Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to prison last week for plotting a coup, has been rushed to hospital after falling ill while under house arrest, his son said.
The emergency visit on Tuesday is the 70-year-old former army captain’s second trip to the hospital since his conviction.
Bolsonaro has had recurring intestinal issues since he was stabbed while campaigning in 2018, including at least six related surgeries, the last being a 12-hour-long procedure in April. He won the election that year, and governed from 2019 to 2023.
“Bolsonaro felt unwell a short while ago, with a severe bout of hiccups, vomiting, and low blood pressure,” his son, Flavio, wrote on X.
“He was taken to DF Star [Hospital] accompanied by correctional police officers who guard his home in Brasília, as it was an emergency,” he wrote.
Bolsonaro visited the same hospital on Sunday, and had eight skin lesions removed and sent for biopsies.
A panel of Supreme Court justices on Thursday found the former leader guilty of plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election to current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
They sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison.
The sentence, however, does not immediately send him to jail. The court panel has up to 60 days to publish the ruling after the decision, and once it does, Bolsonaro’s lawyers have five days to file motions for clarification.
Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing and said he is the victim of political persecution. United States President Donald Trump has also called the trial a “witch-hunt”, and imposed tariffs of 50 percent on Brazilian goods, citing the case against Bolsonaro, among other issues.
The former Brazilian leader has been under house arrest since August for allegedly courting pressure on the courts from Trump. He had already been wearing an ankle monitor.
Separately on Tuesday, a federal court ordered Bolsonaro to pay 1 million reais ($188,865) in damages for collective moral harm stemming from racist comments he made while in office.
The inquiry originated from Bolsonaro’s statements to a Black supporter who approached him in May 2021 and asked to take a picture.
The former president joked, saying he was seeing a cockroach in the man’s hair. He also compared the man’s hairstyle with a “cockroach breeding ground”, implying the hair was unclean.
There was no immediate comment from his legal team after the latest court order.
His defence had previously told media outlets that the former leader’s remarks were intended as jokes rather than racist statements, denying any intent to cause offence.
Public opinion in Brazil, meanwhile, is split on Bolsonaro’s prison sentence on coup charges, and the far-right politician’s allies have laid out several plans to overturn or reduce the jail term.
In the Congress, they have rallied behind an amnesty bill, building on the campaign to free hundreds of his supporters who stormed and vandalised government buildings in January 2023.
Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, a leading Bolsonaro ally, has also promised repeatedly to pardon the former leader if he were to become president in next year’s election. A court has barred Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030, though the former president insisted earlier this year that he would compete in the 2026 presidential election.
For his part, Lula, the incumbent president, has hailed the sentencing of Bolsonaro as a “historic decision” that followed months of investigations that uncovered plans to assassinate him, the vice president and a Supreme Court justice.
Bolsonaro’s conviction, he also said, “safeguards” Brazil’s institutions and the democratic rule of law.
