A Tyrant's Robe Has Descended Across Brazil
A Tyrant's Robe Has Descended Across Brazil
One Man Rules Latin America's Largest County- and It Isn't the President
“Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”
- Montesquieu [The Spirit of the Laws, I.XI.6]
Political power in Brazil has become dangerously concentrated in the hands of one man, but it isn’t a top general or the President Lula da Silva. Instead, it is Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is trampling the liberties of the Brazilian people in a war against what he considers to be disinformation. According to de Moraes, Brazil’s “fragile democracy” is threatened by what he calls “digital militias” and the only solution is for him to take profoundly undemocratic steps to remove political opponents from the internet with no due process and no information made available about cause. His victims, some of them leading political or economic figures, are thrown into a Kafkaesque quagmire where they are told they are guilty but cannot even find out with what they have been charged. Glenn Greenwald, who has been a resident of Brazil for some time, has been working to expose this issue for years. However, it is journalist Michael Shellenberger who recently released a new set of “Twitter Files” for Brazil showing the egregious demands which this one magistrate has made. Most of all, according to Musk, who was not involved in the release but promoted the work to show what his company has been going through, Twitter has been told to remove users without telling them what it is for while pretending it was Twitter’s decision, which for him was de Moraes taking things too far. The fine for refusing to remove people from your social media website is $20,000 per day per person, but Musk has said he will shut down Twitter in Brazil if he must and has encouraged people to access it through a VPN. De Moraes, with da Silva’s support, is trying to charge Musk with interfering in their internal affairs because Musk isn’t playing his game. I am less interested in the story of Musk’s fight with de Moraes, and more interested in how Brazil got to this point. Governments commonly try to censor information which they find threatening, and every oppression is done in the name of safety, but it is unique that anyone within a state should let one judge take such terrifying power. De Moraes can claim he is “saving democracy” all he wants, but it’s obvious to outsiders- and much of the Brazilian population- that it is not former President Bolsanaro or his supporters who present a real threat to Brazil’s democracy, but de Moraes himself.
In Brazil, as in many other countries, there has been a military dictatorship within living memory, in this case ending in 1985. Further, as is the case across Latin America, in any given Presidential election are usually some sort of apologist for Marxism and an apologist for a prior military regime, in this instance the former being current President Lula da Silva and the latter being the prior President Jair Bolsanaro. This gives a degree of credence to concerns about the “fragile democracy” or the return of military government, however at the same time this rings hollow to Americans who saw this nonsense about Trump the entire time. Bolsonaro is kind of a scary guy and can fairly be described as illiberal, but any decently organized republic is set up to prevent the President from taking all the power. It is not a “failure of democracy” if the person that the political and media classes dislikes get elected. What is far more illiberal and authoritarian is de Moraes, who has positioned himself as the main opponent to the return of military government, which they want you to believe will come back due to the dangers of “disinformation.” These are the same excuses under which liberties have been attacked across the Western world since Trump’s victory in 2016. In this instance, it’s a stunning example of the premise that “whatever we like is democracy,” which the globalist neoliberal establishment is constantly using to reinforce their unpopular rule.
A number of recent events have led to Brazil’s judiciary becoming so overpowered. The first of which is the enormous “Operation Car Wash” corruption scandal which dominated Brazilian public life for years, leading, among other things, to the temporary imprisonment of Lula, which prevented him from contesting the 2018 elections. Though this exposed a great deal of corruption, there was also corruption in the investigation itself, and it is believed by many that Lula was at least mostly innocent and imprisoned to stop him from running for a 3rd term as President. Some felt that the investigation showed that Brazil was hopelessly corrupt, others thought that the fact that the investigations happened at all showed that Brazil had strong institutions and was a functional government. Regardless, as this scandal placed the judiciary against the legislative and executive branches of government, it caused the Supreme Court justices to become much better known figures throughout the country, as their work was in the news all the time. De Moraes was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2017, when the Operation Car Wash affair was at its height. At the time, the leftists in the country criticized the appointment, as de Moraeas was thought to be associated with the center-right. Of course, now that he is an anti-free speech crusader destroying the liberties of the Brazilian public, he is the darling of Brazil’s institutional left.
