Bolsonaro & Those Damn Indestructible Ankle Monitors

The plot has again thickened, and got a bit weirder, in the arrest and trial saga of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September for an alleged coup attempt related to not accepting the results of the last presidential election.

We detailed Saturday that federal police rushed to his residence Saturday to take him out of house arrest, and initiated what’s being called a ‘preventative arrest’ - and he was whisked away to police headquarters in Brasilia. The arrest order issued from the country’s top court came hours after his ankle monitor was shown to be violated at 12:08am on Saturday. From there, authorities considered Bolsonaro a flight risk, explaining he is in close proximity to foreign embassies where he might try and gain asylum.

Bolsonaro was in court Monday for a full day of trial, part of what’s likely to be a lengthy appeals process, where he surprisingly confirmed that he did indeed tamper with the ankle monitor. His explanation got strange, telling the court that he suffered a nervous breakdown and hallucinations caused by a change in his medication, after which was fearful of the device as it might be ‘wiretapped’.

Assistant judge Luciana Sorrentino said following a meeting with Bolsonaro where she inquired of the incident, “he had ‘hallucinations’ that there was some wire tap in the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it.” Sorrentino described further of the conversation that Bolsonaro told her he “did not remember having a breakdown of this magnitude in another occasion” and that it could be linked to a change in medication, but he insisted there was no intention of trying to escape.

The former Brazilian leader “said he was with his daughter, his elder brother and an aide at his house and none of them saw what he was doing to the ankle monitoring,” according to a court document which has been made public. “He said he started to touch it late at night and stopped around midnight.”

Photos released by the court show the ankle monitor’s cap heavily damaged, after he reportedly at one point took a soldering iron to it. According to The New York Times:

At first, Mr. Bolsonaro told the police that he had banged his ankle monitor causing it to malfunction, according to a report from the capital region’s prison authority.

But when an agent on the scene asked about the burn marks on the device, Mr. Bolsonaro admitted using a soldering iron to try to melt it. In a video of the exchange released by the authorities, Mr. Bolsonaro can be heard apparently telling the agent that he had started torching the monitor hours earlier.

His legal team has since claimed that “Bolsonaro would have no way of escaping” as he is “an elderly man who suffers from serious health problems.

However, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has long been a political enemy (the US has even sanctioned him personally) as well as chief overseer of the case, described over the weekend, “He is located about 13 kilometers (8 miles) away from where the United States of America embassy lies, in a distance that can be covered in a 15-minute drive.”

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge that medicine-induced paranoia and hallucination caused him to tamper with an electronic ankle monitor, court records showed, a day after police took him into custody out of fear he might flee https://t.co/UDE85hVyXg pic.twitter.com/cmCan0ehnS

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 24, 2025

There’s also the fear that the Embassy of Argentina would be open to helping him find safe-haven. But his legal team has said that he must serve his prison sentence at home as his severe health problems “makes his safe stay in a prison environment impossible.” President Trump has long decried the case as a ‘witch hunt’ while the Lula government has condemned Washington’s ‘interference’ in the internal affair.