BRASILIA – The Brazilian Attorney General’s Office (Prosecutor’s Office) requested this Monday the maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for the first 40 accused of participating in the assault on the headquarters of the three powers of the nation, in the coup attempt on January 8.
In a document sent to the Supreme Court, which must judge these acts, the Attorney General’s Office says that, in the case of those first 40 defendants, it has verified both the “materiality” and the “authorship” of at least five crimes.
It is about “armed criminal association”, “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law”, “coup d’état”, “qualified damage and serious threat” and “deterioration of public property”, which, according to the Penal Code, together ” they reach 30 years in prison”, which is the maximum sentence contemplated by the laws of the country, says the document.
The Supreme Court has already accepted the complaints filed against 1,290 people, Most of them directly participated in the violent events of January 8, when thousands of far-right activists simultaneously assaulted the offices of the Presidency, Parliament and the court itself.
According to the investigation, this violent attack against democracy was intended to incite the Armed Forces to overthrow the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had assumed power eight days earlier.
Most of the participants in the assault were ideologically aligned with the right-wing ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, defeated by Lula in the October elections of last year and whose result he refused to recognize.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, “The penalty to be applied to the defendants must be exemplary, since they are serious crimes, carried out in a crowded context.” and that their objective was “to establish an authoritarian regime instead of a legitimately elected government”.
The Supreme Court is still investigating these events, and among those investigated is former President Bolsonaro himself, suspected of having encouraged the coup by ignoring Lula’s victory and sowing doubts about the cleanliness and transparency of last year’s electoral process.
