Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has denied his involvement in an alleged plot to overthrow the country’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Speaking for the first time in court, Bolsonaro, who ruled the country between 2019 and 2022, said a coup was an “abominable thing” and there was “never even a possibility of a coup in my government”.
Along with seven “co-conspirators”, the 70-year-old is standing trial over the events which led up to the storming of government buildings by his supporters on 8 January 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration.
The former president could face decades in prison if he is convicted. He has always denied the charges against him.
Questioned by Judge Alexandre de Moraes in court on Tuesday about the alleged charge of plotting a coup, Bolsonaro said the charge “does not hold, your Excellency”.
Speaking later, he said: “I only have one thing to affirm to your excellency: on my part, on the part of military commanders, there has never been talk of a coup. A coup is an abominable thing.”
“Brazil couldn’t go through an experience like that. And there was never even the possibility of a coup in my government,” he added.
Bolsonaro narrowly lost the presidential election to Lula in 2022.
Following Lula’s victory, Bolsonaro ramped up false claims that there had been faults with electronic voting machines in the run-up to the election.
The prosecution alleged Bolsonaro’s claims of voter fraud started as early as 2021 as a pretext that could be used to question a possible defeat in the 2022 election.
Responding in court, Bolsonaro said he wasn’t the only person who distrusts electronic voter machines and said he had acted within the rules of the constitution.
“Many times I rebelled, I swear. But, in my opinion, I did what had to be done,” he told the court on Tuesday.
Bolsonaro is the sixth defendant to take the stand since the trial started in May.
The eight defendants are accused of five charges, which include attempting to stage a coup, involvement in an armed criminal organisation, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, aggravated damage and deterioration of listed heritage.
Most have so far denied the charges against them.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and admirer of US President Donald Trump, governed Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022.
He narrowly lost a presidential election run-off in October 2022 to his left-wing rival, Lula.
Bolsonaro never publicly acknowledged his defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camping outside army barracks in an attempt to convince the military to prevent Lula from being sworn in as president as scheduled on 1 January 2023.
A week after Lula’s inauguration, on 8 January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, in what federal investigators say was an attempted coup.
Bolsonaro was in the United States at the time and has always denied any links to the rioters.
He has already been barred from running for public office until 2030 for falsely claiming that Brazil’s voting system was vulnerable to fraud, but he has declared his intention to fight that ban so that he can run for a second term in 2026.
