Bolsonaro Wants to Pardon Police Officers Involved in Massacres

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro wants to propose a law to give individual pardons to police officers who are currently in jail, which would not apply to all officers currently incarcerated, but will instead be given to individuals who the president believes is there unfairly, Brazilian media reported Monday.

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Bolsonaro wants to pardon police officers who he believes are "unjustly imprisoned under media pressure," he said speaking to journalists. The president went on to list some examples of those he believes should be eligible for a pardon, those he included were originally jailed for major human rights violations. 

He claimed that those involved in the Carandiru massacre of 1992, and the Eldorado do Carajás massacre of 1996, deserve a presidential pardon. 

The Carandiru massacre took place when Military Police killed 111 prisoners as they were quelling a riot that broke out inside the jail. The Eldorado do Carajás massacre was carried out against members of the ‘Landless Workers Movement’ (MST) in which 19 workers were killed as authorities evicted them from a landowner's private ranch that the MST had occupied due to it being unused.

Legal experts say there would be no basis for such pardons, especially in the cases of the two massacres mentioned above. Those massacres, and the police officers convicted for it, were ruled by the courts to have carried out homicide, meaning the offense is too serious to be given a full pardon. 

Experts also say that if applied, then all prisoners who meet the criteria set by the president would also be eligible for the pardon, triggering mass impunity. 

In the past, Bolsonaro has praised the country’s former military dictators and brushed off criticisms of their record on human rights, even saying once that the dictators had not gone far enough in persecuting the country’s leftist opposition.