Brazil’s Bolsonaro says ‘hallucinations’ led to arrest, judge says

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old leader's preemptive jailing Saturday for he is considered a flight risk.

On his first full day in jail, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge on Sunday he had violated his ankle monitoring the day before at his house arrest because of a nervous breakdown and hallucinations caused by a change in his medication.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old leader’s preemptive jailing Saturday for he is considered a flight risk. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September for attempting a coup to remain in the presidency after his 2022 electoral defeat.

“(Bolsonaro) said he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wire tap in the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it,” assistant judge Luciana Sorrentino said, as reported in a Supreme Court document published on Sunday shortly after her online meeting with the former president.

Sorrentino added that Bolsonaro told her he “did not remember having a breakdown of this magnitude in another occasion,” and speculated it might have been caused by a change in his medication last week. He once again denied that he intended to escape.

The document also says Bolsonaro also told the judge he hadn’t been sleeping well and was feeling “a certain paranoia” that stimulated his curiosity into opening the ankle monitoring device.

“(Bolsonaro) said he was with his daughter, his elder brother and an aide at his house and none of them saw what he was doing to the ankle monitoring,” the document says. “He said he started to touch it late at night and stopped around midnight.”

De Moraes received information that the far-right leader’s ankle monitor was violated at 12:08 a.m. on Saturday. The arrest order came hours later.

A panel of Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled in September that Bolsonaro tried to stage a coup and keep the presidency after his defeat by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022.