, Bolsonaro’s ally in the Senate, denied that.

The next president could also pardon Bolsonaro, though the Supreme Court has ruled that pardons cannot be used to protect a political ally.

Bolsonaro’s best bet to avoid prison is his expected request to serve his sentence under house arrest because of lingering medical problems from a stabbing he suffered on the campaign trail in 2018. He recently underwent major surgery, and he watched his trial from home because, his lawyers said, his health is so poor.

Where Bolsonaro serves his sentence will be decided largely by Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice who led the investigation into the former president and, as a result, became a target of the right.

When closing the trial Thursday, he made clear that amnesty had not worked in the past.

“What leads to peace is due process — a public and transparent trial like this one,” de Moraes said. “This is what leads to the healing of wounds, the strengthening of democracy and ensuring that neither a coup attempt nor the abolition of the democratic state ever occurs again.”