Brasilia.- The Attorney General's Office of Brazil rejected this Thursday the first arguments of the defense of the former President Jair Bolsonaro and others accused of a coup d'état, and requested the Supreme Court to accept the complaints he made last month.
"The complaint describes in detail the criminal acts and the circumstances" of the alleged coup plotfor which the former president and 33 other people have been accused, says a document sent by the Prosecutor's Office to the Supreme Court.
The text rejects the initial allegations of the far-right leader and the other defendants, who deny having participated in an alleged conspiracy that, according to the Prosecutor's Office, began after Bolsonaro lost the October 2022 elections to the current president, the progressive Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
According to the indictment, this coup plot first attempted to prevent Lula's inauguration and then led to the assault on the headquarters of the three branches of government on January 8, 2023, a week after his inauguration, when thousands of extremists demanded that the Armed Forces overthrow the new government.
In the document released this Thursday, the Prosecutor's Office also denies a series of requests made by the defendants' defense attorneys.
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Among them, one required that, if the complaints were accepted, the trial be conducted by the 11 members of the Supreme Court's plenary session and not by the five judges of the court's First Chamber, as stipulated in its internal rules.
Following the Attorney General's response to the defense's initial arguments, Judge Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court's rapporteur for the case, will conduct a final analysis to decide whether to accept the allegations and initiate criminal proceedings.
Although there is no procedural deadline for this decision, legal and political circles are asserting that the response will be swift and that, if the complaints are accepted, Bolsonaro and the other defendants will begin trial during the first half of this year.
