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Brazil is 5,000 miles from the United States. Yet events in the country over the last five years have obvious applicability to those in the United States: A storming of government buildings, charges against a right-wing ex-president, government efforts to repress certain speech in the name of fighting misinformation.
Today’s installment looks at Brazil and whether the country’s efforts are saving its democracy or destroying it.
$8,900 per day: That’s how much a Brazilian will be fined if caught using X.
The man responsible is a Supreme Court justice nicknamed “Big Alex” who believes such a steep fine is key to saving democracy.
Brazil emerged from 21 years of military dictatorship to become a democracy in 1985. Since then, it has developed some of Latin America’s most competitive politics, with power routinely switching between the left and the right. Brazil was under left-wing leadership from 2003 to 2016; right-wing leadership from 2016 until 2023; and has been back under left-wing since 2023.
It was in 2017 that Brazil’s center-right president Michael Temer made Alexandre de Moraes, a former prosecutor, one of the country’s 11 Supreme Court justices. Nicknamed “Big Alex” because of his 6’5” frame, Moraes was known as highly capable. Once on the court, he set his sights on fighting “misinformation.”
In 2019, Moraes was put in charge of an investigation into misinformation about and threats to Brazil’s Supreme Court. Such threats included calls for coups and the murder of justices and their families.
Such investigations are typically set up by an independent prosecutor. This one, though, was set up so the Supreme Court would investigate alleged crimes directed at it, then come up with the verdict and punishment for said crimes. In other words: The Supreme Court would be victim, judge, jury, and executioner.
The so-called “fake news” inquiry resulted in Moraes ordering various social media accounts to be shut down for “disinformation,” despite Brazil lacking a definition of “disinformation” and no transparency around which accounts were ordered shut down and why.
That same year, 2019, Moraes ordered a news outlet to remove a story that showed a Supreme Court justice’s name had been mentioned in emails about a corrupt business deal. In a separate case, businessmen who said in a private WhatsApp conversation that they would prefer a coup to a left-wing government had their homes raided, social accounts suspended, and bank accounts frozen.
The situation intensified in the following years, when Jair Bolsonaro – a populist conservative often likened to Donald Trump – was president. Bolsonaro alleged ahead of a 2022 election that voting machines were rigged. On January 8, 2023, after Bolsonaro was narrowly defeated, his supporters stormed Brazil’s Supreme Court and Presidential Palace.
Moraes responded by cracking down.
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