Donald Trump is going after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who wants to put the president’s good friend, former president Jair Bolsonaro, in jail. In addition to imposing steep tariffs on Brazil, Washington has placed sanctions on Moraes, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accusing him of “an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary detentions that violate human rights, and politicized prosecutions.” These moves were the direct result of personal appeals from the Bolsonaro family. Using rhetoric that evoked the Cold War, the former president’s son Eduardo Bolsonaro even released in English a “message to the free world.” The international communist menace has reappeared as a judge who threatens to transform Brazil into Venezuela.

How can a single judge be so powerful? To answer this question, we must look to modern Brazilian history. The country’s most popular 20th-century leader was Getúlio Vargas, whose authoritarian rule lasted between 1930 and 1945, at which point the military forced him to resign and call for elections. It was the beginning of a short democratic phase of Brazil, the Fourth Republic, which lasted from 1946 to 1964. Vargas and his allies won elections during this period, but in 1954 the great leader ended up committing suicide under accusations of corruption. 

In 1964, the US government erroneously believed President João Goulart, a follower of Vargas, would bring communism to Brazil. CIA-funded NGOs, with support from the media, organized a march asking for military intervention in order to save the country’s democracy from communism. What followed was a parliamentary coup, backed by the military, to “protect democracy.” In 1968, there was a “coup inside the coup,” which further concentrated power in the military. However, the regime was never a formal dictatorship. It was a hyper-regulated bipartisan regime with indirect elections for president. The presidents were always a marshal or a general from the same party until 1985, when the military decided to step down from power.

The last president during military rule, João Figueiredo, declared that Brazil would have democracy, and whoever opposed it, he would “arrest and beat up.” It was the beginning of the “New Republic,” which nominally still exists today, the founding document of which is the 1988 Constitution. The most impactful feature of this document was the immense new power it granted to lawyers. With the Constitution, the Public Prosecutor’s Office became an independent organ which is not subordinated to any of the three powers, and can create public penal actions on its own initiative. Article 127 charges the office with “defense of the legal order, the democratic regime and … social and individual interests.” The only external control exerted over it is the ability of the president to appoint the General Prosecutor of the Union, who is theoretically the chief of all public attorneys in Brazil. However, public attorneys cannot be arbitrarily fired. 

In some absurd recent instances, prosecutors have used their extensive powers to impose progressive academic fads on the public. For instance, in 2018 a vegan prosecutor decided to cut off meat in poor children’s meals in a rural region, claiming that it was too expensive. But a more prominent example of this unaccountable power in the New Republic was the imprisonment and exoneration of current President Lula da Silva, who was prosecuted for corruption when he was the frontrunner in the presidential election of 2018. His arrest and imprisonment that year pushed him out of the race, allowing Bolsonaro to win. Subsequently, the Supreme Court annulled Lula’s conviction, allowing him to run successfully in 2022. After his presidency, Bolsonaro became a favorite target: He was even investigated for harassing a whale while riding a jet ski.

“It isn’t just the prosecutors who are out of control.”

It isn’t just the prosecutors who are out of control. Americans may find strange the fact that Moraes, a Supreme Court Justice, is able to judge and investigate the former president. The reason is that Article 102 of the 1988 Constitution tasks Supreme Court judges with oversight of the president, vice-president, congressmen, and other public authorities, including its own justices. So the justices interpret the law and are supposed to judge themselves if they commit some crime. The only control over the Supreme Court is the Senate, but no senator wants to vote against judges who hold power over them. So in 2019, Justice Dias Toffoli created, without the help of a public attorney, the Kafkaesque “Inquiry on Fake News,” and handed it over to Moraes, who began to act like a chief of police—which he had previously been in São Paulo. 

The two main parties of the New Republic, who prior to Bolsonaro’s rise alternated power in presidential elections, are Lula’s Workers Party (PT) and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). The only PSDB president was Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former sociology professor at the University of São Paulo who served from 1995 to 2003. Lula, who succeeded Cardoso, was a union leader beloved by São Paulo’s left-wing intellectuals. Roughly speaking, both PT and PSDB have their hearts and brains at the University of São Paulo, and represent different factions of São Paulo’s liberal oligarchy. Before Vargas’s rise, this oligarchy largely ran Brazil, and the New Republic has in effect returned it to its place of prominence.

