Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was last week found guilty of leading a failed military coup d'état after he lost the 2022 presidential election to his left-wing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. His conviction is particularly significant for those familiar with the atrocities committed during Brazil’s military dictatorship, which followed a coup d'état against a left-wing government in 1964 and lasted more than 20 years.
Bolsonaro has previously publicly praised the dictatorship and the violence it committed against women. In 2016, when he was still an obscure federal deputy, he dedicated his vote in the impeachment trial of then-president Dilma Rousseff to “the memory of Col Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dread of Dilma Rousseff”.
This celebration of one of the dictatorship’s most notorious torturers by an elected official was shocking and appalling. In 1970, the intelligence and political repression unit led by Brilhante Ustra had arrested and tortured Rousseff, then a young guerrilla fighter, for 22 days. “If [a security officer] didn't like the answers, he would punch you”, Rousseff would later tell investigators.
