Hcfyk

I suspect that today, this achievement has been granted for the first time to Brazil, with the arresting of Michel Temer, and considering that Lula da Silva is still under arrest.

It is normally big news if a former president is incarcerated, so I'd be surprised to know this occurred twice somewhere else.

Quite a few candidates if:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_regimes_who_were_later_imprisoned

... [sort by country] is anything to go by...

• Andalusia (technically an autonomous community in Spain) appears to have two former presidents sitting in jail since 2016.




• Argentina has a whopping 8 presidents that sat in jail, including 2 from 2007 onward.




• Bangladesh had 5 presidents who went to jail, of which two were behind bars in 1975.




• Bosnia and Herzegovina had 2 presidents sitting in jail from 2006 to 2012.




• Bulgaria had as many as 3 former prime ministers behind bars at the same time in 1944.




• Comoros has 3 presidents and prime ministers behind bars at the time of writing this.




• Costa Rica had 2 presidents behind bars from 2004 to 2012.

I'll stop at C, since the list is long, with a few honorable mentions:

• Egypt appears to have had 5 former presidents in jail in 2013.




• Guatemala 3 early in 2018




• Hungary 4 in 1945




• Iraq 4 in 2004




• Japan 5 in 1945




• Libya 4 in 2011




• Pakistan 4 + 2 arrest warrants as I write this

The point is Brazil is not an exception.

One caveat: read the list with a fistful of salt, because it lists former French President Sarkozy as sitting behind bars since 2018, whereas he was only put in police custody for a day that year as he was charged with bribery and illegal campaign contributions. (He might sit in jail some day in the future, but the point here is that you may want to double check the data.) Also, Gaston Flosse of French Polynesia is listed twice.

Peru has an interesting case of former presidents being incarcerated or in the eye of justice.

• 
  Alberto Fujimori in right now in prison, for human right violations, 25 years of conviction.


• 
  Ollanta Humala is in preventive reclusion, investigated for corruption.


• 
  Alejandro Toledo, currently fugitive of justice for corruption as well. Case Oderbrecht (link in Spanish), that started in Brasil.


• 
  Alan García, twice president, twice investigated for corruption. Lately due to case Oderbrecht as well.

Summary, if you have been a Peruvian president, you are probably under investigation by the justice.

South Korea right now has their last two presidents, Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye in jail.

Then again, almost all ex-presidents of South Korea end up either on trial or committing suicide...

Notice that the cases of Lula and Temer are very different.

Lula has been convicted and is serving a sentence (his conviction borders ridicule, going directly against all evidence found in the process - he is not the owner of the apartment that would have constituted the "bribe", he never lived there, he never used the apartment otherwise, and he never received any rent for it).

Temer is under "prisão preventiva", which means under arrest in order to not mess with the investigations against him (his arrest is also very much illegal, as the order does not fulfill any of the requirements for a preemptive arrest - continuation of illegal activity, danger of flight, or danger to the integrity of evidence - and will very likely be overturned by an habeas corpus).

So those are different situations; one is a conviction, the other is part of an investigation.

When I was a little kid I used to think that being president of Brazil was a bad thing, because all former living presidents (Juscelino Kubitshek, João Goulart) had been expelled from the country into exile. I thought it was a rule, and in the atmosphere of fear that was prevalent at the time, no one would explain me what was really going on.

Point being, dictatorships will arrest former presidents, or kill them, or send them into exile. It is just what it seems: arbitrary use of power against real or perceived enemies.

Heck, even regimes that are, at least formally, democracies, aren't immune to this disease, as it is the obvious case of Lula. The judicial branch is as corrupt as any other, if not even more, and is not above directly contradicting law and precedent - and then trying to get a 2.5 billion reais illegal reward for such "services"...