Alexandre de Moraes is a PSDB member and a law professor at the University of São Paulo. After Dilma Rousseff, the second PT president and Lula’s successor, was impeached, she was replaced by her vice president Michel Temer, a São Paulo politician from the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), a large and ideologically flexible party known for supporting the current government, whatever it may be. The party’s withdrawal of support for Rousseff doomed her presidency, allowing Temer to ascend to the highest office in 2016. 

That same year, Temer had a problem: His young and beautiful wife, Marcela, had her cell phone cloned and was being blackmailed. The criminal said that he would reveal her nudes and embarrass the government. Moraes, who was then serving as secretary of public security for the state of São Paulo, caught the blackmailer and made sure there was no exposure of the hacked content. In gratitude, Temer appointed Moraes to the Supreme Court.

At the time, the left protested Moraes’s appointment, with some calling him a genocidal fascist because of killings of black youth by the São Paulo police. The man who put Moraes in charge of São Paulo police was the PSDB governor Geraldo Alckmin, who ran unsuccessfully for president against Lula in 2006. Now Alckmin is Lula’s vice president and Moraes is regarded as the savior of democracy by the average Brazilian leftist. How did these former enemies come to form a united front? The answer is that the New Republic is now united against Bolsonarism.

For most part of his career, Jair Bolsonaro was an obscure congressman who defended the military, defending its part of the budget but also the legacy of the military regime. President Dilma Rousseff, a guerrilla militant who was tortured, oversaw a commission that would identify disappeared corpses from that era. Bolsonaro scoffed that only dogs look for bones; when he voted for Rousseff’s impeachment, he said that he did it in the name of Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the most notorious torturer during military rule. These provocations turned Bolsonaro into the left’s ideal villain and gave him a lot of publicity—so much so that he became nationally known and was elected president, despite coming from a weak party with scarce resources.

It isn’t hard to see why Brazilians wanted to elect the bad guy. The New Republic was facing a severe economic crisis in the 2010s, accompanied by spikes in crime and violence. Bolsonaro’s nostalgia for military rule, a time associated not only with law and order but significant economic growth, struck a chord. However, just electing Bolsonaro was not enough to bring about significant change, because of the president’s limited power under the 1988 constitution. 

The Brazilian right’s struggle against the establishment, which has its power base in the courts, led to a revival of Cold War propaganda. Suddenly, everybody who was against Bolsonarism was designated a communist. And we need to save democracy from communism, right? Demanding military intervention became routine in right-wing public manifestations. The belief took hold that the 1964 coup was an intervention which resulted from public demonstrations. The people had asked for the military to intervene against communism, and it did. So all they needed was to ask again. The January 8 riot in Brasília was the most significant effort of this sort.

Contrary to the Bolsonaros and their allies abroad, Moraes is no communist. His record is largely that of a tough-on-crime conservative, which is why his appointment to the Supreme Court occasioned a flood of woke tears. He was against the left during Lula’s heyday. Only deep confusion about the 1964 coup made possible the revival of Cold War rhetoric, and hence the fantasy of communist Moraes. What Bolsonaristas want is something that should be at odds with Trump’s America-First outlook: for America to meddle aggressively in Brazil’s internal affairs.

The New Republic, which placed the courts above democratically elected leaders in order to “defend democracy,” was from its origins a flawed political model, and it is now in crisis. Its renegade judicial apparatus first locked up Lula to prevent his election and, when Bolsonaro emerged, released a weakened Lula just to create a large coalition and defeat Bolsonaro. 

Since Trump’s return to power, Bolsonarists have come to see the US president as their own fixer, the anti-Moraes whose intervention will bring law and order to Brazil. And here we are now. Meanwhile, every Brazilian who is not a Moraes new fan is seeing that a hairdresser and some old ladies who participated in the riot are getting a jail time superior to killers. For the Bolsonarist right, democracy can only be saved by military or foreign intervention—an imagined repetition of the 1964 coup. For the left, democracy must be protected by arresting ordinary people who are against it—much as Figueiredo declared at the founding of the New Republic.

Bruna Frascolla is a writer and translator who lives in her native Bahia, Brazil.

@brunafrascolla

Get the best of Compact right in your inbox.

Sign up for our free newsletter today.

Great! Check your inbox and click the link.
Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.