By forcing Flavio Bolsonaro into exile, the whole world can see that President Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes are in the process of turning Brazil into a banana republic, writes Michael Shellenberger – perhaps best known as one of the leading Twitter Files journalists at the turn of 2022/23 – on the news website Public, which he himself helped to found.
Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator who lost Brazil’s presidential runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday, may be guilty of serious crimes, say Brazil’s Federal Police and Supreme Court. On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Flávio to surrender his ordinary and diplomatic passports within 24 hours, stay in the country, and have no contact with Willer Tomaz, a Brasília lawyer under investigation for laundering money through betting platforms.
But the case against Flávio is transparent persecution and full of irregularities. It rests upon no proof of his guilt, much less any charge or conviction.
The federal police signed the application to seize Bolsonaro’s passport just seven minutes after his election defeat was confirmed on Sunday, and Moraes approved it a little later that same evening, according to Shellenberger.
Moraes’s own colleagues were surprised by the passport order and feared it would raise tensions, columnist Mônica Bergamo reported.
Several people have fled the country out of fear of Lula and Moraes, writes journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is best known for publicising Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) extensive surveillance programme, but who has also followed events in Brazil closely.
There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition.
At the same time, Lula, who has previously been convicted of corruption, is himself under suspicion that could cause him legal and reputational problems:
Last week Public reported that the accountant who prepared Lula’s income tax returns is under investigation by São Paulo prosecutors for laundering money for the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), Brazil’s largest drug cartel, which the United States government designates a foreign terrorist organization.
Moraes has, however, given Lula a helping hand:
Before the runoff, on October 8, Brazil’s election court censored and fined Flávio for linking Lula to the PCC. Moraes began the censorship of allegations of a link between Lula and the drug cartel in 2022, the day of that year’s presidential first-round election.
As president of the electoral court at the time, Moraes ordered a publication to remove a story reporting that the police had recorded a PCC leader declaring his support for Lula. Moraes then ordered hundreds of other posts against Lula removed at the request of Lula’s coalition.
In 2024, the powerful Supreme Court justice ordered X to censor claims of alleged disinformation from Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters, an order Elon Musk refused to comply with, whereupon Moraes attempted to restrict access to X in Brazil and both fine the company and seize Musk’s assets. The case ended with X paying some fines and regaining normal access to Brazil.
Brazil is highly corrupt, and this also applies to the judiciary, writes Shellenberger. Recently, two judges were sentenced to long prison terms for accepting bribes in property cases.
