Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup and seeking to “annihilate” the South American country’s democracy.
Justices Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha and Cristiano Zanin ruled on Thursday that Bolsonaro was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election.
Announcing Bolsonaro’s sentence for crimes including coup d’etat and violently attempting to abolish Brazil’s democracy on Thursday night, the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said: “[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state … the greatest consequence [of which] … would have been the return of dictatorship to Brazil .”
On Tuesday, two other judges, Moraes and Flávio Dino, also declared the 70-year-old politician guilty of leading what the former called “a criminal organisation” that had sought to plunge the South American country back into dictatorship.
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