A court has ordered Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro to wear an ankle tag and put him under curfew over fears he might abscond while standing trial.
He governed Brazil from 2019 to 2022 and is accused of plotting a coup to prevent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office in January 2023. He denies any wrongdoing.
It follows US President Donald Trump’s attempts to quash the case, which he has called a “witch hunt”, by threatening steep tariffs on Brazilian goods.
Bolsonaro said the court restrictions amounted to “supreme humiliation” and that he had never considered leaving Brazil.
On Friday, police raided his home and political headquarters on orders from the Supreme Court.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes also ordered that Bolsonaro be banned from social media and barred from communicating with his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who has been lobbying for him in the US, and foreign ambassadors, diplomats or embassies.
The ex-president will be placed under 24-hour surveillance and have to comply with a nighttime curfew.
Judge Moraes said Bolsonaro was acting deliberately and illegally, together with his son Eduardo, to have sanctions imposed on Brazilian public officials.
In a statement, Bolsonaro’s lawyers expressed “surprise and outrage” at the court’s decision, adding that the former president had “always complied with the court’s orders”.
According to the Federal Police, Bolsonaro has attempted to hinder the trial and undertaken actions that constitute coercion, obstruction of justice and an attack on national sovereignty.
Last week, the US president threatened a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods from 1 August, directly citing Brazil’s treatment of Bolsonaro.
Lula hit back, saying he would match any tariffs imposed on Brazil by the US. In a post on X, the president said Brazil was a “sovereign country with independent institutions” and “no one is above the law”.
On Thursday, Trump posted a letter on Truth Social that he sent to Bolsonaro in which he said the criminal case amounted to political persecution and that his tariff threat was aimed at exerting pressure on Brazilian authorities to drop the charges.
The US president has compared the prosecution to legal cases he himself faced between his two presidential terms.
Bolsonaro is standing trial along with seven accused over events which culminated in the storming of government buildings by his supporters a week after Lula’s inauguration in January 2023.
The eight defendants are accused of five charges: attempting to stage a coup, involvement in an armed criminal organisation, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, aggravated damage and deterioration of listed heritage.
If found guilty, Bolsonaro, 70, could face decades behind bars.
The former president has consistently denied the charges against him, calling them “grave and baseless” and claiming to be the victim of “political persecution” aimed at preventing him running for president again in 2026.
Speaking in court in June, Bolsonaro said a coup was an “abominable thing” and there had “never been talk of a coup” between him and his military commanders.
He narrowly lost the presidential election to his left-wing rival Lula in 2022.
He never publicly acknowledged defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camped outside army barracks in an attempt to convince the military to prevent Lula from being sworn in.
A week after Lula’s inauguration, on 8 January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and the presidential palace in what federal investigators say was an attempted coup.
Bolsonaro was in the US at the time and has always denied any links to the rioters.
A federal investigation into the riots and the events leading up to them was launched. Investigators subsequently said they had found evidence of a “criminal organisation” which had “acted in a coordinated manner” to keep then-President Bolsonaro in power.
Their 884-page report, which was unsealed in November 2024, alleged that “then-President Jair Messias Bolsonaro planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organisation aiming to launch a coup d’etat and eliminate the democratic rule of law”.
Brazil’s Attorney General Paulo Gonet went further in his report published last month, in which he accused Bolsonaro of not just being aware but of leading the criminal organisation that he says sought to overthrow Lula.
