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election 2022
Bolsonaro and 36 Others Indicted in Brazil Over Right-Wing Coup Attempt
"Well, look at this thing called 'accountability,'" said one MSNBC host.
Nov 21, 2024
The Brazilian Federal Police on Thursday indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 others for allegedly plotting the "violent overthrow of the democratic state" after the country's current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, defeated the right-wing leader in 2022.
"The final report has been sent to the Supreme Court with the request that 37 individuals be indicted for the crimes of the violent overthrow of the democratic state, coup d' etat, and criminal organization," police said in a statement about the conclusion of the two-year investigation.
As The New York Timesexplained: "Although the police in Brazil can make recommendations about criminal prosecutions, they do not have the power to formally charge Mr. Bolsonaro. The country's top federal prosecutor, Paulo Gonet, must now... decide whether to pursue charges against Mr. Bolsonaro and compel him to stand trial before the nation's Supreme Court."
The recommendations for charges came after the arrest of four members of the military and a federal police officer earlier this week over an alleged plot to kill Lula and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin before they were sworn in, as well as Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Police said that "a detailed operational plan called 'Green and Yellow Dagger' was identified, which would be executed on December 15, 2022, aimed at the murder of the elected candidates for president and vice president."
According toCNN, "Police reportedly allege that Bolsonaro had 'full knowledge' of a plan to prevent Lula and his government from taking office after his election victory."
Summarizing a conversation with a columnist, Bolsonaro said on social media Thursday that "we have to see what is in this indictment by the Federal Police. I will wait for the lawyer." He also said that Moraes "does everything that the law does not say" and "I cannot expect anything from a team that uses creativity to denounce me."
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, including with two other pending cases: In March he was indicted for allegedly falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination data and in July he was indicted for crimes including embezzlement related to alleged misappropriation of diamond jewelry and other state property. Those indictments came after Brazil's highest election authority last year barred him from running for any public office for eight years over his lies about the 2022 contest.
In addition to Bolsonaro, the other three dozen people indicted on Thursday include "some of the most important members of his far-right administration," The Guardianreported. As the newspaper detailed:
They included Bolsonaro's former spy chief, the far-right Congressman Alexandre Ramagem; the former defense ministers, Gen. Walter Braga Netto and Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; the former minister of justice and public security, Anderson Torres; the former minister of institutional security, Gen. Augusto Heleno; the former navy commander Adm. Almir Garnier Santos; the president of Bolsonaro's political party, Valdemar Costa Neto; and Filipe Martins, one of Bolsonaro's top foreign policy advisers.
Also named is the right-wing blogger grandson of Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo, one of the military rulers who governed Brazil during its 1964-85 dictatorship.
The list contains one non-Brazilian name: that of Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian digital marketing guru who was in charge of communications for Argentina's president, Javier Milei, during that country's 2023 presidential campaign. Buenos Aires-based Cerimedo is close to Bolsonaro and his politician sons.
Given that Bolsonaro previously traveled to the United States when faced with legal trouble shortly after his loss two years ago, in this case, "precautionary measures have been issued, including a ban on international travel, which led to the confiscation of Bolsonaro's passport months ago," EL Paísnoted Thursday.
Bolsonaro was among the right-wing leaders around the world who celebrated U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's victory earlier this month. The Brazilian—who is sometimes called the "Trump of the Tropics" and like the American incited an insurrection after his last electoral loss—said that the impact of Trump's win "will resonate across the globe... empowering the rise of the right and conservative movements in countless other nations."
Trump's return to office is expected to at least stall if not end his various legal issues, including for trying to overturn his 2020 loss.
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Brazil's Bolsonaro Indicted for Falsifying Covid Vaccine Records
"Fraud has always been the specialty of Bolsonaro, the Father of Lies," said the chair of the left-wing Workers' Party.
Mar 19, 2024
Brazil's Federal Police on Tuesday indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination data and criminal association, marking the first time the far-right leader has been criminally charged.