Things really changed in 2019 when the court’s Chief Justice, Dia Toffoli, issued a one page order unilaterally expanding the court’s own power, shortly after the hated Bolsonaro took office. It was an arbitrary and undemocratic power grab meant to fight the “threat” Bolsonaro allegedly posed to Brazil’s democracy. This change allowed the court to open its own investigations, specifically into “fake news”- he used the English term!- that attacked the “honorability” of the court. While there may be a variety of legal systems in this world, it is generally always the case that someone has to bring an investigation to a judge, but in this case Toffoli took both executive and legislative power for the court. This rapidly moved Brazil into the scenario that Montesquieu describes in this article’s epigraph, “There would be an end to everything, were the same man or the same body…to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals” [The Spirit of the Laws, I.XI.6.] This is exactly what has happened following this one page order allowing the court to open its own cases, something which it has no legitimate authority to do.
Toffoli chose de Moraes for his effort to go after those criticizing the court. The first thing de Moraes did was force a magazine called Crusoe to remove an article about this same Toffoli and his links to a corruption investigation. De Moraes called the article “fake news.” The publishers had no recourse, because in the past it was usually the Supreme Court protecting the press from lower court orders trying to make them remove their content. The ban on the content was later removed after legal documents surfaced showing that the reporting was accurate. The jig should have been up when the first thing these powers were used for was shutting down accurate reporting about the very man who put the order in place, but de Moraes was just beginning. His power would soon be spreading much more widely, attacking freedom at every turn. Even in the most egregious instances of censorship or surveillance in the US, the government was using rubber stamp courts or was merely pressuring companies to remove people from social media. When such “prosecutions,” if you can even call them that, originate from the same body which judges them, it is simple tyranny and there is no protection of the rights of the public. The judiciary insists that because it goes back to a full panel of the 11 Supreme Court Justices this is not the tyranny of de Moraes, but they are clearly just going along with him.
Jack Nicas, who covered the Brazilian election for The New York Times, and thus also de Moraes’ ever increasing power, provided much of the best English-language journalism on this issue, albeit while persistently trying to play up the supposed threats to democracy which de Moraes claims he is combating. In one article from September 26th 2022 titled “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?” he tells the story of a WhatsApp chat group containing some of Brazil’s wealthiest businessman who supported Bolsonaro. In the summer of 2022, one member of the chat group, real estate magnate Jose Koury, said “I prefer a coup to the return of the Workers’ Party,” to which one of the other 7 people in the chat responded with a GIF of a man applauding. No one else responded and there was not further discussion of the topic. When the chat was leaked to the media, Nicas describes what happened, “Federal agents raided the homes of eight of the businessmen. The authorities froze their bank accounts, subpoenaed their financial, phone and digital records, and told social networks to suspend some of their accounts.” This was all done at the order of de Moraes, and these are men with financial interests throughout Brazil and a large public presence; you can imagine how little defense the common man has against such persecutions. No one had planned anything, one man had just spoken immoderately, and said something that people from across the world say when they are dissatisfied with government [not just in countries with a history of coups, many Americans say such things as well.] Since the entire process is de Moraes, there weren’t any safeguards besides the broader Supreme Court which he clearly controls. He tried to justify his actions by releasing a document showing their connections to various right wing figures, but this information was already publicly known. He ultimately unfroze their bank accounts and they were never charged. What is more notable is that when Brazil’s deputy attorney general, Lindora Aruajo appealed his order saying it represented, “a kind of thought police that is characteristic of authoritarian regimes” it was de Moraes himself who saw to the appeal and declined it.
The same article by Nicas goes through a whole list of de Moraes’ oppressions. All of this from one man:
“Mr. Moraes ordered major social networks to remove dozens of accounts, erasing thousands of their posts, often without giving a reason, according to a tech company official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking the judge.…
In many cases, Mr. Moraes went after right-wing influencers who spread misleading or false information. But he also went after people on the left. When the official account of a Brazilian communist party tweeted that Mr. Moraes was a “skinhead” and that the Supreme Court should be dissolved, Mr. Moraes ordered tech companies to ban all of the party’s accounts, including a YouTube channel with more than 110,000 subscribers. The companies complied…
In seven cases, he ordered the arrest of far-right activists on charges of threatening democracy by advocating for a coup or calling people to antidemocratic rallies. At least two are still in jail or under house arrest. Some cases were initiated by the attorney general’s office, while others Mr. Moraes began himself…
In the most high-profile case, Mr. Moraes ordered the arrest of a conservative congressman after he criticized Mr. Moraes and other justices in an online livestream. “So many times I’ve imagined you taking a beating on the street,” the congressman, Daniel Silveira, said in the livestream. “What are you going to say? That I’m inciting violence?”
