President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed a bill Thursday that Brazil’s leaders said could reduce former President Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence tied to his failed 2023 coup attempt, according to the Associated Press.
Lula announced the veto during a ceremony at the presidential palace in Brasilia, with the action coming on the third anniversary of riots led by Bolsonaro supporters that destroyed government buildings and helped build the case against the former president.
The Associated Press said Lula had already pledged to block the proposal. The Senate passed the bill in December, and Brazil’s Congress could override the veto, though analysts warned that such an effort could be politically risky for lawmakers ahead of next year’s general elections.
During the ceremony, Lula addressed members of the three branches of power. He said, “We don’t have the right of forgetting our past. That’s why we don’t accept dictatorships, civilian or military,” and added, “Jan. 8 is marked by history as the day of our democracy’s victory.” He continued, “It is victory against those who tried to seize power through force, ignoring popular will expressed in the polls.”
The Associated Press reported that Lula, who won his third term in a narrow contest against Bolsonaro, is currently a front-runner in a likely battle with Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, one of Bolsonaro’s sons. Bolsonaro has been ruled ineligible to run until 2030 for abuse of power during the campaign trail, and began serving his attempted-coup sentence in November after a deadline was extended until 2033. Other cases remain pending, the report said.
Supreme Court chief justice Luiz Edson Fachin also spoke at a separate ceremony in the court. The Associated Press said Fachin characterized the riots as “the democratic rule of law is in crisis in the contemporary world” and told the audience, “It is necessary to resist, always within democratic boundaries, and our pathway must be our institutions.” He said Brazil has “given a great example of resilience,” and the report said he did not mention Bolsonaro or the jailed military leaders involved in the plot.
The Associated Press said Brazil’s top court has opened more than 1,700 lawsuits against participants in the riots, including leaders and protesters.
The report also noted that Lower House Speaker Hugo Motta and Senate president Davi Alcolumbre did not attend Lula’s ceremony. Sen. Esperidião Amin, a Bolsonaro supporter, said hours after the event that he would seek an amnesty bill for those involved in the coup attempt. The Associated Press said Brazilian Supreme Court justices have already said such an amnesty would be unconstitutional.
In its account of the 2023 events, the Associated Press said Bolsonaro supporters also destroyed part of Congress during the riots and that the violence is often compared to the storming of Capitol Hill by voters of U.S. President Donald Trump one year earlier.
The Associated Press said the bill would have changed how prosecutors accounted for the attempted coup charge. It reported that if Lula had not vetoed the bill, the attempted coup count would be absorbed into another charge, reducing Bolsonaro’s prison sentence. The report also said the legislation could have reduced jail time for other convicts linked to the coup trial by two-thirds.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers have urged authorities to put him on house arrest because of his poor health, the Associated Press reported. The report said Bolsonaro has been in and out of hospitals since he was stabbed by a man found to be mentally ill during the 2018 election campaign, and added that neither Bolsonaro nor his lawyers commented on Lula’s decision.