In the spirit of BRICS, criminal defendant Jair Bolsonaro should be immediately transferred to China
A modest proposal
In one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of international trade, President Donald Trump this week announced that 50% tariffs would be imposed on Brazil—a country that has a trade surplus with the United States and is one of its most important importers of coffee, orange juice, and petroleum—solely on the condition that it drop charges against criminal defendant, former Brazilian president, and personal friend of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is currently facing a possible prison sentence of up to 40 years for attempting a military coup after losing the 2022 elections.
I would like to suggest that, in the spirit of BRICS, Bolsonaro be immediately transferred to house arrest in China, where he can await his democratically guaranteed right to a trial, which has now moved into its final stages. This may sound outlandish, and even a violation of international law, but the United States has never been a country that respects international law as its recent bombing of Iran proves. Furthermore, it has a long history of entering Latin American countries to either free its allies or arrest its enemies.
In 1983, the Reagan administration invaded the sovereign nation of Grenada to help arrest and assassinate its democratically elected leader, Maurice Bishop, whose emphasis on national sovereignty ruffled feathers in Washington. In 1989, the George H. W. Bush administration invaded the sovereign nation of Panama to kidnap leader Manuel Noriega, who was rumored at the time to have compromising "honey trap" information from the days they alllegedly used to go to brothels together during the president’s CIA years in the 1970s. In 2016, the U.S. sent a force of special agents into Haiti to kidnap and arrest the newly elected democratic leader of the Senate, Guy Philippe—a controversial figure to say the least—but a process that showed zero respect for international law.
Donald Trump's friendship with the Bolsonaro family is notorious. Bolsonaro's son, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, was so close to Trump's inner circle that he was allegedly present at the January 5, 2021, “War Council” meeting with Mike Lindell, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republican insiders as they plotted an amateurish coup d’état to prevent Joe Biden from taking power.
The mainstream media is currently building a false equivalency between the January 6, 2021 Capitol invasion and the Brazilian January 8 invasion two years later. But the level of planning behind the Brazilian coup attempt was far more sophisticated, carried out over the course of three years, and included attempts to assassinate President Lula, Vice President Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Highlights from the final 234-page indictment presented by Attorney General Paulo Gonet are related in an explanatory piece I wrote about the charges against Jair Bolsonaro and his cronies on February 20, which can be read in its entirety here. The charges include attempts to instigate martial law, turning governance of Brazil over to the armed forces with an assasination plot against President Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
In short, what happened in Brazil on January 8, 2023, was not a one-off call by a president for his supporters to “storm the capitol building,” but the culmination of years of careful plotting. It’s also worth mentioning that, unlike in the U.S., 21 high-tension electric transmission cables were sabotaged during the month of the coup attempt, in order to cause rolling blackouts and spread confusion among the population.
Considering the long history of U.S. intervention in Brazil — including support for the 1964 military coup and Operation Car Wash, which removed Lula from the 2018 elections and opened the door for a Bolsonaro presidency — the risk of a U.S. special forces rescue operation or military incursion cannot be overestimated. This is why I call on China to immediately extradite Jair Bolsonaro to a secure location where he can safely stand trial and exercise the democratic rights he tried to deny President Lula.