Brazil court convicts first defendants in pro-Bolsonaro riots

AFP :
In the first verdicts over riots by supporters of Brazil’s far-right ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, the Supreme Court sentenced three defendants Thursday to heavy jail terms on charges including an attempted coup.

The court sentenced Aecio Pereira and Matheus Lima de Carvalho to 17 years in prison, for their role in the riots that overran the seat of power in Brasilia on January 8.

A third defendant, Thiago de Assis Mathar, received a 14-year sentence.

Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters overwhelmed security and stormed the presidential palace, Congress and the high court itself that day, trashing the three buildings as they called on the military to oust leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva one week after his inauguration.

“This was no walk in the park. It was a Sunday of devastation, a day of infamy,” said Chief Justice Rosa Weber.

The riots deeply shook a nation still divided by Lula’s narrow win over Bolsonaro in Brazil’s October 2022 presidential race, and drew inevitable comparisons to the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by supporters of then-president Donald Trump — Bolsonaro’s political role model.

Pereira, 51, reportedly a former employee of the Sao Paulo municipal sanitation company, made an obscenity-laced cell-phone video of himself at the Senate president’s table during the invasion, wearing a T-shirt marked “Military Intervention” and urging fellow Bolsonaro supporters to “take to the streets.”

Mathar was caught on security camera footage invading the presidential office suite, said the lead judge on the case, Alexandre de Moraes, citing the police investigation.