The historic sentencing of former president Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison signals the health of Brazil’s fragile democratic institutions. But it cannot provide a neat ending to the Right’s long-running assault on Brazilian democracy.

Thousands of people in Latin America’s largest nation took to the streets last Friday to celebrate the sentencing of former president Jair Bolsonaro to twenty-seven years in prison. The day before, September 11, a date associated in the region with the violent 1973 coup d’état in Chile, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court delivered a verdict unlike any in the nation’s modern history, holding not just Bolsonaro but key allies in the upper ranks of the armed forces responsible for planning a coup, leading a criminal conspiracy, and plotting to violently aboli

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