Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is convicted of plotting a coup, Argentine President Javier Milei’s party suffers a key election loss, and Mexican and Ecuadorian directors win acclaim at the Venice Film Festival.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is convicted of plotting a coup, Argentine President Javier Milei’s party suffers a key election loss, and Mexican and Ecuadorian directors win acclaim at the Venice Film Festival.

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At Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday, justices reached a majority to convict former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and seven associates of attempting a coup in the wake of the country’s 2022 election.

The case is being decided by a five-judge panel; by Thursday afternoon, four judges had voted to convict Bolsonaro on all five charges related to his efforts to stay in office. One voted to absolve him. After they announced their votes, the justices began discussing sentences for the defendants late Thursday.

The case has captivated observers in Brazil and abroad. It represented a landmark moment not only in the country’s democratic history, but also in its recently soured relationship with the United States.

Bolsonaro, running for a second term, lost the 2022 presidential election to leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s attorney general has argued that Bolsonaro’s repeated insinuations of fraud in that vote—and his meetings with top military commanders about how to hang on to power—amounted to a plot to undermine Brazilian democracy. Bolsonaro supporters alleging election fraud violently stormed Brazil’s government complex in January 2023.

The Supreme Court opened the case in April based on recommended charges from a federal police investigation. Seven of Bolsonaro’s close allies, many of them military officers, are co-defendants in the case; all eight deny the charges against them.

Brazil has experienced numerous coups during its history, and a military dictatorship ran the country between 1964 and 1985. But until now, a civilian court has never convicted any member of the Brazilian military on coup-related charges.

According to documents submitted by Brazilian federal police as part of the case, some of Bolsonaro’s allies planned to assassinate Lula, his running mate, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

A shooter went as far as assuming position to kill Moraes in December 2022 but aborted the mission in part because Moraes’s movements did not occur as expected that day, according to the documents. Moraes is overseeing Bolsonaro’s trial.

Although Brazilian politics are sharply polarized—Lula defeated Bolsonaro by only a

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