Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro warned that his country is close to becoming a "dictatorship" in a video in which he invites his followers to a demonstration he called for this Sunday on Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
"Let us carry out our peaceful act, in defense of democracy, for our freedom. What is at stake is not my future, it is the future of all of us, of our children and our grandchildren," said the former right-wing president.
According to Bolsonaro, "the whole world is aware of how threatened our freedom of expression is, how close we are to a dictatorship," and he asks his followers not to bring banners to the event. The populist leader thus alluded, without naming them, to the clash of justice with Elon Musk for the alleged request for censorship of coup messages on the networks.
The initiative comes amid the
confrontation between magnate Elon Musk, owner of X, and Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes
, Bolsonaro's main inquisitor.
In another chapter of the tug-of-war between Musk and De Moraes, the South African tycoon on his social network accused the Brazilian magistrate of having "interfered in the 2022 Brazilian elections."
Musk commented on a post by American journalist Michael Shellenberger, author of 'Twitter Files Brazil', a report according to which Moraes illegally asked Twitter to reveal
private information about users
who had used hashtags he considered inappropriate.
In recent days, the Tesla boss accused the judge of Brazil's Supreme Court of "censoring" parliamentarians and activists opposed to the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The judge - who is also head of the Superior Electoral Court of Brazil - in turn included Musk in the investigation into the 'digital militias', named after the profiles close to Bolsonaro,
who supposedly used the web to spread fake news.
A few days ago, a committee of the United States House of Representatives published a report presenting Moraes' classified decisions related to X and other digital platforms.
Bolsonaro had already organized a massive protest on February 25 in São Paulo, where he defended an "amnesty" for those detained in the framework of the alleged attempted coup d'état perpetrated on January 8, 2023 due to the invasion of the institutional headquarters. from Brasilia.
Judge Moraes is precisely the one who is carrying out the investigation into the episode and until now he has applied
very harsh prison sentences
to the first convicted.
Source: ANSA