Brazilian President Bolsonaro finds a new way to reduce his 27-year prison sentence: reading books | Jair Bolsonaro

Jair Bolsonaro’s lawyers appear to have been reading the country’s penal code and found a way to help their client reduce the 27-year prison sentence he received last year for plotting a coup: by reading books.

There’s just one problem: the former far-right Brazilian president has never been known to be a bookworm. “Sorry, I don’t have time to read,” Bolsonaro once declared. “It’s been three years since I’ve read a book.”

Brazilian law contains a literary device through which prisoners who read books can have their sentence reduced by four days for each title they read. A Supreme Court judge on Thursday authorized the ill-fated former president to participate in the scheme after a request from his legal team.

Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper with a reputation for hostility toward democracy, minorities, the Amazon rainforest and the arts, is unlikely to appreciate an approved reading list. The book includes Brazilian works on indigenous rights, racism, the environment, and the violence of the country’s dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 – a regime that Bolsonaro publicly supported.

One title, Ana María Gonçalves’ 950-page The Color Fault, tells “the history of Brazil… from the point of view of a black woman.”

The book Democracy! It is a non-fiction picture book for children by English-born author and illustrator Philip Bunting.

Some of the books on the list, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, are more than 1,000 pages long. Bolsonaro once appeared in public with a similarly sized tome – Winston Churchill’s more than 1,000-page memoir of World War II – but it is unclear whether the former president has read it.

In order to benefit from the commutation scheme, prisoners must prove that they have actually read the books by submitting written reports to the prison authorities.

When Bolsonaro was asked to name his favorite book during the 2018 presidential election, he chose a book by Carlos Alberto Brillante Ostra, a notorious army colonel accused of torturing hundreds of prisoners during the dictatorship. “It’s a true story about Brazil… with facts, data and places with real events,” enthuses Bolsonaro, who was transferred this week to a high-security prison in the capital, Brasilia, after spending Christmas in prison at a federal police base.

Ostra’s book does not appear on the judicial system’s reading list, but it does have one title, Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s “I’m Still Here,” which is about the plight of prisoners who disappeared in these torture centers.