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The supreme court judge presiding over the trial of Brazil’s ex-president, Jair Bolsonaro, has a “cowardly and treacherous” plot is afoot to pave the way for another attack on the South American country’s democracy.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes was put under sanctions by the US on Wednesday, as part of an apparent push by Donald Trump to help his ally Bolsonaro escape punishment for allegedly masterminding an attempted coup after losing the 2022 election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Trump also slapped a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports in response to what he called the “witch-hunt” against the far-right former president.
On Friday, Moraes, a shaven-headed Muay Thai practitioner known by the nickname Xandão (‘Big Al’), came out swinging. He told the court that Trump’s tariffs and the “spurious” sanctions targeting him and other supreme court justices recently stripped of their US visas, were part of an “illegal and immoral” ruse to obstruct justice that was being engineered by a group of Brazilian “traitors” who had lobbied foreign authorities to carry out “hostile acts” against the country’s economy.
Moraes said the campaign’s objectives were identical to those of the 8 January 2023 riots in the capital, Brasília, when hardcore Bolsonaro supporters stormed the supreme court, congress and presidential palace in an attempt to reverse his election defeat. Those rioters, Moraes said, had hoped to generate social chaos that would provoke a military intervention and make way for a coup.
Two and a half years later, Moraes claimed that by lobbying foreign authorities to impose tariffs, the Brazilians behind the alleged plot were trying to trigger “an economic crisis, that would create a social and then a political crisis so that, once again, there might be social instability and the chance of a new putschist attack”.
“To the disappointment of these Brazilian traitors, [that] will not occur,” the judge added.
Moraes did not name the “supposedly patriotic Brazilians” he claimed were leading the supposed plot from overseas. But his comments were an unmistakable reference to Bolsonaro’s third son, the congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, who moved to the US in February and has admitted to lobbying Trump officials to pressure Brazil over his father’s plight. After Trump hit Moraes with sanctions this week, the younger Bolsonaro thanked him and said: “I have a feeling of mission accomplished”.
The supreme court’s coup trial is expected to conclude in the coming weeks and Bolsonaro – who has denied leading a power grab – is expected to be convicted and sentenced to up to 43 years, meaning the 70-year-old could spend the rest of his life in jail.
Moraes vowed that the court’s work would continue as normal, despite the “ham-fisted” attempts at coercion. There would be no “cowardly surrender” from its members as they sought to defend their country’s democracy.
Trump’s attempt to pressure Brazil’s government and judiciary over Bolsonaro’s fate has sparked the most severe diplomatic crisis between Brazil and the US in decades. “The US government’s interference in the Brazilian justice system is unacceptable,” Lula said on Wednesday, after Trump signed his tariffs into force and hit Moraes with Magnitsky sanctions normally reserved for the perpetrators of severe human rights violations.
Polls suggest most Brazilians oppose Trump’s attempts to meddle in the functioning of their country’s institutions.
Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist and Latin America expert, believed Trump was trying to punish the government of a country which had “done a better job than the US by quite some distance at holding an authoritarian leader accountable”.
“Right now, Brazil is more democratic than the United States,” Levitsky said.
“Brazil’s democracy is flawed. It’s got problems. It’s polarized. But it’s a real functioning democracy and of course many Brazilians are pissed off that the Trump administration is trying to use trade policy to undermine the legal process there.”
