The former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro received a medical discharge this Thursday, New Year, and left the Brasilia hospital where he was admitted on Christmas Eve and has returned to the police station where he has been imprisoned since November for leading a coup plot. The far-right politician has been hospitalized for eight days during which he has undergone a scheduled surgical procedure to treat a bilateral inguinal hernia and three more procedures to try to put an end to the recurring hiccups he suffers. Hours before departure, Judge Alexandre de Moraes denied the request of Bolsonaro’s lawyers to allow their client to be confined to house arrest due to his health problems.
Bolsonaro was transferred shortly before seven in the afternoon from the hospital to the Federal Police superintendence in an unmarked car, followed by a large motorized escort. Shortly before, his wife left the private hospital where her husband had been admitted.
Judge Moraes alleged, when rejecting Bolsonaro’s request to serve his sentence at home for health reasons, that “unlike what the defense alleges,” the former president’s health condition has not worsened during his hospitalization, but rather there was a “clinical picture of improvement in the discomfort he had been feeling, after undergoing new elective surgeries.”
The Supreme Court magistrate recalls in his order that by ordering Bolsonaro to serve his sentence in a police station and not in a prison, he stipulated the presence of a medical team monitoring the prisoner’s health 24 hours a day, authorized him to be treated by professionals he trusted and for his relatives to provide him with homemade food.
Bolsonaro was hospitalized, with judicial authorization, to enter the operating room and be treated for the hernias. His doctors later decided to subject him to a phrenic nerve block with anesthesia to eliminate the recurrent spasms he suffers as a result of the gastrointestinal problems he has as a result of the stab wound he suffered in the 2018 campaign.
In addition to the hiccups and hernias now corrected, Bolsonaro suffers from hypertension and sleep apnea. He has started taking antidepressants at his own request because diaphragm spasms sap his spirits.
Bolsonaro was sentenced in September to 27 years in prison and disqualification for leading a coup plot to remain in power after losing the elections in 2022 against the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
From his cell, the leader of the Brazilian right has designated his son Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator, as a presidential candidate. He would face Lula, who will run for re-election.
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