BRASÍLIA, April 29 — Debora Rodrigues dos Santos lived most of her life in relative anonymity: a hairdresser raising two children in a small Brazilian city. Now, she is the face of a battle to get amnesty for participants in a 2023 right-wing uprising that some call an attempted coup.
The 39-year-old risks up to 14 years in prison for scribbling with lipstick on a sculpture during violent protests by supporters of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, unseated in 2022 elections by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
“Perdeu, mane” (You lost, fool), she wrote across the bust of a three-metre tall sculpture that she had scaled outside the Supreme Court.
Rodrigues faces charges of “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law,” participating in an attempted coup d’etat and criminal association.
She has already spent two years in a women’s penitentiary awaiting trial, which was converted to home confinement in March.
Rodrigues’s fate now hangs on five judges of Brazil’s Supreme Court, due to rule in the case by May 6.
The trial has turned Rodrigues into a household name and a cause celebre for the right.
She has found a vocal defender in Bolsonaro, who has described her prosecution as “inhumane” and Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes — with whom he has frequently clashed in the past — as a “psychopath.”
An ‘honest woman’
A business administration graduate, Rodrigues had worked as a hairstylist for 18 years in Paulinia, a city of about 115,000 people in the state of Sao Paolo, where she lived with her children and husband.
After Lula’s 2022 election, she participated in a protest in the nearby city of Campinas, according to friends, before traveling to the capital Brasilia by bus.
She was there when a mob stormed the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court on January 8, 2023 — a week after Lula’s inauguration—in scenes reminiscent of the US Capitol insurrection two years earlier by supporters of Donald Trump.
The Brasilia crowd bayed for the military to oust the leftist new president — who they claimed had stolen the vote — and left a trail of destruction in their wake.
Thousands of people were arrested, and around 500 people have since been convicted. More than 220 are serving prison sentences of 11 to 17 years.
Bolsonaro did not present any evidence of his claims of vote-rigging, and is himself facing charges of attempting to carry out a coup to prevent Lula from taking power.
Pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers in Brazil’s conservative-majority Congress have been pushing for an amnesty for those involved in the Brasilia protest. And in Rodrigues — “a Christian, fair, and honest woman,” according to her sister—they have found a public face.
Earlier this year, Rodrigues’s mother and sister shared a stage with Bolsonaro at a demonstration in Sao Paulo where the ex-president’s wife, Michelle, waved a lipstick at the crowd to symbolize the perceived injustice of the prosecution.
Rodrigues has become a “national symbol of political prisoners and exiles deserving amnesty,” her lawyers have said.
For the left, painting her as harmless is a ploy “so that through her all the other leaders (of the insurrection) are pardoned,” according to Humberto Costa, a senator of Lula’s Workers’ Party.
‘Heat of the moment’
Rodrigues had told her Supreme Court trial, in tears, that she had gotten carried away and acted “in the heat of the moment.”
She regretted her action, she said, was “disgusted” and “traumatised” by the experience, and has vowed to never get involved in “anything related to politics again.”
But Moraes, in his ruling, found Rodrigues was “unquestionably aligned with the criminal dynamic” of the 2023 mob.
Her case also forms part of a broader debate in Brazilian society about who should be held accountable for the events and how severe the penalties should be.
A majority — though shrinking — oppose an amnesty for riot participants, and nearly 60 per cent believe prison sentences of 17 years or more are appropriate. — AFP
