Brazilian police on Tuesday raided big businessmen, considered friends of President Jair Bolsonaro, and who are supporting Bolsonaro in the upcoming presidential election in October. The raids were based on the leak of private WhatsApp conversation where one of the businessmen had apparently said that a military coup would be a better alternative to Bolsonaro’s defeat. Poll trends show that Bolsonaro is trailing former president leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was convicted on bribery charges and spent 19 months in prison before the conviction was overturned.

Bolsonaro’s big business friends apparently fear the return of da Silva and discussed the potential of electoral fraud and the advantages of a coup d’etat. The raids were ordered by Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who became the head of the country’s top electoral court. Billionaire Luciano Hang, founder of department store Havan, felt that he was targeted in the raids, and he tweeted the reason was: “An irresponsible article without context put me in this situation…I never spoke of a coup…I have always defended democracy and freedom of expression.” According to sources of Reuters who spoke on condition of anonymity, among the targets of the raids were Jose Isaac Peres, chief executive officer of shopping mall operator Multiplan Empreendimentos and Meyer Jospeh Nigri, chairman of homebuilder Tecnisa.

Two of Bolsonaro’s sons are federal lawmakers, and they criticised the raids. Senator Flavio Bolsonaro tweeted, “It’s insane to order a search and seizure warrant against honest businessmen…for saying in a private WhatsApp conversation that they would prefer anything to an ex-convict.” That was a reference to opposition candidate da Silva’s prison term. The other Bolsonaro, Eduardo, a congressman, tweeted, “This is an attack against democracy in the middle of an electoral campaign. Censorship. There’s no other word.”

There are indeed some loose ends in the story. Why did Justice de Moraes order such a raid instead of keeping a close eye on the army as well as the businessmen because now the cat is out of the bag, that is if ever there was a cat in the bag, and the army would not consider a coup d’etat they were planning if there were planning one at all. Or this was a red herring, and it might have been meant further strengthen the case of da Silva.

The public anger with president Bolsonaro makes immense sense. He had totally mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic, denying that it is anything serious, not following the Covid-19 protocol, and more importantly not responding to the people’s plight as the pandemic spread like a wildfire.

Six hundred thousand people died in Brazil because of Covid-19. President Bolsonaro refused to accept World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, according to a Brazilian Senate committee report of 1,100 pages released last October. Bolsonaro’s cavalier response to the pandemic as innocents perished was like that of then American president Donald Trump, who dismissed Covid-19 as a mere flu. The two right-wing presidents looked at the medical and social precautions to the unprecedented global pandemic as a liberal conspiracy to break the back of rich businessmen.

It is not surprising then that Bolsonaro is trailing behind his leftist rival da Silva. The former president and left idol sounded mellower when he addressed a media conference and commented on Venezuela.

He said, “We need to treat Venezuela with respect, always wanting Venezuela to be as democratic as possible.” Democracy in Latin America is always vulnerable with the army waiting in the wings to stage a coup. But the generals in Latin America, like generals elsewhere, recognise that they do not know how to handle an economy. That is why, an imperfect and unstable democracy had made a comeback in Latin America.