The Supreme Court voted 10-to-1 to sentence Mr. Silveira to nearly nine years in prison for inciting a coup. Mr. Bolsonaro pardoned him the next day.”
This is naked tyranny, there is no other way to describe it. De Moraes’ excuse is that everything is done with the approval of the full court, but the court is obviously a partner in his labors.
De Morae’s sponsor Toffoli said of de Moraes and his new powers, “Brazil lives with the same incitement to hatred that took lives in the U.S. Capitol invasion, and democratic institutions must do everything possible to avoid scenarios like Jan. 6, 2021, which shocked the world.” In August of 2022, a couple of months before the election, de Moraes managed to become the head of the 7 judge Superior Electoral Court, known as the TSE. In this position he was responsible for overseeing the elections- including his normal role of censorship, imprisoning, and more. Of course the claim was that he was “ensuring the integrity of elections” as they say, but why would anyone in Brazil think he was a neutral arbiter of this process? I refuse to believe his supporters even managed to convince themselves he was fair, they just knew he was on their side. De Moraes, of course, did not use a light hand in his “oversight” of the election. Whipping up fears of the dangers that democracy posed to Democracy™, the authoritarianism of Brazil increased to levels not seen since military rule, all while its supporters claimed this didn’t constitute censorship. In an October 21st article for The New York Times titled “To Fight Lies, Brazil Gives One Man Power Over Online Speech” the same Jack Nicas describes the many powers taken by de Moraes to control the election:
“Brazilian authorities…granted the nation’s elections chief unilateral power to order tech companies to remove many online posts and videos — one of the most aggressive actions taken by any country to combat false information.
The elections chief can order the immediate removal of content that he believes has violated previous takedown orders. Social networks must comply with those demands within two hours or face the potential suspension of their services in Brazil…
“There has been a proliferation of not only false news, but of the aggressiveness of this news, this hate speech, which we all know leads to nothing but an erosion of democracy,” he [de Moraes] said. “This is precisely why we need a faster way.”
…The elections chief’s expanded powers are effective during election campaigns. The powers will lapse after the presidential vote but will take effect again in future campaigns…
The electoral court has already banned posts that have called Mr. Bolsonaro a pedophile…The court has also ordered the takedown of content that says Mr. da Silva is corrupt. Mr. da Silva served time in prison on corruption charges, which were later nullified…
This week, the electoral court restricted one of Brazil’s largest news outlets from describing Mr. da Silva as corrupt, and it blocked a prominent right-wing YouTube channel from posting a documentary on a 2018 assassination attempt against Mr. Bolsonaro…
If a tech company repeatedly refuses to comply with Mr. Moraes’s orders, he can “suspend access to the services” of the platform in Brazil for up to 24 hours.
Earlier this year, Mr. Moraes said he planned to block Telegram, the messaging service with millions of users in Brazil, after the company did not follow his orders to remove the account of a prominent supporter of Mr. Bolsonaro accused of spreading disinformation. (Mr. Moraes was acting then in his capacity as a Supreme Court justice.) Mr. Moraes reversed that ban several days later after Telegram agreed to changes.”
It is obvious that every aspect of this is counter-productive to its claimed purposes and only makes people have less trust in the information they hear and the electoral process.
