Bolsonaro and the Generals Behind Bars
Rise and imprisonment of Bolsonaro, the ‘Messiah’ of coup-ism, and his generals, the ‘apostles of the dictatorship’.
From the beginning of his military career, Jair Bolsonaro was socialized in an ideology that has acted like a permanent fog in Brazilian barracks for decades: the Doctrine of National Security. This emerged in the context of the Cold War, especially since the 1950s and 1960s, and constitutes a bundle of political-military principles that not only permits but expressly legitimizes the political intervention of the armed forces.
The core of this doctrine is the notion that the armed forces are the true guardians of the constitution, security, and “national order.” The enemy is not primarily located externally, but internally: social movements, the left, communists, workers, unions. In this logic, the military sees itself as tutors of democracy and de facto as a kind of “fourth power,” standing above the president, parliament, and supreme court.
Under these conditions, a military coup appears not as an exception but as a legitimate political tool. It is considered justified when certain conditions are met: cultural hegemony over relevant parts of society, support from the bourgeoisie or parts of it, media backing, international acceptance, and a political situation defined as a “crisis.” Democracy is not understood as sovereign rule by the people but as an order under military supervision.
The Doctrine of National Security is inextricably linked to the global anti-communism of the Cold War and to US intervention policy in Latin America. Washington openly viewed the region as its geopolitical “backyard” and systematically promoted military regimes that crushed leftist movements and guaranteed capitalist order. The support for the coup plotters in Brazil in 1964, the decades-long backing for the subsequent military dictatorship, and the promotion of regimes like Pinochet’s in Chile from 1973 were part of this strategy.
Bolsonaro is a product of this tradition. His political worldview, his authoritarian understanding of the state, and his permanent threat of military intervention are rooted not solely in personal radicalism, but in an ideology that sees the military as the ultimate authority of power – and democratic institutions only as long as they do not question the existing social order.
Prussian Coup
The corporate-military coup of 1964 can be read as a “Prussian” variant of a coup in the context of dependent capitalism. The trigger was Brazil’s structural crisis in the early 1960s: massive economic instability, stagnant capital accumulation, and simultaneously a politically strengthened, organized left – including unions, social movements, and the Communist Party. From the perspective of the elites, this constellation blocked fundamental reform projects such as land reform, urban, and education policy.
The coup removed this blockage. It secured the power of the agrarian and economic elites, reorganized the state for accelerated industrialization, systematically excluded the masses from political participation, and tied Brazil even more closely to international, dependent capitalism. The participation of the working class and unions was violently suppressed.
President João Goulart, a labor-friendly social democrat, was overthrown with active US support. The Kennedy government justified the overthrow by claiming Goulart was a communist on the verge of abolishing the existing order and ruling dictatorially. Under the pretext of “saving” Brazil from communism, the military installed exactly what they claimed to prevent: an authoritarian dictatorship.
This was followed by a brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, which under the banner of anti-communism systematically persecuted opposition, unions, and the entire left. The primary beneficiaries of this regime were the USA, which secured its geopolitical hegemony in Latin America, as well as international corporations and the Brazilian elites, to whom the dictatorship guaranteed political stability, repression, and cheap labor.
The transition to bourgeois democracy did not occur through a rupture but through a controlled opening from above. Under the military president Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979), the strategy of “slow, gradual, and secure opening” was pursued to manage the system change, avoid societal ruptures, and particularly prevent a shift to the left. A legal break with the dictatorship did not occur.
After the formal end of the regime in 1985, there was no Brazilian “Nuremberg Tribunal.” Torturers and murderers remained immune from prosecution through comprehensive amnesties – even for non-prescriptible crimes like torture. This impunity was not an oversight but an expression of a political compromise that ensured the continuity of state and military power structures.
It is within this context that the rise of Jair Bolsonaro must also be located. In the phase after 1985, within the framework of the restored bourgeois democracy, he acted, in a way, as a kind of “unionist” within the military. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro – a political ascent that would hardly have been possible without democratization and amnesty policies. Bolsonaro thus directly benefited from the very order that left the crimes of the dictatorship untouched.
The absence of institutional punishment reflects the historical function of the armed forces in bourgeois states: the defense of the capitalist order and the violent suppression of those political forces that question the power and property relations on which capitalist accumulation is based.
The Ascent
For decades, as Jair Bolsonaro lingered on the fringes of Brazilian politics, he drew from two central sources of resentment: the deep-seated resentment of large parts of the military over the social stigma of the dictatorship after 1985, and the desperation of a population largely abandoned by the state, especially in the everyday regime of violence in Rio de Janeiro. Bolsonaro fused these two strands – military grievance and social disintegration – into a lasting political capital.
