Brazil’s ex-president Jair Bolsonaro said Saturday that he will “probably” need surgery, after being hospitalized a day earlier in the northeastern city of Natal with what he called “unbearable” abdominal pain.
The far-right former leader said on X that he would “probably be operated on again” after being transferred to a hospital in Brasilia.
A source at the private Rio Grande Hospital in Natal said Bolsonaro would probably be transferred by plane late Saturday.
The former leader has undergone multiple surgeries since being the victim of a vicious knife attack during his 2018 campaign for the presidency, but he said Saturday on X that doctors told him his latest painful incident was “the most serious” since then.
Rogerio Marinho, a senator in Bolsonaro’s far-right Liberal Party, had been accompanying Bolsonaro on a multi-city tour in Rio Grande do Norte state when the trip was cut short after the 70-year-old ex-president complained of “unbearable pain” caused by a bowel obstruction.
He was first taken to a local hospital where he was “stabilized,” then flown by helicopter to the larger Rio Grande facility in Natal, the state capital.
Bolsonaro lost some 40 percent of his blood in the 2018 attack. The assailant was later declared mentally unfit to stand trial.
The former army captain was elected president just weeks after the attack but the stabbing has taken a lasting toll, leading to repeated hospitalizations and surgeries.
His latest setback occurred two weeks after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that he should face trial on charges of plotting a coup after he lost the presidency to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the 2022 election.
In Natal, a surgeon at the private Rio Grande Hospital initially said on Friday that no surgery was planned, as the ex-president had seen improvement.
“Thank God, my condition is stable and I am recovering, without fever,” Bolsonaro wrote on X, adding that “the cause was a complication in the small intestine, a consequence of the multiple surgeries I needed to undergo after the attack in 2018.”
Marinho said the transfer to Brasilia would allow the former president to be treated by a medical team that has “followed him for years.”
Bolsonaro has been declared ineligible to run for office until 2030 for baselessly questioning the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting system.
But he has clung to hopes that the judgment might be overturned or the sentence reduced in time to allow him to stand in next year’s elections.
