By Rodrigo Viga Gaier and Luana María Benedito
RIO DE JANEIRO/SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro rallied thousands of supporters in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday in a bid to increase his political capital after losing a re-election bid to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022 and faces accusations of involvement in a coup d'état.
Images shared on social media and broadcast by the media showed a large crowd of Bolsonaro supporters, many of them wearing Brazilian soccer jerseys.
The organizers of the demonstration estimated the attendance of 100,000 people. Authorities did not release a count.
The right-wing Bolsonaro, the subject of police investigations before and during his four years in office, faces an investigation into his alleged role in a campaign to undermine confidence in Brazil's voting system, which culminated in an insurrection on 8 January 2023 by thousands of his followers in Brasilia, the capital.
On February 8, police confiscated Bolsonaro's passport and accused him of editing a draft decree to annul the results of the 2022 elections, pressuring military chiefs to join a coup, and planning to imprison the judge of the Supreme Court Alexandre de Moraes.
“Have you seen the draft decree? Me neither,” Bolsonaro told reporters on Sunday. “I want to see it, people want to see it and the press too.”
The former president, who will not be able to stand for election until 2030, stated that his government never played “outside the four lines of the Constitution.”
Last month, Brazil's federal police formally accused Bolsonaro, a vaccine skeptic during the COVID-19 pandemic, of altering his vaccination records, opening the door to criminal charges.
On Sunday, Bolsonaro also took the opportunity to praise Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla (NASDAQ and owner of social media platform He urged the crowd to give the billionaire “a round of applause.”
After Musk said he would challenge a decision by Moraes ordering x to block certain accounts, lawyers representing Musk told Brazil's Supreme Court that x would comply with all rulings issued by the court or Brazil's highest electoral court. , according to a letter seen by Reuters on Monday. .
Moraes investigates “digital militias” that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the Bolsonaro government.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,’https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