The retired captain used this military backing and social misery strategically to introduce his entire family clan system into Rio’s politics. As a patriarchal figure, the concentration of familial power granted him a special status: driven by ego and a lust for authority, he commanded a troop of political caricatures of himself. Publicly and half-ironically, Bolsonaro numbered his sons as 01, 02, 03, and 04 – a nickname that stuck to them even outside the family: the “Irmãos Metralha” (the Beagle Boys from the Disney universe).
Subordinate to the patriarch, supported by military networks and connections to criminal groups from militarized police units, the Bolsonaro clan gradually began to occupy all levels of legislative power – first municipal, then state, and finally national.
The prelude was a targeted intervention in the 1990s when Bolsonaro brought his eldest son Carlos into the election campaign – explicitly against the political interests of his then-wife and Carlos’s mother, from whom he was divorced. Under the direct instructions of his father, Carlos undermined her political position so successfully that she could not run for re-election, while he himself secured a seat on Rio de Janeiro’s city council. Other children followed the same pattern. The private family structure became a political apparatus: personal loyalty replaced program, familial bonds replaced institutional control. The Bolsonaro family formed its own dynasty.
Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro continuously portrayed himself as a military strongman. In reality, however, his military career was short and inglorious. In the 1980s, he was repeatedly subjected to disciplinary action and at one point faced proceedings that could have led to his expulsion from the army. The occasion included accusations of involvement in planning attacks with homemade bombs in Rio de Janeiro – attacks that were to be blamed on communist groups.
These plans were in the context of a series of right-wing extremist coup fantasies within Brazil, carried by various groups that wanted to reverse the democratic restoration after 1985. The goal was a return to military dictatorship, preferably under the leadership of the so-called “Linha Dura” – those military hardliners responsible for the most repressive and darkest years of the regime.
For these reasons, Bolsonaro never achieved a higher military position. Former dictator General Ernesto Geisel reportedly retrospectively called him a “bad soldier.” Politically, too, Bolsonaro remained marginal for decades. In parliament, he belonged to the so-called “baixo clero,” the lower clergy: lawmakers without influence, without strategic skills, incapable of forging coalitions, organizing consensus, or pushing through their own legislative projects.
Bolsonaro was neither a strategist nor a builder. His later ascent was fueled not by political competence but by resentment, familial power accumulation, and the systematic mobilization of authoritarian desires – long before he took the national stage.
Operation Lava Jato
Jair Bolsonaro was elected president in 2018 in a political climate significantly shaped by an institutional coup. The carriers of this process were a politically intertwined economic, media, and judicial elite that formed against the leftist President Dilma Rousseff (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT). Rousseff was impeached in 2016 on allegations of budgetary violations – allegations later proven baseless. Today she is president of the BRICS bank, a bitter contrast to her political demolition at the time.
Parallel to the parliamentary overthrow, a judicial power tool developed under the pretext of fighting corruption at the semi-state oil company Petrobras: the so-called “Operation Lava Jato” (Car Wash). What began as an investigation quickly became a political lever.
The central figure of this operation was Judge Sérgio Moro, who cooperated closely and informally with the prosecution, strategically directed investigations, and deliberately provided advantages to prosecutors. Through selective, politically motivated proceedings, Moro instrumentalized the judiciary to push the then former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) out of the 2018 presidential race. Lula was convicted, imprisoned, and excluded from the election – even though he was clearly leading in all polls. This ultimately paved the way for the runner-up, Jair Bolsonaro, to the presidency.
The political nature of this action became evident when Sérgio Moro, after Bolsonaro’s election victory, accepted the position of Minister of Justice in his government – a de facto reward for his role. Moro later left the cabinet and partially distanced himself, including criticizing the catastrophic management of the COVID-19 pandemic. This mismanagement, however, had been extensively criticized by health experts since the beginning of the pandemic.
The final unmasking of Lava Jato came in 2019 when the US magazine The Intercept published exclusive investigations. Based on leaked Telegram chats between prosecutors and Moro, the publications documented the systematic politicization of the investigations. The leaks, obtained by a hacker, documented the shift from jurisprudence to deliberate political instrumentalization.
It became clear: Lava Jato operated as “lawfare” – legal warfare. It was one of the central weapons of the coup against Dilma Rousseff and the Workers’ Party. The proceedings exemplify how criminal law can be repurposed into a political weapon: where tanks are replaced by verdicts, barracks by courtrooms.
This form of coup enabled the destruction of political leadership, the selective criminalization of the left, and opened the path to power for the extreme right. It represents the contemporary, “clean” variant of a coup d’état in peripheral liberal democracies.
