Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro was the mentor of “a wilful and premeditated coup attempt” that sought to plunge Latin America’s largest democracy into political mayhem and perhaps even civil war, a congressional inquiry investigating the 8 January insurrection has alleged.
The dramatic assertion was made on Tuesday as the senator Eliziane Gama read the inquiry’s final report into January’s failed rightwing uprising in which thousands of radical Bolsonaro supporters rampaged through the capital, Brasília, after their leader failed to win re-election.
