Brazil has become a pariah

It was bound to happen sooner or later – and, obviously, it finally did. The Supreme Court has gone to such lengths to protect corruption in Brazil, with such arrogance and disregard for the minimum decorum expected of its conduct, that it has finally caught the attention of the world for what they are doing here. A year ago, the part of the international community that deems itself more civilized and more capable of setting rules of behavior for the non-members was celebrating the “victory of democracy” in Brazil. How lucky for the planet, right? The danger of “right-wing populism” was defeated. Love won. Brazil “came back.” Nobody, however, expected justice Dias Toffoli to be so cunning. In just one year, with his unprecedented succession of rulings in favor of crooks and thieves, he has managed to demolish all that self-righteous talk. Here’s Brazil, steered by his whims, placed among the world’s pariahs – the lawless countries, devoid of moral codes and shame, which belong in the dark face of humanity.

The decay of the Supreme Court as a respectable institution was already far underway, with the rubble of its roof and walls on the ground, due to the actions of justice Alexandre de Moraes. Backed by the highest court in the country, he abolished the civil rights enshrined in the Constitution to establish a penal dictatorship in Brazil – a aberration that transformed the Supreme Court into a police station aimed at repressing political opponents of the current regime. Sooner or later, though, his time will come. Moraes has everything to end up in the international press as one of those Third World figures who appear from time to time as successors to dictator Idi Amin in his judge persona. But Toffoli got there first. The legal uncertainty the Supreme Court created in recent years has surpassed the violation of democratic guarantees and plunged headlong into the squalor of the generalized robbery committed against the Treasury. That is way out of line. It’s like a guy who, instead of taking off his swim trunks inside the pool so no one can see, climbs on the diving board to show everyone he’s naked.

The truth about the summit of the Judiciary in Brazil, known here but concealed all this time by the mainstream international media, came to light in the worst possible way for the Supreme Court. The Financial Times in London, which is like a school report on behavior for governments and nations around the world, published a 100% accurate, competent, and devastating exposure of the current corruption surge in Brazil – and the leading role that Toffoli and the Supreme Court play in this horror movie. It’s an awful situation since the Financial Times is among the few news outlets that are read in boardrooms, ministerial meetings in the First World, and by the fattest cats of the global high bureaucracy. It’s followed in marketing departments and by the strictest enforcers of the adherence to political correctness. In short: it’s among the favorite readings of the Davos bunch that leaves Lula, Marina Silva, minister of the Environment and Climate Change, and the Workers’ Party’s leadership always so stirred. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that articles published by the Financial Times serve as a kind of “free pass” for the elite of the globalized media to echo the information.

It’s all there. The article mentions the annulment of a R$ 10 billion fine owed by J&F and a R$ 3.8 billion fine owed by Odebrecht, which, by judicial agreement, the two companies committed to pay so their directors would not be imprisoned for the crime of active corruption. Toffoli, alone, canceled both, so that neither defendants, who plead guilty, had to go to jail nor honor such agreement. The text cites the report by Transparency International, which downgraded Brazil by ten positions on the index of the countries perceived as most corrupt in the world in 2023 – its worst position since 1995 – and mentions Toffoli’s name several times. It also exposes the unwinding of Operation Car Wash’s legacy of a seven-year fight against corruption. It mentions the 2,200 years of prison sentences annulled in favor of the 165 convicted thieves. It mentions the note by the United States Treasury Department on the thievery against Petrobras during Lula-Dilma terms – according to American authorities, the biggest bribery case ever recorded in history. It reveals to the most qualified readers in the world that Toffoli was the Workers’ Party’s lawyer before being appointed by Lula to the Supreme Court. It informs that justice Cristiano Zanin was Lula’s personal lawyer.

It’s a complete disaster. “Thanks to Toffoli’s decisions, Brazil has become a graveyard of evidence of crimes that have generated misery, violence, and human suffering,” says the Financial Times, quoting the text from Transparency International. “The country is increasingly becoming, in the eyes of the world, an example of corruption and impunity.” The newspaper also informs on the justice’s reaction to the report: he ordered a criminal investigation of the entity, based on a patently false news story, long buried, about imaginary illegalities it would have committed in Brazil. It’s one of the golden rules of the penal philosophy of Idi Amin. “We have freedom of speech here,” he would say. “What we cannot guarantee is the freedom of those who express themselves.” Such position is an exact portrait of how the Brazilian Supreme Court rolls today, except this time nothing is coming out of Toffoli’s orders – Transparency International is based in Berlin and cannot be indicted, demonetized, or arrested by Alexandre de Moraes and his Federal Police. It’s a perfect rigmarole.

