A close ally of Jair Bolsonaro has turned against Brazil’s former president, claiming that an aide to the far-right leader tried to “coerce” him into joining a conspiracy to annul the October elections and keep Bolsonaro in power.
Senator Marcos do Val claimed at a news conference on Thursday that he was invited to a meeting on 9 December with the then president by a fellow member of congress, Daniel Silveira, to discuss a plan to “save Brazil” .
At the meeting, Silveira allegedly asked Do Val to try to induce the country’s top electoral authority, the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes, into making compromising comments in a taped telephone conversation.
The recording would then be used to have De Moraes arrested, and prevent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking over as president on 1 January, Do Val claimed.
Bolsonaro “sat in silence” while Silveira laid out the plot, said Do Val, who claimed that he had refused to join the conspiracy.
The explosive allegations came as Silveira was arrested in the state of Rio de Janeiro on Thursday morning on De Moraes’s orders, having lost his parliamentary immunity with the end of his term a day earlier.
De Moraes accuses Silveira, a hardcore Bolsonaro supporter who has previously been detained for threatening the electoral officials, of disobeying court orders and “complete disrespect and mockery” of the judiciary.
De Moraes has ordered Do Val to testify before federal police within five days as part of the investigation into the former president’s alleged attempt to subvert democracy, Reuters reported.
Do Val’s allegations add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Bolsonaro sought to overturn the results of the October elections, which Lula won by a slim margin. Bolsonaro has still not officially conceded.
These attempts seemingly culminated in the 8 January attack on the capital, Brasília, in which thousands of Bolsonaro supporters ransacked government buildings in what is being treated as an attempted power grab.
In the days following the insurrection, police found a draft decree in the house of Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s former justice minister and the Brasília security chief at the time of the attacks. Analysts say the document could have been used to pave the way for a military coup. Torres is under arrest and due to give evidence to the police on Thursday.
Bolsonaro himself is being investigated as a possible “intellectual author” of the attacks, while authorities are also scrutinising the role of the security forces, amid widespread evidence of collusion with the 8 January rioters.
Do Val initially made the allegations during a Instagram live on Wednesday night, and an account of the alleged plot was published by the rightwing magazine Veja on Thursday, before Do Val gave his press conference.
Under the headline “Indecent Proposal” Veja reported that Bolsonaro told Do Val that the national intelligence agency and presidential security cabinet were on board with the plan to entrap De Moraes.
Do Val gave a different account at the press conference on Thursday, saying that Silveira did all the talking in the meeting and that there was no mention of the two security agencies.
A military officer and trainer of elite security teams with a strong social media presence, Do Val was elected for an eight-year term as senator in 2018 riding the conservative wave that brought Bolsonaro to power.
He was a staunch ally of the previous government in congress. Following his allegations on Wednesday night, he said on social media that he planned to “definitively” leave politics.
Do Val is so far the closest Bolsonaro ally to have turned against the former president – a sign of his growing isolation. The far-right leader is holed up in Orlando, having fled to the US before Lula’s inauguration, and recently applied for a six-month tourist visa.
At a fundraising event in Florida on Wednesday, Bolsonaro told a crowd of supporters that he plans to remain involved in Brazilian politics. According to political commentators in Brazil, however, members of his Liberal party believe he has lost any chance of trying to return to the presidency at the next election, in 2026.
In a further indication of Bolsonaro’s diminished political clout, his candidate for the senate presidency, Rogério Marinho, lost to the Lula-backed Rodrigo Pacheco in an internal election on Wednesday.
Police plan to take Do Val’s testimony as part of their investigations into the 8 January insurrection. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s eldest son, said in congress on Thursday that the meeting described by Do Val “does not constitute any type of crime”.
In a statement later, Flávio Bolsonaro said there was never any coup attempt and that his father is a “defender of law and order and has always played within the four lines of the Constitution.”
During the inaugural session of the supreme court on Wednesday, Chief Justice Rosa Weber said:“[This court’s values] will never be touched or crushed by barbarity, and nor will its judges be intimidated by barbarity.”
