Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is staying at a friend’s house in Florida, resurfaced in public on Monday for the first time since his hospitalization, chatting with fans in the street in front of the home in which he is staying about the riot in Brasilia.
Bolsonaro left his country on December 30, according to many reports, to take a vacation following the end of his presidential tenure on January 1. He is currently staying in a luxury condominium in Kissimmee, central Florida, owned by MMA fighter José Aldo, according to the Brazilian outlet Metropoles, which published a video of his conversation with supporters on Monday.
The conservative former president’s stay in America became the subject of controversy on January 8, when thousands of his supporters flocked to the capital and attacked the headquarters of the nation’s Congress, Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF, the supreme court), and the presidential offices, Planalto. The January 8 riot destroyed the outer facades of the STF and Congress and left the court’s chambers largely unusable, as well as vandalizing, stealing, or fully destroying priceless artwork and historical artifacts. The government reported dozens of injuries, but no deaths.
Bolsonaro supporters had convened that day to protest the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a hardline socialist convicted on multiple appeals of corruption during his prior time in office. Lula served as president from 2003 to 2011, presiding over a nationwide corruption scheme now known as “Operation Car Wash” in which government officials overcharged private contractors for infrastructure project contracts, then received kickbacks from the excess taxpayers’ funds.
Lula opponents argue that his multiple criminal convictions, overturned on a technicality in 2021 by the STF, should have disqualified him from being on the ballot in 2022. Some have called for the military to intervene and oust the president, arguing that provisions in the Brazilian constitution grant the armed forces that power.
Since the riot, Bolsonaro had only made three public statements of note prior to this week: a condemnation of the riot on the night of January 8 via Twitter, a statement to CNN Brasil explaining that he traveled to Florida for a family vacation and intends to return to his country, and confirmation via Twitter that he was briefly hospitalized in Florida due to complications from a 2018 assassination attempt – a stabbing that left his digestive tract heavily scarred. Bolsonaro’s Twitter account, finally updated this week to no longer list him as a presidential candidate, also regularly posts messages detailing his administration’s political and economic successes, but they are written in a promotional, not personal, tone.
Multiple videos and photos taken by passersby in Florida of Bolsonaro have also surfaced online in the past month, including a now-infamous photo of the former president eating fried chicken at a KFC and a bizarre video of Bolsonaro ambling around the local supermarket Publix.
In the video published by Metropoles on Monday, Bolsonaro appears to be addressing a small crowd of Brazilian supporters outside the condominium where he is staying in Florida. Bolsonaro speaks to them in Portuguese, first touting more administration successes – echoing the posts on Twitter – then addressing the riot.
Bolsonaro quebra silêncio e diz que cometeu deslizes no governo
Bolsonaro também mencionou os ataques terroristas que ocorreram em Brasília no último dia 8 e classificou o episódio como "inacreditável"
Leia: https://t.co/guvlGmbFkf pic.twitter.com/xgcJ1ynrBA
— Metrópoles (@Metropoles) January 16, 2023
“I lament what happened on the 8th, an incredible thing,” Bolsonaro can be heard saying. “But in my government, people learned what politics is, got to know the powers, began to value freedom.”
“I spoke for some about freedom and they said it was like the sun, it is born every day, but it is not like that,” he continued, in an apparent swipe at Lula. “People believe in Brazil.”
Bolsonaro also admitted to some “mistakes” in office, stating that, when he was president, “every day was Monday.”
“Were there any holes [in my governance]? Of course there were,” he said. “We make some mistakes at home, never mind in the government. But at home, we know who is responsible – it’s always us, the husbands.”
Any public references Bolsonaro makes to the riot will likely be the subject of heavy public and judicial scrutiny at home. Leftists in Brazil and in the United States have suggested that the president may have helped organize or incite the storming of Brasilia by refusing to participate in Lula’s inauguration and suggesting that the government should do more to ensure the integrity of elections. A group of dozens of far-left lawmakers pressured leftist American President Joe Biden last week to investigate Bolsonaro’s legal status in America and potentially expel him from the country.
At home, Lula’s government has arrested nearly 2,000 people in relation to the riot. Most of them were reportedly in and around a protest camp outside of the Brazilian armed forces headquarters in the capital, where Bolsonaro supporters had stationed themselves for weeks asking the military to prevent Lula from taking office and, later, remove him following his inauguration. Police were later forced to release over 600 of those arrested, many of them elderly, mothers of young children, suffering from significant health ailments, or otherwise not apparently posing any threat to the state.
Brazilian media, citing journalists and inside sources, have reported since the riot that some in Lula’s administration see a path to prosecuting Bolsonaro over the event – and many on Bolsonaro’s side fear that Lula will move to arrest the former president, or at least bar him from running for office again.
“The political calculus of loyal allies, the more vulnerable Bolsonaro is and the less popular support he can attract, the greater the chances that he becomes ‘easy prey’ for the judiciary and ends up in jail,” the newspaper O Globo reported the day after the riot.
On Tuesday O Globo reported, citing STF insiders, that most of the judges on the court do not support any immediate moves to arrest the former president, fearing potential violations of due process and increased public unrest.
“The word of the moment is caution,” the newspaper reported, but suggested that Bolsonaro opponents see a much clearer path to banning him from running for public office than to putting him in prison.
“The reading of most members of the court is that having the former president behind bars today could further disrupt the national scenario,” the newspaper reported, “whether in the social or political sphere. In addition, they point out that Bolsonaro needs to have ‘all the guarantees of the legal process observed’ – that is, respond to the process and have the right to defend himself.”
A report in the Brazilian outlet UOL suggested that barring him from being a candidate for public office is a much likelier scenario and could happen in as little as a month. Bolsonaro opponents are clinging to the discovery of a document trashed in the home of former Brazilian Justice Minister Anderson Torres allegedly invalidating the 2022 election. Torres was head of public security in Brasilia on the day of the riot and was arrested in its aftermath on suspicions of malicious neglect for allegedly allowing the riot to happen.
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