More importantly, do you want to take a guess about if these temporary powers went away? Of course they didn’t. When people did not think the election was fair, primarily because of de Moraes’ interference, he then had a pretense to continue to censor people questioning the impact that his campaign of censorship and oppression had on the election. Suffice to say anyone who believes this is saving democracy has their head so far up their ass that they can see the sunshine from the other side. Following the vote, seeing that they were dominated by one judge and without a voice, the public took to protesting outside of military bases asking for the military to prevent da Silva from taking power. While ill-advised, it’s hard to imagine how this constitutes a crime in any free system of government. It’s also not clear what freedom the military could take from Brazil that hasn’t been taken already, but the issue of course is which side would be oppressed. Needing to shut down political expression, de Moraes went on another spree of removing people from social media. Again from Nicas,
Among the accounts Mr. de Moraes ordered taken down are those of at least five members of Congress, a billionaire businessman and more than a dozen prominent right-wing pundits, including one of Brazil’s most popular podcast hosts.
Mr. de Moraes’s orders to remove accounts do not specify why, according to the lawyer and a copy of one order obtained by The New York Times. Visits to banned accounts on Twitter yield a blank page and a blunt message: The “account has been withheld in Brazil in response to a legal demand.” And account owners are simply told they are banned because of a court order and should consider contacting a lawyer.
The lawyer said that his tech firm appealed some orders it viewed as overly broad, but that Mr. de Moraes denied them. Appeals to the full bench of judges have also been denied or ignored, this person said.
In spite of this, or possibly because of it, they did get the January 6th they feared. De Moraes antagonizing the public surely did more to guarantee this outcome than anything that Bolsonaro did or could have done. Of course, the corporate media and this class of incompetent bureaucrats and judges that I hate so much does not consider that. Brazil’s January 8th 2023 riot did contain a fair amount of violence, more than America’s 2 years prior but the situations were so remarkably similar it is beyond suspicious, and I find it much more likely that their government was inspired by ours than that their protesters were inspired by ours.
Contra what the US Democrats, Brazil’s judicial establishment, and the corporate media wants to tell you, riots at legislatures aren’t that historically uncommon, and it is not the case that protesters occupying a building will overthrow a state that was not already on the verge of collapse. This kind of conflict just does occur within a polity sometimes, especially when people have been misgoverned. Ideally, a government will punish the ringleaders or worst offenders, pardon everyone else, address reasonable demands, ignore unreasonable ones, and then everyone moves on with their lives. In the case of the US, we had just suffered under an arbitrary and heavy-handed covid regime which did not save anyone, and our election system which was already ridiculous with a bunch of different vote sources and long count times went through emergency rule changes which led to unprecedented results [in the sense that none of the numbers followed patterns of prior years.] In the case of Brazil, democracy in the country was legitimately broken by the amount of power accumulated by a single magistrate, and even if the counting was fair, the election was manipulated from top to bottom.
In both Brazil and the United States those in power [or soon to be taking power] completely dismissed the grievances of the people. A similar situation arose in early Republican Rome, when the plebeians were angry about debts which were [literally] enslaving them. In 494 BC, less then a generation after the expulsion of the kings, a mob outside of the Senate grew out of control and a riot was imminent. The Consul Appius Claudius, a particularly haughty man, declared that,
“The mob had nothing whatsoever to complain of: the disturbances were not due to their sufferings but to their disregard for law and order; they were not angry - for they had nothing to be angry about: they were merely out of hand.” [Livy, 2.29]
This is remarkably similar to the attitude which was take in our own time, and in the United States even over three years later there is still an obsession with the riots and punishing anyone who happened to be there, while our rulers refusal to admit that our elections give the appearance of impropriety. Alternately, in Brazil the power of the man whose unchecked unlawful power offends much of the nation has only grown. In the case of Rome, the crowd was pacified for a period of time, but the valid grievances being unresolved, the same issues shortly after led the an event known as the “Secession of the Plebs,” which was possibly the first general strike in recorded history. This event permanently altered the balance between the orders within Roman society and led to the creation of the Tribune of the Plebs, a position specifically empowered to protect the common man against malicious magistrates.
Unfortunately, it happens to be the case that in neither the United States nor Brazil has any such action happened which would secure the people’s rights against magistrates or other political superiors. De Moraes has continued his crusade against freedom. After January 8th Moraes went on a rampage, ordering Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and and Instagram to shut down the accounts of anyone he said within 2 hours of receiving the demand or be fined $20,000 per day. The pretense of course is that they bore some responsibility for the riot, but there is no due process. Further, he tried to remove a young man named Nikolas Feirrera from the internet. Feirrera, a popular Youtuber, had recently been elected as a legislature with the most votes of any of the 513 legislators elected that year. His “crime?” Suggesting the January 8th riots were a set up by the government. As you can see, de Moraes is not acting like an innocent person. It is trite, but as the expression goes, “when you cut out a man’s tongue you only show that you fear what he has to say.”
