Brazilian police have raided the holiday home of former president Jair Bolsonaro as part of an expanding investigation into an illegal spying racket that allegedly existed during his far-right government.
Federal police officers reportedly arrived at Bolsonaro’s family retreat in Mambucaba, a picturesque seaside village 126 miles west of Rio, early on Monday morning as nine search warrants were executed in different parts of the country.
The ex-president had been staying at the property with his three politician sons, Carlos, Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro, although reports claimed they had left the house earlier in the day. Some local media reports suggested the Bolsonaros had fled by boat but Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Fabio Wajngarten, insisted the men had gone fishing at 5am, “well before [getting] any news” of the operation.
The main target was the ex-president’s second son, Carlos, whose offices in Rio’s city hall and beachside mansion in western Rio were also searched.
GloboNews said the raids had been ordered as a result of police suspicions that 41-year-old Carlos, who is one of his father’s closest confidants, had illegally received intelligence material from his father’s former intelligence chief, Alexandre Ramagem.
Ramagem, who ran Abin, Brazil’s intelligence agency, during Bolsonaro’s 2019-22 government, had his home and offices raided by police last Thursday as part of an investigation into illegal snooping. One of the accusations Ramagem is facing is that, during his time running Abin, he was involved in a “criminal organisation” that used Israeli spyware to track Bolsonaro’s political foes. Police also reportedly suspect that intelligence material was produced by members of a “parallel” intelligence agency to benefit members of the Bolsonaro clan. Ramagem has denied wrongdoing and described the accusations as an attempt to derail his political career and the Bolsonarista right as a whole.
Bolsonaro, who has yet to comment on Monday’s raid on his son’s house, called last week’s operation against Ramagem “relentless persecution”.
Gleisi Hoffmann, one of the closest allies of Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called the spying claims “one of the greatest scandals in Brazilian history”.
Lula’s communications minister, Paulo Pimenta, wrote on social media: “Only in dictatorships do you use the state apparatus to persecute your political rivals and cover up the crimes of your friends.”
Carlos Bolsonaro, a Rio councillor and social media whiz, is one of the most high-profile and pugnacious figures within the world of Bolsonarismo, famed for his ferocious and often enigmatic attacks on X against his father’s political opponents.
In a public statement of their proximity, Carlos travelled to his father’s 2019 inauguration in the presidential Rolls-Royce, alongside Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro calls Carlos “my pitbull”.
On Monday, search warrants were also executed in Salvador; the capital, Brasília, and a nearby city called Formosa. A federal police source told GloboNews officers had seized a computer belonging to Abin. Carlos Bolsonaro has yet to comment on the operation.
In a statement, the federal police said its investigation was probing “a criminal organisation that installed itself within Abin in order to illegally monitor public authorities and other people”. It said Monday’s raids targeted the suspected “political nucleus” of that organisation and were designed to help identify “the main recipients and beneficiaries of information that was illegally produced within Abin, through clandestine actions”. The statement said those being investigated faced possible charges including invasion of other people’s computer devices, illegal interception of communications without a court order, and involvement in a criminal organisation.
Monday’s dramatic events throw Bolsonaro’s political future into even greater doubt. Last year he was banned from seeking election until 2030 for spreading disinformation about Brazil’s electoral system.
The 68-year-old populist is also the target of a series of criminal investigations into his behaviour while president of South America’s largest democracy. They include his handling of the Covid pandemic, which killed more than 700,000 Brazilians, and his role in allegedly inciting the 8 January 2023 riot in Brasília, which Lula’s government has called an attempted coup.
