Two weeks ago, Bolsonaro had his sixth operation to deal with the intestinal damage he suffered in an assassination attempt in 2018, but the doctors say that it was unsuccessful. He remains in intensive care.
The former army captain and hard-right politician who was Brazil’s president in 2019-22 was already facing political oblivion. When he called on his supporters to make a show of strength on Rio’s Copacabana Beach last summer, he hoped for more than a million people. About 18,000 turned up.
Bolsonaro could go to jail for more than 40 years if he is found guilty of plotting to reverse his electoral defeat in 2022 by a military coup, and it’s very likely that he will be convicted if he survives.
The five supreme court judges were unanimous in ruling that he should stand trial. He claims he is the target of a political witch-hunt, of course.
Bolsonaro and seven allies (four generals, a colonel, his civilian spy chief and security minister) were charged with involvement in an armed criminal organisation, planning a coup d’etat and violently attempting to abolish Brazilian democracy.
His former personal assistant, Lieutenant-colonel Mauro Cid, has already made a plea deal and spilled his guts, so it looks bad for all the others.
What is weird is that these allegedly professional military officers and skilled political operators were so stunningly incompetent at planning a coup and so lackadaisical in carrying it out.
The civilian "demonstrators" who would have provided an excuse for putting soldiers on the street duly showed up and stormed Brazil’s Congress and the Supreme Court on January 8, 2023, but then they just wandered around stealing things or smashing them.
The military never left their barracks, and Bolsonaro himself was "on holiday" at the time, in Orlando, Florida.
The civil authorities who responded to this shambolic attempted coup were equally feckless.
Of the people who occupied the government buildings in Brasilia, 1400 were eventually arrested, but most of them only weeks later after being identified from video footage.
Charges have only been laid against the alleged plotters of the coup two years after the event.
On paper, the plot was ruthless and horrific: poison the new president, Luiz Inacio da Silva (Lula), shoot supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes dead and shut down the Congress and the superior courts.
In practice, it was a clown car whose driver has fallen asleep. You can’t take the plotters seriously because they were so sloppy and so easily discouraged.
But then you remember that only two years previously, Bolsonaro’s idol Donald Trump had also narrowly lost an election he expected to win and had similarly responded by insisting that he had really won it.
Bolsonaro followed the Trump playbook to the letter, right down to the takeover of Congress (January 6, 2021, for Trump, January 8, 2023, for Bolsonaro).
But then the protagonists ran out of nerve and botched the last act — in both cases.
Bolsonaro watched his mob wandering around Congress aimlessly but never risked getting on a plane and going home to lead them.
Trump wrestled with his Secret Service driver for the steering wheel for a moment, insisting he wanted to join his rioters in Congress — then went tamely back to the White House and spent the rest of the day watching the events play out on television.
I’m not claiming that Trump was conspiring with American senior officers in 2021 to stage a putsch and put him back in power. I’m not even insisting that the Brazilian senior officers now facing grave charges all fully committed themselves to a plan of action ending in the violent takeover of the state, although they certainly dabbled with the notion.
I’m just saying that the two events were similar in broad outline and in spirit, and that both ended in failure because the men who wanted to take back power illegally lacked the courage and the will to gamble everything on one throw of the dice.
Good. It’s almost always better if politicians obey the law, even if they are only doing so by default.
But most people learn from their experiences and try to do better next time.
For Bolsonaro, there is probably no next time, and one can imagine the frustration and disappointment he must feel as he watches his American counterpart put the lessons he learned last time into practice.
Act first. Act fast. And take no prisoners.
■ Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
