Brazil’s Bolsonaro: “I fear I may end up in jail like Jeanine Añez”

Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, affirmed that he might end up in jail when he leaves the government and cited the arrest of former Bolivian president Jeanine Añez during a meeting with pastors in which he defended the intervention of the military to guarantee the “transparency” of the October elections, as he distrusts electronic ballot boxes.

“Sometimes I ask myself, who am I to have reached where I have reached? People know how often I have said that it would be much easier for me to be somewhere else instead of being in the presidency, threatened to go to prison when I leave the government,” he commented.

Thus, Bolsonaro said in public what he had recently told his collaborators, which was revealed on Tuesday, August 2, by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the portal Metrópoles.

In these conversations with ministers, Bolsonaro assured the local press that if the police corner him to arrest him, he would be ready to shoot to “kill”.

The president will run in the October 2 elections for the Liberal Party (PL, right), and according to a poll published by PoderData has 35% of voting intentions against 43% of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT, left).

In a runoff election on October 30, the PT candidate would be the winner with 50% against 40% for the current president, PoderData indicated, broadly coinciding with the polls of other surveys published since last week.

After talking about his eventual imprisonment, Bolsonaro referred to the former Bolivian president, Jeanine Añez (2019-2020), convicted in June by the Bolivian justice system.

“And what is the accusation against me? The same accusation of which a lady named Jeanine Añez, former president of Bolivia, who is in prison and sentenced to ten years, was accused. What is the accusation against her? Anti-democratic acts,” said Bolsonaro.

Months ago, Bolsonaro criticized the sentence against Añez, for which he blamed Bolivian President Luis Arce’s leftist government and offered to receive her in Brazil as a political asylum seeker.

During his presentation to the General Convention of the Assemblies of God (Assembleia de Deus), Bolsonaro defended traditional values and criticized “gender” ideology, abortion, and drugs.

He reiterated his objections to electronic ballot boxes and repeated his criticism of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).

In this sense, he declared: “I am doing my part, seeking to impose transparent elections through the Armed Forces”.

Former Captain Bolsonaro has been advocating for months that the military should carry out a parallel vote count and this week proposed that they film some voters, which was considered a violation of the secrecy of the vote, according to analysts.

The controversy surrounding the elections has been gaining intensity with the call launched by Bolsonaro for his followers to protest against the TSE on September 7 in military parades in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro.

At the same time, the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federation of Industries of São Paulo (Fiesp) prepared two manifestos in defense of democracy and against threats to the institutional order.

The USP text, published ten days ago, has already gathered more than 700,000 signatures and will be presented on August 11 at that university’s Law School.

With information from ANSA