The truth is the Supreme Court is losing the most elementary notions of ridicule. What can be said, for example, about a very recent feat of the same Federal Police? Bear with me. At times like this, just when the walls are closing in on the highest court, here comes the federal law enforcement requesting to officially hear the testimony of former president Jair Bolsonaro to find out if he had bothered a whale off the north coast of São Paulo. Can you believe it? After the “remarkable” discovery, with a DNA sample analysis and all, of a fingerprint on a plastic bottle apprehended during the investigation of the “coup d’état” of January 8 – in addition to slingshots and marbles –, all the scientific investigation resources of the Federal Police, with the support of the Federal Prosecution Office and GloboNews, are mobilized in this astonishing whale case. It reinforces their thesis of “apparent aggression” to justice Moraes at the Rome Airport, which to this day is treated as a state secret by the “feds” and the Supreme Court, piling up with the jewels from Arabia, the accusation made by Colonel Cid, and more of the same – a nuclear bomb bound to explode at any moment, according to the latest revelations of the PF press office, but that so far has not. The latest chapter in the relentless persecution of Bolsonaro happened this Thursday. Under the same accusation of plotting a coup d’état that never happened, his passport was seized.

That said, in addition to Toffoli being accused of favoring corruption, how on Earth could the Supreme Court have the nerve to sentence Bolsonaro to prison with the whole world watching? It is already preparing to revoke, through its Superior Electoral Court militia, the mandate of senator Sergio Moro. It has declared once before that Bolsonaro is ineligible for “danger of coup” as they think he could be a strong opponent in the 2026 elections. Are they now willing to put the man behind bars? Who will still believe the Supreme Court is a serious institution after doing something like this – exactly when the world’s public opinion finds out about the destruction of evidence, the annulment of fines, and the rest of Toffoli and his companions’ deeds? Nothing mitigates the dire situation the Supreme Court is going through as none of their comrades have shown any kind of sympathy for Toffoli. Lula, so far, has not uttered so much as a peep in favor of the friend accused by “this alien organization,” as Toffoli himself classifies Transparency International. The Workers’ Party’s bigwigs, always geared up for war, are silent. Not even his own colleagues at the highest court in the country were keen on defending him.

Toffoli and the Supreme Court, who relentlessly support corruption, corrupts, and corrupters, are pushing Brazil into an increasingly worse isolation from democracies and upstanding nations. In just one year of Lula’s government, the country has joined the exclusive club of diplomatic dwarfs. Now, it’s becoming a dwarf with a global reputation of having a thief as president. Let’s just look into facts. Lula made his great debut on the diplomatic scene by siding with Russia in the war against Ukraine – saying the truth is that Ukraine is responsible for the invasion of its own territory. He turned Brazil into the only country in the world that, at the same time, claims to be democratic and welcomes, in an official visit, the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who has a US$ 15 million bounty on his head by Interpol for international drug trafficking. Unlike all free countries, associated himself with the dictatorship of Iran, a state declared worldwide as an ally of terrorism. He supported Brazil’s endorsement of a complaint by South Africa – one of the most violent, corrupt, and socially unjust countries on Earth – against Israel. The accusation of “genocide” was dismissed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The bottom line is Lula has only brought shame on Brazil.

Lula stood with the assassins of Hamas in the attack that killed 1,200 civilians, including women and babies in Israel last October. He joined all the dictatorships of the world in accusations against Israel for “genocide.” He is automatically opposed to everything the United States and the European Community stand for. He meddled in the elections in Argentina in favor of the defeated side and got smacked down. In the latest elections on the continent, in El Salvador, the “right-wing” candidate, who is anti-crime and anti-corruption, won with 85% of the votes. It’s him that the world is talking about today. Regarding Brazil, the talking is only about the allegations of facilitating the theft of the Treasury with the backing of the Supreme Court-Lula consortium. It cannot be taken seriously even in Latin America, to which it deems itself the Spiritual and Political Guide. Its poor dream of being “leader of the Global South” has become a joke. The fact is that the real pariah of the world is no longer “Brazil under Bolsonaro”, as the left spent years saying. It is today’s Brazil – with Lula’s foreign policy and the luxurious travels of the first couple on one side and Toffoli and the Supreme Court on the other. Though displeased with the Supreme Courts’s stance in favor of Transparency International and the Financial Times, this time Toffoli cannot blame “Bolsonarism” since he has been accused of decriminalizing corruption when practiced by government partners. It’s the perfect catch-22.