For the Brazilian left, it was a political 7-1: a historic defeat against a rising neo-fascist bloc, supported by parts of agribusiness, influential business sectors, international organizations, foreign big-tech corporations, and transnational right-wing networks around Steve Bannon and associates.
Pandemic Incompetence
With Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration in 2019, dark years began for Brazil. At the latest with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a catastrophic crisis management was revealed: characterized by open pandemic denial, the promotion of mass gatherings, systematic vaccine refusal, the rejection of basic hygiene rules, and state-propagated quackery around the supposed “miracle cure” chloroquine, which proved ineffective against COVID-19.
The consequences were devastating. Between 2020 and 2022, Brazil became one of the global epicenters of the pandemic. In total, around 39 million infections and over 715,000 deaths were recorded – one of the highest mortality rates worldwide. This outcome is seen by many as an expression of genocidal government practice: Bolsonaro’s policies and the actions of the military supporting him led to one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in Brazilian history.
In May 2020, Bolsonaro appointed active General Eduardo Pazuello as Minister of Health – a military man with no health policy experience, publicly justified as a supposed “logistics specialist.” His tenure became the epitome of administrative incompetence. Particularly symbolic was the incident in early 2021 when, instead of the announced 78,000 vaccine doses, only 2,000 doses were delivered to the Amazon. The disaster drew nationwide attention and temporarily brought the vaccination campaign in the region to a halt.
Simultaneously, Bolsonaro further radicalized his political discourse. Even before his presidency, but intensified between 2019 and 2021, he openly called for the return of torture and military dictatorship. The “mistake” of the dictatorship’s torturers, he claimed, was that they did not kill their victims. He repeatedly stated that only a civil war with at least 30,000 deaths could “fix Brazil.” At the height of the pandemic in 2020/21, Bolsonaro mocked his own population in live broadcasts, imitated choking people, derided those on ventilators, and made fun of the dying.
Politically, the balance of power shifted from 2021 onwards, when, in the wake of the “Vaza-Jato” revelations, the convictions against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and other politicians were annulled. This cleared the way for Lula’s renewed candidacy. The 2022 presidential election became one of the closest and most polarized in Brazilian history. US right-wing ideologue Steve Bannon publicly declared it a key election for the global right.
Lula won – making Bolsonaro the first president since the introduction of re-election to be denied a second term in 2022. Long before, Bolsonaro had systematically sown distrust in the electronic voting system. He repeatedly claimed – without any evidence – that he had already won in the first round in 2018.
He was clearly following the example of Donald Trump, signaling he would take the path of delegitimizing democratic elections and possible institutional escalation – up to the open reference to the storming of the US Capitol in 2021.
The Incarceration
After his defeat in the October 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT), Jair Bolsonaro refused the symbolic act of the transfer of power: He did not hand over the presidential sash, de facto did not acknowledge his electoral defeat, and withdrew from the political process by fleeing to the United States at the end of December 2022. In parallel, a systematic attack on Brazil’s democratic-bourgeois institutions began.
This process had a longer prehistory but escalated after the election. It included continued attacks on the electronic voting system, the delegitimization of ballot boxes, the mobilization of fanatical followers with open calls for military intervention, and conspiratorial efforts to prevent the inauguration of the elected government. Investigations also revealed assassination plots: attacks on President Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and other state authorities, including Alexandre de Moraes, a judge on the Supreme Federal Court (STF).
Particularly explosive was the so-called “Green and Yellow Dagger” plot. The plan aimed to kill key officials through poisoning. The attacks were to take place on December 15, 2022 – just three days after the official certification of Lula’s election victory by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The goal was to create an institutional shock that would justify an intervention by the armed forces.
On January 8, 2023, this escalation path reached an open rupture: Bolsonarist, pseudo-patriotic mobs stormed and vandalized the National Congress, the Palácio do Planalto, and the Supreme Federal Court (STF). The attack was not a spontaneous riot but the most visible expression of a longer-prepared attempt to destabilize the constitutional order.
In the following years, the Federal Police, within the framework of several investigations – including “Operation Tempus Veritatis” – collected extensive evidence of coordination between Bolsonarist networks and parts of the military. Planning documents, audio recordings, protocols, and communication logs were documented, pointing to an organized conspiracy for a coup d’état.
These investigations resulted in proceedings before the Supreme Federal Court (STF). In September 2025, the court convicted Jair Bolsonaro as well as other civilian and military participants for attempted coup d’état, forming a criminal organization, and related offenses. Bolsonaro was sentenced to a prison term of up to 27 years.
Adherents of Bolsonarism stylized the verdict as political persecution. Internationally, figures like Donald Trump picked up this narrative and linked it to geopolitical interests – such as Brazil’s strategic role, its rare earth minerals, and its domestic market. Yet the core remains: For the first time in over 500 years, parts of the armed forces in Brazil were held criminally accountable for an attempted coup d’état – based on solid evidence.
