Brazil’s former president Fernando Collor de Mello was arrested and taken to prison Friday to begin serving a nearly nine-year sentence for corruption and money laundering, the latest former leader to face jail time.
Collor de Mello, Brazil’s first democratically elected president after a decades-long dictatorship, resigned in 1992 after congress launched impeachment proceedings against him for allegedly taking bribes.
His arrest stems from a conviction over bribes taken two decades later while a senator, part of the sprawling “Car Wash” corruption scandal.
The 75-year-old was detained in Maceio city in northeastern Alagoas state, where he served as a senator and governor, a federal police source told AFP.
In 2023, Collor de Mello was found guilty of having received 20 million reais ($3.5 million dollars) in bribes while a senator between 2010 and 2014 to “irregularly facilitate contracts” between a construction company and a former subsidiary of Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras.
On Thursday, a top court rejected his efforts to have the arrest order annulled.
His lawyers told local media that he was arrested before dawn as he was about to travel to the capital Brasilia to hand himself in.
He was incarcerated in an individual cell in a special wing of Baldomero Baldomero Cavalcanti de Oliveira prison in Maceio.
Collor de Mello is not Brazil’s first president to fall foul of the law.
Four of the seven presidents who have led the country since the 1964-1985 military dictatorship have either been convicted, jailed or impeached.
In the latest case, far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro has been ordered to stand trial over an alleged coup plot after losing the 2022 election.
Current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who served two terms between 2003 and 2010, was among dozens of top businessmen and politicians in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America who were caught up in the tentacular Car Wash mega-probe.
The investigation uncovered a vast network of bribes paid by large construction companies to politicians in several countries to obtain major public works contracts.
Lula spent a year and a half behind bars before having his conviction overturned by the Supreme Court and winning a third term in October 2022.
Collor de Mello was heralded as a youthful, non-conformist figure, who promised far-reaching political and social reforms when he beat the leftist Lula to the presidency in 1989.
But his day in the sun did not last long.
Less than three years later he stood down as president as the impeachment process was nearly complete.
He returned to politics, after a period of ineligibility had expired, and in 2006 was elected senator for Alagoas, a seat he held until 2022.
In 2022, he campaigned for Bolsonaro who was seeking re-election but it was Collor de Mello’s old adversary Lula who triumphed.
AFP