Federal Police Detective Fábio Alvarez Shor said in his indictment report that Bolsonaro and aides forged vaccination records "to cheat current health restrictions" ahead of a trip to the United States—which at the time required visitors to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
"The investigation found several false insertions between November 2021 and December 2022, and also many actions of using fraudulent documents," the detective wrote.
In addition to Bolsonaro, Moro Cid, a top aide, and Gutemberg Reis, a federal lawmaker, were also indicted. Cid previously told investigators that Bolsonaro asked him to falsely record that the president and his 12-year-old daughter had been vaccinated. Fourteen other associates are also implicated in the alleged crimes.
Investigators previously alleged that "the objective of the group was to hold together in relation to their ideological agenda; in this case, to sustain the rhetoric regarding their attacks on the coronavirus vaccine."
Gleisi Hoffmann, a federal lawmaker who chairs the leftist Workers' Party of current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, responded to the indictment on social media, writing, "Fraud has always been the specialty of Bolsonaro, the Father of Lies."
If fully convicted, Bolsonaro—who denies any wrongdoing—faces 12-16 years behind bars.
Bolsonaro is a notorious Covid-19 vaccine skeptic who once suggested that getting the shot could turn people into alligators. The president's policies and actions sparked massive nationwide protests during the height of the pandemic. His administration also came under fire for intentionally stalling coronavirus vaccine deals with Pfizer and for allegedly conditioning the purchase of other vaccine stockpiles on bribes.
An investigation by Brazilian lawmakers into Bolsonaro's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic accused him of "crimes against humanity" and blamed his policies for more than 300,000 deaths. Paulo Gonet, Brazil's top prosecutor, was slated to meet with federal lawmakers on Tuesday to consider pandemic-related charges against Bolsonaro.
A 2021 study examining the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil concluded that 400,000 lives could have been saved had the Bolsonaro administration enacted more stringent social distancing rules and started vaccinating people sooner.
Last year, Brazil's Superior Electoral Court banned Bolsonaro from holding office again until 2030 after finding that he abused power by making baseless claims of fraud in the 2022 presidential election, which he lost to Lula, who served as president from 2003-10.
Bolsonaro faces numerous additional investigations, including a probe of his role in the far-right uprising in Brasília, the capital, on January 8, 2023. A congressional inquiry found that Bolsonaro was the "intellectual and moral author of a coup movement" that culminated in the storming of government buildings last year. The lawmakers behind the inquiry recommended indictments for Bolsonaro and associates.
Some former top military officials have recently turned on Bolsonaro, accusing their erstwhile supreme commander—who was an army officer during Brazil's U.S.-backed military dictatorship—of pushing them to stage a coup to keep him in power.
Lula said Monday that Bolsonaro failed to carry out a coup "not only because some people who were in charge of the armed forces didn't want to do it and accept the president's idea, but also because the president is a big coward."
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Fighting Back Against Texas’s Voter Suppression Law
While SB1 is one of many antidemocracy laws enacted by 19 states in the year after the 2020 election, it stands out for its sheer number of restrictive and discriminatory provisions, which largely target Latino and Black voters.
Sep 17, 2023
Trial began Monday in a major federal lawsuit challenging a wide-ranging and discriminatory voter suppression law Texas enacted in 2021. The Brennan Center, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and our other co-counsel represent a wide swath of Texans, including election administrators, community groups, civil rights and voting organizations, and faith-based groups. Over the course of the trial, we will show how Senate Bill 1 violates the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
While SB1 is one of many antidemocracy laws enacted by 19 states in the year after the 2020 election, it stands out for its sheer number of restrictive and discriminatory provisions, which largely target Latino and Black voters. This is likely the only challenge to such an extensive restrictive voting law that will go to trial between now and the 2024 election.
