A man convicted of Bolsonaro’s coup plot in Paraguay is arrested while trying to escape by plane to El Salvador

Vasques, sentenced to 24 years and 6 months in prison for participating in the coup plot, fHe was arrested at the Silvio Pettirossi International Airport, in Asunción, after irregularly entering that country with the identity of a Paraguayan citizen.

According to a report from the Brazilian Federal Police, He intended to flee to El Salvador on a flight with a stopover in Panama.

Before arriving in Paraguay, Vasques, who was under house arrest in the state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, while awaiting the execution of his sentence, he “broke the electronic anklet” that monitored his movements.

According to the security cameras in his community, he left his residence on Wednesday night in a rented vehicle, accompanied by a dog, “apparently of the pit bull breed”, and loaded with food and transport utensils for his pet.

The jThursday, in the middle of Christmas Day, the electronic anklet stopped emitting a signal. Later, two police teams went to his house and verified that he was not there.

It was then that Brazilian authorities sent an alert to Paraguay and Argentina about a possible leak. In parallel, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered his preventive detention and, finally, he was detained at the Asunción airport.

Expelled to Brazil

The director of Migrations of Paraguay, Jorge Kronawetter, said that Vasques’ administrative expulsion has been ordered because he was wanted and captured in Brazil and violated Paraguayan laws by having entered the country illegally.

“Using the immigration law, we are going to hand him over to the Brazilian Federal Police to carry out their mandate,” he added.

Vasques was convicted by the Supreme Court on December 16, within the framework of the trial against the last five defendants of the coup attempt orchestrated by Bolsonaro, who is already serving a 27-year prison sentence and is currently recovering in the hospital after undergoing surgery for a bilateral hernia in the groin.

The former police chief had not yet begun to serve his sentence in a closed regime because the sentence is not final, since you can still appeal the ruling.

The Supreme Court found him guilty of being behind an operation in the second round of the 2022 elections to hinder the arrival of voters to the voting centers in traditionally left-wing fiefdoms and thus favor Bolsonaro, who was ultimately defeated by the current ruler, the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The high court has convicted thirty defendants for the coup plot, against whom it has handed down sentences of between one and 27 years in prison.

Another convict managed to escape

However, Vasques was not the first of those convicted of coup plotting to escape from Brazil.

The former deputy and former director of the Intelligence services Alexandre Ramagem fled last September clandestinely from the state of Roraima, bordering Venezuela, and headed to the United States.

Police also suspect that Bolsonaro also tried to escape after the far-right leader manipulated his electronic anklet with a soldering iron in late November.

Bolsonaro precisely received the greatest punishment from the Supreme Court, considering him the “leader” of the coup plot, which began even before the 2022 elections and had as a corollary the violent assault on the headquarters of the three branches of government on January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration.