RIO DE JANEIRO — The emergency alert reached the Brazilian police at 12:07 a.m. Saturday: The former president’s ankle monitor had been tampered with.
Officers entered the home of the ex-president, Jair Bolsonaro, to find the electronic monitor charred and mangled, but still strapped on.
There hadn’t been a fire or an accident. Instead, Bolsonaro had burned the device tracking his every move, he told police, days before he was expected to begin a 27-year prison sentence for trying to stage a coup.
Bolsonaro, 70, wasn’t trying to flee, his sons, allies and lawyers said. Rather, he felt unwell because of his medications.
“Bolsonaro would have no way of escaping,” Paulo Cunha Bueno, one of his lawyers, told reporters outside the police facility where Bolsonaro is being held in Brasília, the capital. The former president, Bueno added, “is an elderly man who suffers from serious health problems.”
At first, Bolsonaro told police that he had banged his ankle monitor causing it to malfunction, according to a report from the capital region’s prison authority.
But when an agent on the scene asked about the burn marks on the device, Bolsonaro admitted using a soldering iron to try to melt it. In a video of the exchange released by authorities, Bolsonaro can be heard apparently telling the agent that he had started torching the monitor hours earlier.
A Brazilian Supreme Court justice then ordered Bolsonaro’s arrest on suspicion that he had intended to break out of the home where he had been under house arrest since August.
In Saturday’s arrest order, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the case, said authorities had exhausted all precautionary options.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment about his arrest.
In the weeks before his detention, there was wide speculation about when Bolsonaro would begin serving the sentence handed down by the Supreme Court in September, after he was convicted of overseeing a plot to cling to power when he lost the 2022 presidential elections.
He remained under house arrest as a panel of judges weighed legal challenges brought by his lawyers. This month, the court rejected the appeals.
A day before the ankle monitor episode, his lawyers had asked the court to let Bolsonaro serve his sentence at home because of health problems, which he attributes to complications from a stabbing attack in 2018.
His poor health, which includes frequent attacks of hiccups and vomiting, “makes his safe stay in a prison environment impossible,” his defense said on social media.
On Saturday, after Bolsonaro’s detention, the court rejected that house arrest request. But once he begins serving his sentence, his defense team could try again, submitting medical evidence to support its argument.
A rally by Bolsonaro supporters had been planned outside his home for Saturday. Damaging the ankle monitor, de Moraes wrote, pointed to his intention to escape then, “facilitated by the tumult caused by the demonstration.”
At a hearing Sunday, Bolsonaro told the court he had burned the ankle monitor because his medications had caused “hallucinations” and “paranoia” that the device might be used to eavesdrop.
Worries that Bolsonaro might flee before he could be held to account for the failed coup plot are not new.
After a police raid last year targeting him and his inner circle, Bolsonaro appeared to be making plans to seek asylum in Argentina, police said, although it is not clear whether he ever followed through.
Days after police raid, Bolsonaro spent two nights at the Hungarian Embassy in Brazil in an apparent bid for asylum in a country led by a right-wing ally, Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
And this year, one of Bolsonaro’s sons, who is living in the United States, lobbied President Donald Trump to help his father, stirring fears that Bolsonaro might flee there.
Bolsonaro’s conviction relied upon troves of evidence that he and his inner circle had undermined voters’ confidence in Brazil’s electoral systems and then, after he narrowly lost the vote to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had tried to keep him in power.
Their plans included dissolving the Supreme Court, annulling the election result and handing far-reaching powers to the military. Prosecutors also accused Bolsonaro and his allies of plotting to assassinate perceived enemies, including Lula.
When the plan collapsed, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed government buildings in a destructive rampage that echoed the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Bolsonaro has maintained his innocence, saying that he had sought ways within Brazil’s Constitution to correct what he claimed, without evidence, had been a stolen election.
On Saturday evening, his supporters gathered for the demonstration in front of his home. Some chanted “amnesty,” in reference to a halting attempt by Bolsonaro’s allies to pass a bill absolving him.
The former president’s son Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator, called on those gathered to pray for his father and keep their hopes up. “Have faith,” he told the crowd. “The light comes after the darkest hour.”