BRASÍLIA, Brazil — Jair Bolsonaro had just nine weeks to pull off a plan that was both risky and extraordinary. With the help of allies, prosecutors say, he was intent on overturning the October 2022 presidential election he had lost.
A close aide came up with a sinister solution: poisoning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had defeated Bolsonaro, before he was sworn in as Brazil’s next president on New Year’s Day 2023, according to a document that had been printed at the presidential offices while Bolsonaro was in the building.
“Lula does not walk up the ramp,” referring to the sloped path to the presidential offices, said another document seized during a police raid on Bolsonaro’s party headquarters.
The trial of Bolsonaro, who denies plotting to kill Lula, began Tuesday before Brazil’s Supreme Court on charges that he oversaw a sweeping plan to cling to power in a case many see as a crucial test of the country’s young democracy. With a vast trove of prosecutorial evidence, most analysts say he is almost certain to be found guilty and could face decades in prison.
To piece together the case against Bolsonaro, The New York Times reviewed dozens of hours of testimony and hundreds of pages of police and prosecution documents from an investigation spanning nearly two years.
Prosecutors and Bolsonaro’s defense each point to the evidence to tell sharply diverging stories.
To investigators, Bolsonaro and dozens of ministers, military officials and aides worked doggedly to sow doubts about the election result; tried to enlist military leaders in overturning the vote; and drafted plans to jail, or even assassinate, perceived enemies.
To Bolsonaro and his allies, the case is built on lies and weak evidence with the aim of sabotaging his political comeback in next year’s presidential elections. He denies plotting to kill Lula and says what the police portray as a coup attempt was simply his efforts to study “ways within the constitution” to remain in power after losing an election he claims was stolen from him.
The plan to keep Bolsonaro in power went into high gear in late October 2022, after Lula was declared the winner of the election, according to testimony given to investigators by Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, the president’s personal secretary.
Cid was in the room during many discussions among those accused of plotting a coup, and his testimony, which is part of a plea deal, is key to the prosecution’s case against Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro first sought to discredit the results, Cid told police, and he seized on Brazil’s electronic voting machines, which he had claimed for years were rigged, despite providing no evidence. He began planning an official complaint with electoral authorities, claiming that hundreds of thousands of votes had to be voided because of faulty machines.
Social media amplified claims of fraud, and supporters set up camps in front of army headquarters, demanding that the military nullify the results.
But the plan being hatched by Bolsonaro and his allies, investigators say, went far beyond trying to provoke a popular revolt.
At 9:23 a.m. on Nov. 9, 10 days after Bolsonaro’s defeat, a document, later found on a cellphone seized by investigators, was created at the presidential offices. It sketched out an extreme plan calling for the “extinction of the winning ticket.”
Lula and his running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, would be assassinated using “poison or chemical agents” or “lethal weaponry, such as explosives,” said the document, written by Gen. Mario Fernandes, a top aide to Bolsonaro.
A Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, who had made decisions aimed at blocking online misinformation from Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies, was to be placed under surveillance and then jailed or killed, according to the document.
After a day of editing, Fernandes printed the proposal at 5:09 p.m., investigators say. Forty minutes later, Fernandes arrived at the presidential residence, where Bolsonaro and Cid were present.
But Fernandes says the document was nothing more than musings and that he never showed it to anyone, including Bolsonaro, according to his testimony during a Supreme Court hearing in July.
“I printed it for myself,” he testified. “Soon after, I tore it up.” The visit to the presidential residence, he said, was “a coincidence.”
Three days after the plan was drafted, Gen. Walter Braga Netto, Bolsonaro’s running mate and former chief of staff, called a meeting at his home to discuss implementing it, Cid testified. He told police that he and Braga Netto were joined by two members of an elite special forces unit of the army.
Braga Netto has denied the meeting ever took place, accusing Cid of lying to cut a deal with prosecutors.
As plans were made behind closed doors, the camps of protesters in front of military buildings were growing. Bolsonaro called the demonstrations “the fruit of indignation and feeling of injustice, regarding how the electoral process took place.”
Bolsonaro’s inner circle continued pursuing their targeting of opponents, investigators say. On Dec. 6, Fernandes printed the assassination plan at the presidential offices for a second time, according to investigators. Bolsonaro was in the building, police say, citing signals from cellphone towers.
At the same time, Bolsonaro and his aides were also busy trying to recruit the military’s help, investigators say.
Early on Dec. 7, Cid signed into the presidential residence for an important meeting, according to text messages and entry records recovered by police. Soon, the leaders of Brazil’s three military branches began arriving.
During an hourlong discussion, Bolsonaro presented the top military brass a legal decree calling for the declaration of a state of emergency and new, “clean” elections, according to Cid and what one commander present told police. He would remain in power until a new vote was held. The decree, which Cid said Bolsonaro edited after it had been drafted, also called for jailing de Moraes.
Bolsonaro has said, in court and in the media, that he never discussed doing anything illegal at meetings with military leaders but was instead exploring legal measures within the constitution, including “a state of siege,” as he sought to remain in office while challenging election fraud.
This measure, which temporarily grants special powers to the president, is intended to be used only in times of great crisis or war. And, by then, electoral authorities had already concluded that there were no signs of any irregularities.
At the meeting, the proposed decree drew mixed reactions. The commander of Brazil’s navy supported the plan and placed his troops at Bolsonaro’s disposal, investigators say. But the leaders of the army and the air force flatly rejected the idea.
After the meeting, the group around Bolsonaro planned their next steps. On Dec. 8, Fernandes sent a voice message on WhatsApp to Cid, recounting a conversation he said he had with Bolsonaro. The two, he said, had discussed the timing of the assassination plot.
“I said, ‘Come on, President,’” Fernandes said in the message. “‘We have already missed so many opportunities.’”
But prosecutors say the failed pitch to the commanders worried the group because their plan to overturn the election would probably not succeed without the military’s support.
So, over the next week, the decree was tweaked and softened, according to Cid and digital records recovered by police. Plans to arrest de Moraes and other high-ranking figures were scrubbed from the text. At a second meeting, on Dec. 14, Bolsonaro pitched the revised plan to the three military commanders, the colonel said.
Gen. Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, the army leader, again said no, telling Bolsonaro that his forces “would not act in anything that exceeded its constitutional authority,” he testified at a Supreme Court hearing. He told Bolsonaro that his plot carried legal consequences.
After police found a copy of the decree declaring a state of emergency in Bolsonaro’s home during a search in February 2024, the former president questioned if it was really a plan to thwart democracy as prosecutors claim. “You call that a coup decree?” Bolsonaro said. He never edited the document, he added, and only printed it “to see what it was.”
Bolsonaro has also rejected accusations that he took part in drafting or approving plans to assassinate his rival. “If it had been proposed,” he told the Supreme Court during a hearing in June, “it would have been rejected, with immediate action taken.”
After miliary commanders refused to become part of any effort to subvert the election, prosecutors say Bolsonaro’s allies abruptly dropped their plans.
Two days before the end of his presidential term, Bolsonaro flew to Florida. Breaking with tradition, he would not hand the presidential sash to Lula as he was sworn in Jan. 1, 2023.
Bolsonaro’s supporters, though, would not give up the fight.
A week after Lula was sworn into office, they stormed the presidential offices, the Supreme Court and Brazil’s Congress in a destructive riot that echoed the assault on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier.
After hours of chaos, the army finally arrived and began arresting the rioters.
In the United States, Bolsonaro was silent for hours. When he finally spoke, he condemned the destruction but rejected any responsibility. He had always operated, he said, “within the lines of the constitution.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
