Yeah, we may be a young democracy but we kind of like it. Oh, well, where to start?
The report (it's 900 pages) may not even be public, I don't know, so it is hard to see exactly what it entails. But here is, from what I read over the past 2 years, what's happening. I'll try to keep things in chronological order. Take it mostly as "alleged" but quite likely.
1) Before the elections, Bolsonaro called for a meeting with ambassadors and said that the electronic voting system was not to be trusted. (No evidence that holds any water was ever given.) This eventually led to Bolsonaro being convicted and losing his political rights for 8 years. Criminal charges may follow.
2) It was a serial occurrence, but as he was about to finish his term, it was discovered that one of his trusted aides was putting pressure at the Customs. Apparently, as a group was coming back from Saudi Arabia or UAE, they got caught trying to smuggle in some jewelry, that was gifted to Brazil by the Saudis. Those were never declared, and some of it was, through intermediaries, being sold abroad to fund... something, but probably his time in FL after he left the country. That aide, who is a major I believe, was eventually arrested and thrown under the bus by the Bolsonaro family (one of his sons is a Senator for Rio de Janeiro, another a Congressman for São Paulo, a third a City Councilman in Rio. The third one is the one that is generally doing the dirty work). The aide's father, a general, got mad and told him to sing. More on his sweet music later.
3) He lost the election (the last Sunday of Oct. 2022 was the second round) and never conceded. Many people around him and him were saying, again without any evidence, that there was widespread fraud. The military even released a report where they said they could not find any evidence, but that doesn't mean there was no fraud anyway. His party tried, in bad faith, to cancel a percentage of the votes. Which ones? Exclusively the ones that were not for Bolsonaro. Supreme Justice Moraes (he of the knocking heads with Elon Musk and a recurring character in this tale), essentially, said they were out of their minds and fined them US$ 20 million or so.
4) Supporters of him started to gather outside military bases and, essentially, call for a military coup. They were generally peaceful, but a nuisance, obviously. Truck drivers were also blocking roads, not as peacefully.
5) I think it was December 12th, 2022. That's the day that the election winners are essentially confirmed (just a formality here; they are declared a few hours after the election, and any pending irregularities are judged in the meantime, but for the most part, they get a certificate stating they were elected for such and such office). The mob got restless, and tried to invade the Federal Police building in Brasilia (I can't recall the exact rationality).
6) A few days before the end of his term, Bolsonaro flew to Orlando. It may or may not be relevant to his entry into the US, but he and some cronies were using a falsified vaccine certificate. He stayed there for a few months and eventually came back when his visa was about to expire.
7) Jan 1st, 2023: Lula takes office. A long sigh of relief is hear everywhere. Except...
8) Sunday, January 8th, 2023. (I didn't see most of this in real-time, as my Dad had just passed.) What became our Jan 6th. A mob breaks into the Congress and Supreme Court, creates a lot of havoc, and destroys a lot of things. Beyond the general idea that they wanted to overthrow the government, I have no idea what they intended to accomplish. Particularly because both buildings were empty. An investigation into what, how, and why this happened starts.
9) So, there are some threads of investigation here. The camps, the jewelry, the meeting with ambassadors, Jan 8th, the falsified vaccine cards. I'm not sure what led to what, as they are all quite interconnected since the characters (Bolsonaro and his upper echelon) are quite constant. I'm not even going into the use of ABIN, essentially our MI5 / MI6, to investigate and find dirt on enemies of the Bolsonaros.
10) In any case, that aide back in Part 2, sang a lot. He was the personal aide to Bolsonaro, so privy to a lot. Eventually, they got to the plot that is what is causing today's indictments directly. Going back to November 2022, large parts of the military were convinced of fraud. Through another general (lots of them in this), who was senior secretary of Bolsonaro's cabinet, they were:
a) Making sure the camps from Part 4 were allowed to stay and grow. They got worried after December 12th that they were losing strenght.
b) Starting an assassination plot. Braga, who was the VP candidate and (you guessed it) a former general was instrumental in this planning. There were 4 SpecOps, led by the guy I mentioned above, and had contacts from the Federal Police about the security of Lula, Moraes and others. The aide told them to try and get funding with Bolsonaro's party (election year means they had a lot of undeclared and unused cash from the campaigns, I'm sure). They were, with Bolsonaro's knowledge and assent, creating a plan. They got burner phoses. They exchanged weeks of info and instructions. The idea was to, on December 15th, 2022, kidnap and kill Moraes; poison Lula; kill somehow Lula's VP, Alckmin. There was someone else to be killed, some assume it was Dino, who was to become the Sec of Justice and now also sits on the Supreme Court, but it's all hypothetical so far.
Apparently, they had some operational issues on Dec 15th. Moraes moved sooner than expected and they aborted the plan. For some reason, it died there. My own hypotheses is that Bolsonaro got cold feet. Also, there was one of the generals within the Army, the Army Commander in fact, that was adamant against anything weird; that may have been what kept Bolsonaro from giving the go ahead after the first hiccup.
So this is, in very broad terms what led to this. Bolsonaro and 36 others (notably, not one of his sons are listed) got indicted for attempted coup and what is akin to the RICO Act.
I sure hope this is all well argued and results on something, perchance a lower influence of the military in our politics.
I open the floor to questions. Thank you for reading.