This process undoubtedly marks an institutional rupture. However, it does not constitute a break with the structural foundations of the Brazilian state. The formal democracy of the representative bourgeois system primarily regulates conflicts between factions of the bourgeoisie; it neither resolves class contradictions nor does away with the material basis of authoritarian power.
The Brazilian state has historically proven capable of internalizing and neutralizing crises that threaten its stability. Direct ruptures are only not tolerated by the capitalist order when they endanger the reproduction of capital or lack international backing – even if this requires the temporary punishment of individual parts of its own repressive and ideological elite.
For Marxist and anti-capitalist movements, the central challenge therefore lies in not misinterpreting these events as a victory for formal democracy. They are an expression of a deep class conflict in contemporary Brazil: a power struggle between competing factions of the ruling class, into which the state intervenes to ultimately ensure the continued existence of the oppressive system.
Tropical Hitler?
The Brazilian military coup of 1964 can be understood as a local variant of the so-called Prussian developmental line: Structural reforms are blocked while the ruling class and the state pursue an authoritarian capitalist modernization. This deepens the decoupling of economic growth and social democratization. Capital develops without a revolutionary rupture, and traditional dominant groups – large landowners, agrarian elites, state bureaucracies – adapt, while the masses remain politically excluded.
These tendencies already began in the 1930s under the Vargas dictatorship and the Estado Novo with fascistoid features. The 1964 military coup radicalized this process: heavy industry was combined with authoritarian structures, modern technocracy with political violence, economic growth with extreme exploitation of labor. Florestan Fernandes speaks of a “bourgeois revolution without a revolutionary bourgeoisie” – a specifically Brazilian aspect of the Prussian line. Chico de Oliveira describes Brazil as a platypus: a country that combines modern forms of accumulation with archaic power structures – much like the animal combines features of different species, such as mammal with egg-laying and a venomous spur.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the mythical discourse of “let the cake grow first, then share it later” was promoted: Brazil must first grow economically and industrialize, then a “fair” income distribution would follow. In reality, one part of society amassed enormous wealth while the working class received only crumbs. Today, Brazil is one of the largest economies in the world and simultaneously lives with extreme social inequalities.
The Brazilian context does not allow a mechanical copy of the European Prussian experience. The Prussian line appears here under dependent conditions, subordinate to imperialism. In the present, this logic is evident in Bolsonaro: He is historically not comparable to Hitler – he did not lead a total mass party, did not establish a complete fascist state, and did not start a war. Nevertheless, he embodies an extreme right that incorporates structural features of fascism, adapted to peripheral Brazilian conditions. Intellectual guru figures like Olavo de Carvalho, who denied the existence of COVID and later died of the disease himself, carried this ideology intellectually. The category “Tropical Hitler” thus functions critically, not as a direct equation.
Elements of Bolsonarism
Cult of Violence and Death: Bolsonaro glorifies torture and dictatorship, explicitly endorses the elimination of political opponents, and naturalizes death – for instance, by presenting the COVID pandemic as fate.
The Internal Enemy as Political Focal Point: Communists, the left, teachers, artists, indigenous peoples, and the press are constructed as scapegoats. A moral “us” is juxtaposed against a degenerate “them” – a paranoid Manichaeism typical of classical fascisms.
High, Dependent Nationalism: Unlike Hitler, Bolsonaro speaks of sovereignty but in fact subordinates the country to the USA, hands over strategic resources, and destroys national industry. This creates a subaltern fascism model without a genuine national project.
Permanent Anti-Democratism: Systematic attacks on institutions, discrediting of elections, and attempts to mobilize the military and police show that Bolsonarism only accepts institutional limits until it can break them.
Conclusion
While most of the coup’s core is imprisoned, significant risks remain: possible amnesties, international escapes, and foreign political interference in the 2026 presidential election campaign. Only a mobilized population on the streets can remove Bolsonarist networks from institutions and reclaim popular participation in the budgetary process and central decision-making.
The Congress, currently largely occupied by Bolsonarists and opportunistic politicians of the “Centrão,” does not serve as a political center but as an opportunistic grouping without ideology, which attaches itself to power or offers money for it. Initiatives in Congress to amnesty crimes or reduce maximum sentences would benefit organized crime and gang leaders. Recent Federal Police investigations also uncover financial crimes by the most important economic sector, Faria Lima – the sector allegedly used to launder money for the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) from São Paulo.
Shortlist of key elements:
- Cult of Violence and Death
- The Internal Enemy as Political Focal Point
- High, Dependent Nationalism
- Permanent Anti-Democratism