Though seemingly all reasonable people have been willing to point out the dangers of letting one man take this power, de Moraes certainly has his supporters. One woman named Milly Lacombe, who is surely a rational person one would want to rely on in a difficult situation, said in an Op-Ed from January 2023, “Under the threat of a Nazi-fascist-inspired insurrection, is it worth temporarily suppressing individual freedoms in the name of collective freedom? I would say yes.” Notice the “Nazi-fascist-inspired”…so it is neither Nazi or fascist, but is inspired by those different ideologies, neither of which would she likely be able to explain besides “it’s government by mean people.”
One union leader named as Petista Chico Vigilante was also quoted in The Rio Times as saying, “He deserves a bust in every square, in every corner of this country, because of the civil courage he shows.” This guy wants to thank him for fighting fascism by putting his image everywhere like he is Mussolini. And of course, the media is on his side:
This is how things were when Michael Shellenberger released what he called “Twitter Files Brazil.” This story has been told adequately by many, and Twitter’s fight is not my interest here, but the short version is Twitter said it would no longer comply with these orders, even if the company had to shut down its presence in Brazil. The media was filled with articles about Musk battling de Moraes. Musk was threatened over “interfering” in Brazil’s domestic affairs. Musk, in a typical fashion, claimed he would released data which showed de Moraes was a “traitor” to Brazil, something which we should assume Musk does not possess. Brazil’s anti-freedom partisans continue to lose their mind, and Shellenberger said thousands of Worker’s Party activists called for his arrest over his testimony before the legislature and that Lula has now said that lying- in general- should be a jailable criminal offense. It’s all very scary.
It is rare throughout history that a single magistrate should accumulate this amount of power, though there have been many feared magistrates over the centuries. Usually, a powerful magistrate has a mandate to pursue actual crime and corruption, or it is something like a “Special Counsel” in the US which can expand to everything. I cannot think of another example in the modern era where anyone who did not seize the state in a military coup or inherit a dictatorship accumulated power as fast as de Moraes. However, there is one good example from antiquity: the infamous Second Decemivirate in Rome. Almost 50 years after the Secession of the Plebs discussed above there was still a great deal of unrest between the classes [this is all part of a 200 year class struggle which modern historians call the “Conflict of the Orders.”] Rome did not have a “great lawgiver,” but the constitution was instead developed over time, as new innovations became necessary. This meant that initially Rome did not have formal written laws, which worked fine in a primitive society where judges made decisions about things like murder, theft, or inheritance based on tradition and precedent. However, the plebeians came to feel that this disadvantaged them, and it was agreed to temporarily replace the government with ten elected magistrates, known as “decemvirs.” The First Decemvirate went well, and produced laws known as The Ten Tables. However, despite the work being completed, a man named Appius Claudius, the son of the Consul Appius Claudius above, managed to convince people another term was needed. Appius campaigned vigorously and filled the other positions with lesser men, which is to say, sycophants [Livy, 3.35.] From here he became a brutal tyrant, Livy writes,
“If anyone in the Senate or the streets spoke a word for liberty, the rods and axes would promptly be made ready, if only to teach the rest a bitter lesson. The right of appeal was gone; people could no longer help a fellow-citizen wrongfully accused…
Soon the rods began to be used: men were beaten, others executed. Cruelty had its reward, and, often enough, a victim’s property was turned over to his murder. The decemvirs’ young toadies were easily corrupted by such pay, and far from making any attempt to check their master’s brutal conduct, openly rejoiced in it; for them, personal immunity in crime was a more agreeable thing than national liberty.” [3.36-37]
Ultimately, this period ended with one of the most famous episodes in Roman history1. Appius, perverted by power and consumed by lust, became determined to steal a young freeborn woman named Verginius to take as his slave- though she was betrothed and destined for a marriage bed, it appeared she would be going to a brothel. In a confrontation in the Forum, in plain view of the Roman public, her father, out of options, said, “There is only one way, my child, to make you free” and stabbed her in the heart, and then looked at the tyrant and said, “Appius, may the curse of this blood rest on your head forever” [3.48.] The public reaction to this outrageous scene quickly lead to the downfall of the Decemvirate, and free government was restored; Appius killed himself in prison [3.58.]
