Thousands of people in Latin America’s largest nation took to the streets last Friday to celebrate the sentencing of former president Jair Bolsonaro to twenty-seven years in prison. The day before, September 11, a date associated in the region with the violent 1973 coup d’état in Chile, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court delivered a verdict unlike any in the nation’s modern history, holding not just Bolsonaro but key allies in the upper ranks of the armed forces responsible for planning a coup, leading a criminal conspiracy, and plotting to violently abolish the rule of law after losing the 2022 election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The sentence was at once a recognition of the severity of his crimes and a signal that Brazil’s fragile democratic institutions could, under immense pressure, still rise to the occasion. “That’s very much like they tried to do with me,” US president Donald Trump observed in response. “But they didn’t get away with it at all.”

Historic as it is, Bolsonaro’s guilty verdict does not provide a neat ending to the long-running assault on Brazilian democracy that intensified after his election in 2018. Indeed, Bolsonaro remains the central figure of the Brazilian far right even though he is barred from seeking office until 2030 and will likely be imprisoned past that point anyway. His conviction is best understood not as the conclusion of a political drama but as the opening of a new chapter in Brazil’s struggle to grapple with impunity while safeguarding its sovereignty.