Brazil’s former chief of intelligence, Alexandre Ramagem, has been detained in the United States. He was one of seven people who alongside former President Jair Bolsonaro were convicted of plotting a military coup aimed at keeping him in power after he had lost the 2022 election.
Ramagem, who led Brazil’s intelligence agency (Abin), was sentenced to 16 years in prison but was not in court when the guilty verdict was announced having fled the country – crossing into neighbouring Guyana by car before flying to the US.
Agents from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) detained Ramagem in Orlando, Florida, on Monday.
ICE confirmed that Ramagem was in its custody but did not say why its agents had stopped him.
Federal police in Brazil said that a Brazilian national convicted by the Supreme Court of plotting a coup had been detained in Orlando, but did not mention Ramagem’s name.
Its statement added that the individual had been detained thanks to “international police co-operation between the [Brazilian] federal police and US law enforcement authorities”.
BBC News Brasil understands that Brazil’s federal police force expects Ramagem to be deported after appearing before a judge specialising in immigration matters.
His lawyer is expected to fight his deportation by arguing that Ramagem is being politically persecuted and could ask for asylum in the US, if he has not already done so.
Ramagem was the director of Abin from 2019 to 2022, while Bolsonaro was president.
As well as having been convicted for his role in the attempted coup, he is under investigation for allegedly having used his position at Abin to illegally spy on critics of Bolsonaro, which he has denied.
Brazilian judicial authorities declared him a fugitive, and in December Brazil’s Supreme Court asked the US to extradite him.
Ramagem has in the past said that he felt “safe” on US soil and defended his decision to move there in an interview he gave to a pro-Bolsonaro journalist.
“It made sense for me not to stay in Brazil, where my daughters would have seen me arrested without having committed any crime,” he said, again denying he had plotted a coup.
He also said that he had been given a friendly reception when he arrived in the country.
“What I can tell you is that the American authorities received me very well, and that’s exactly what they said: ‘It’s very good to have a friend safe here with us,'” he said.
US President Donald Trump has previously described the investigation which led to the conviction of Bolsonaro and his seven fellow co-conspirators as a “witch hunt”.
Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in jail, a sentence which Trump described as “very surprising” at the time.
The Trump administration placed sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court judge who led the investigation, shortly after the verdict was announced but has since lifted them, arguing that they were “inconsistent with US foreign policy interests”.
By BBC News
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