Machiavelli includes a section in Discourses on Livy about how it is that despite coming about through the free and public elections [more than we can say for de Moraes] the Decemvirate became oppressive, writing, “An absolute authority corrupts the material in the shortest time and creates friends and partisans. Nor is it any disadvantage to be poor or to lack family ties, for wealth and every other favour quickly pursue authority” [I.35.] That may seem somewhat trite [500 years after it was written,] but what is more notable is from a later section about how the Decemvirate shows the same circumstances may save or destroy a Republic. Machiavelli writes,
“The disadvantage involved in creating this tyranny arose in Rome from the same causes that give rise to most tyrannies in cities: that is, from an excessive desire on the part of the people to be free, and from an excessive desire on the part of the nobles to rule; and when they do not agree to establish a law that favours liberty, but, instead, one of the parties rushes to support a single man, it is then that tyranny quickly arises.” [I.40]
This, indeed, is what happened in Brazil: despite that it was the people’s candidate Bolsonaro we were meant to believe would be a tyrant, the fear of him held by the nobility caused them to place their own tyrant first, and in doing so, they took all of the power and created a monster they are unlikely to soon be rid of.
Surveys show almost 50% of Brazilians feel they are living under judicial tyranny, and this is before it was all over the international news. This means the public itself would likely vote to remove the man who claims he is “saving democracy” if given the opportunity. It is not obvious how the people of Brazil can escape from the prison the nation’s political elites and their partisans have constructed. De Moraes’ supporters, of course, could just as easily find themselves subject to his oppressions. As was said above, they did once fear him, but are blinded by other fears and hatreds. Machiavelli notes of Appius, “He had made himself so popular through his behaviour that it seemed amazing for him so quickly to have acquired a new character and a new talent, having previously been considered a cruel persecutor of the plebeians” [I.40.] Sooner or later, Brazil’s left will again experience this, but it will be shallow comfort to the rest of the public to see their enemies persecuted when it is alongside themselves. There are no obvious legal solutions to fight a megalomaniacal tyrant who has legislative, executive, and judicial power and operates completely outside of the constitution.
Democracy, real democracy, not the fake system promoted by the Western elites, is currently dead in Brazil. Voting cannot save them, as de Moraes is more powerful than any President. Waiting until he decides “misinformation” is no longer a threat to “democracy” is unlikely to do anything but allow him to tighten the noose. It doesn’t seem the military has the heart to capture and remove this man. The day may come where he commits an oppression so outrageous that the entire public comes together in opposition, and perhaps on that day an angry mob will capture him, perhaps they will even tear his body apart. The one, possibly only, reliable solution to get rid of this man is a general strike: simply walking out of work and refusing to do anything until de Moraes leaves the country, but that requires a unified public. For now, it seems, Brazilians will have to be satisfied that the magistrate’s dispute with a foreign plutocrat has brought his long train of abuses and usurpations to the center stage.
Correction 4/20/24: The original version of this article said that Shellenberger’s work on the “Twitter Files Brazil” were released in coordination with Elon Musk. They were instead released without Musk’s advanced knowledge but he promoted the work on his Twitter account after its release.
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
Many or most modern historians doubt that this episode happened at all, believing it was invented later as a smear against the Claudia gens, but most modern historians are also haters and losers. Further, Livy was a personal friend of Augustus, who was a descendant of that family, so that makes no sense, though the claim is that Livy’s source made it up, not Livy himself. Regardless, you can view this as a parable if you wish.
Well, I'm sure you will find this completely shocking, but Car Wash was a US-backed coup. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/12/united-states-justice-department-brazil-car-wash-lava-jato-international-treaty/
It’s crazy how similar the Trump and Bolsonaro saga is. Same as US Jan 6th vs Brazils. Almost like it was all done by the same CIA