Among its host of restrictive provisions, the law establishes onerous new rules for voting by mail and curbs voter outreach activities. It also hinders voting assistance for people with language barriers or disabilities and restricts election officials’ and judges’ ability to protect voters from harassment by poll watchers. Like the dozens of restrictive state voting laws that have been enacted nationwide in the last three years, SB1’s proponents claim that it is intended to fight voter fraud. Indeed, its myriad provisions appear to respond directly to baseless claims peddled by Donald Trump and his fellow election deniers about the security of mail-in voting and election administration.
In a state that was already the toughest in the nation to register and vote, Texans now have an even harder time staying on the voter rolls, casting their ballots, and ensuring their ballots are counted.
Yet Texas has never found evidence of widespread fraud—and not for lack of trying. Without the pretext of making elections more secure, SB1 is simply an unconstitutional effort to suppress eligible voters in marginalized communities. It seems no coincidence that after people of color surged in turnout in Texas’s 2018 and 2020 elections, the legislature passed a law that restricts methods of voting favored by Black and Latino voters and impairs voter assistance to those with limited English proficiency or limited literacy.
The plaintiffs in the case, LUPE v. Texas, can attest to the various ways SB1 has created obstacles to the ballot box that infringe on the constitutional right to vote. Voters of color have been disproportionately impacted by these burdens, violating their right to equal protection, the 15th Amendment’s protection against race-based disenfranchisement, and the Voting Rights Act. Our plaintiffs’ anecdotal experiences are backed by state voting records in the wake of the law’s enactment. Brennan Center research shows that just a single provision—which has recently been blocked by a judge—led to massive disenfranchisement with major racial disparities in Texas’s 2022 primaries.
The law’s new rules for mail-in voting required people to write the last four digits of their driver’s license number or social security number on their mail ballot application and mail ballot envelope. Officials had to reject an application or ballot if the number provided didn’t match the number on file in a voter’s registration record, even if that person was eligible to vote. These mismatches weren’t always the result of someone writing the number incorrectly but rather providing a correct number that didn’t coincide with the ID they used when they registered to vote—which could have been more than a decade ago. Tens of thousands of applications and mail ballots were tossed solely for having a missing or mismatched ID number, and nonwhite voters were at least 30% more likely than white voters to have their application or mail ballot rejected. A significant portion of those prevented from voting by mail ultimately didn’t vote at all.
Similarly, the law curtails the ability of people with disabilities or with limited English or literacy skills to get help voting, denying them the equal voting access and assistance they’re entitled to under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Voting Rights Act. In particular, SB1 imposes new requirements and penalties for voter assisters that have deterred volunteers from aiding voters at the polls. It also makes it a crime to compensate or receive compensation for helping people vote by mail, which prohibits civic organizations from supporting community members who have trouble filling out the forms. Several witnesses will speak to how these provisions made it difficult for them to secure the help they needed to vote in the 2022 election.
Voters aren’t the only ones struggling under SB1. The law also targets election officials and poll workers, who are already facing a torrent of threats, harassment, and abuse. One provision makes it a crime for poll workers to “take any action” that would make a partisan poll watcher’s observation “not reasonably effective.” This unconstitutionally vague directive gives poll workers no clear sense of what they can and can’t do to stop poll watchers from harassing or intimidating voters, leaving poll workers fearful of being prosecuted just for doing their jobs. In the face of this uncertainty, some experienced poll workers have declined to sign up for future elections.
The heavy burdens that Texas’s law imposes at every stage of voting are becoming increasingly apparent. In a state that was already the toughest in the nation to register and vote, Texans now have an even harder time staying on the voter rolls, casting their ballots, and ensuring their ballots are counted. And in the two years since SB1’s enactment, state legislators around the country have continued to push legislation aimed at restricting voting access for Black, Latino, and vulnerable voters and making elections more susceptible to partisan meddling. Leaving these unconstitutional voter suppression measures unchallenged can only serve to spur further attacks on the freedom to vote in Texas and beyond.
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