Jair Bolsonaro’s lawyers appear to have been reading up on the country’s penal code and have found a way to help their client reduce the 27-year prison sentence he received last year for plotting a coup: by reading books.
There is only one problem: the former far-right Brazilian president has never been known as a bibliophile. “Sorry, I don’t have time to read,” Bolsonaro once declared. “It’s been three years since I read a book.”
Brazilian law contains a literary device through which book-reading inmates can cut their sentences by four days for each title read. On Thursday, a supreme court judge authorised the disgraced former president to take part in the scheme after a request from his legal team.
Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper famed for his hostility to democracy, minorities, the Amazon rainforest and the arts, is unlikely to appreciate the approved reading list. It includes Brazilian works on Indigenous rights, racism, the environment and the violence meted out by the country’s 1964-85 dictatorship – a regime Bolsonaro openly supported.
One title, Ana Maria Gonçalves’ 950-page Um Defeito de Cor (A Colour Defect), tells “the history of Brazil … from the point of view of a Black woman”.
Also featured is Democracy!, a children’s non-fiction picture book by the English-born author-illustrator Philip Bunting.
Some of the books on the list, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, are more than 1,000 pages long. Bolsonaro did once appear in public with a similarly sized tome – Winston Churchill’s 1,000-plus page Memoirs of the Second World War – but it is unclear if the former president read it.
In order to benefit from the sentence reduction scheme, prisoners must prove they have actually read the books by submitting written reports to prison authorities.
Asked to name his favourite book during the 2018 presidential election, Bolsonaro plumped for one by Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a notorious army colonel accused of torturing hundreds of prisoners during the dictatorship. “It’s a real story about Brazil … with facts, with data, with places with real episodes,” enthused Bolsonaro who was this week transferred to a maximum security prison in the capital, Brasília, after spending Christmas imprisoned at a federal police base.
Ustra’s book does not feature on the justice system’s reading list but it does contain one title, Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s I’m Still Here, about the plight of prisoners who disappeared into such torture centres.
