Brazil is suffering from convulsions. At first it was one a week, then one every day. Then everything began to change by the hour.
On Thursday 17 March, Brazilians tuned in to watch as former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva was sworn in as a cabinet minister. Then they went to use the toilet or get a drink, and by the time they came back his appointment had already been blocked by a judge.
It is possible that by the time you read this article Brazil will have experienced further convulsions and what happened on Thursday will already be a distant memory. The reason for this is that Brazil is currently fighting fire with fire. The firefighters pretend not to realise that if the country goes up in flames once and for all, everyone will get burned.
Brazil is a country in uproar. The demonstrators in favour of the impeachment of the president are in uproar. The demonstrators opposed to her impeachment are in uproar. Both sides are in uproar against those who refuse to side one way or the other.
The politicians suspected of corruption are in uproar, accusing other people of being the thieves. And vice versa. A sector of the media has stopped asking questions in favour of roaring foregone conclusions.
It is like being trapped in a recurring nightmare. Just when you think that the country has reached rock bottom, it sinks to a whole new level. And from there it goes on to plummet even greater depths.
In the face of the current crisis, which is not only political and economic but also one of identity, the worst thing that could happen to Brazil would be to turn back the clock; instead of tackling its chronic defects in order to build a future, recreating the nation’s past in its own image and likeness. The risk of this happening has looked ever more likely in recent days. And given the loss of faith in politicians and traditional political parties, dogged by charges of corruption, the judiciary has been filling the political void.
On 13 March, when hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets to demand Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and Lula’s arrest, something finally became explicit. The judiciary was no longer just an institution – it had now gained a face. And not just any face, but that of federal judge Sérgio Moro, the lead prosecutor of Operation Lava-Jato (car wash), the official investigation into corruption involving the state and the award of public contracts to private companies. If the baddies were Lula and Dilma, the good guy was Sérgio Moro. The judge was revered on T-shirts bearing the slogan “In Moro we trust”.
Instead of reinvention, the crisis of political representation has given rise to its most pernicious figure: that of a saviour of the nation. The judge could have refused to accept the role of hero. Instead, he has risen to the occasion. Side-stepping his official role, he expressed his gratitude for the “kindness of the Brazilian people” and declared it: “important that the elected authorities and political parties listen to the voice on the streets”.
The avenging judge was already hugely popular when he authorised the “coercive questioning” of former president Lula. In reality, Lula was taken from his home by federal police officers, in the full glare of media tipped off about the event.
For the entire country the fabricated image was that the greatest popular leader since the return to democracy had been arrested. If he was arrested he must have been guilty. In fact, the former president is being investigated for corruption. Nothing has so far been proved. For Brazilians, however, it was as if he had been tried and sentenced.
The judge, or SuperMoro as he is being referred to as by Brazilians, has reignited the flames of a former Brazilian tradition: lynching. Instead of justice, always slower than the haters would like, he has given the people who were baying for blood what they wanted. Even though it was a moral lynching, the symbolic image produced very concrete results, as evidenced by the demonstrations.
Three days after the protests, the avenging judge then leaked a tapped phone conversation between the president and Lula. In it Dilma warned Lula that he was about to receive an “instrument of investiture” for a ministerial appointment, which he could use “if the need arose”. The conversation was immediately presented by certain quarters of the media as definitive proof that Lula was only being made minister to avoid arrest. Once a minister, he could only be tried by the Supreme Court. The number of demonstrators outside the Planalto palace, the seat of government, and in the country’s main cities, increased. The night of 16 March was one of the most tense in recent times. Since then the hatred between the two sides has escalated. If you unwittingly walk past a pro-impeachment demonstration wearing red, the colour associated with the Workers’ party, you run the risk of being beaten up. Some people already have been.
Lula has not even been accused of involvement in the Lava-Jato corruption scandal, but it is already obvious what Moro thinks. The fact that the wiretap had been officially suspended when the conversation was recorded and then released to the press was considered a trivial detail by the judge. As was the fact that it was a conversation between the country’s president and her future minister.
Moro has justified the breach of confidentiality in relation to the content of the recordings as being in the public interest: “Democracy in a free society requires that the governed know what the governors are doing, even when they act in the dark.” But legal experts from the law faculty at the University of São Paulo have said that Sérgio Moro is paving “a way towards the end of the democratic rule of law”.
Lula, Dilma and sectors of the Workers’ party have betrayed the hopes of at least two generations of Brazil’s left wing. Making Lula a minister after he had been investigated by the police, even if considered legal, is far from ethical. It is possible that the suspicions about Lula will be proved valid. Evidence may also be found against Dilma, with the impeachment process against her set in motion the same day as Lula was appointed minister and subsequently unseated.
If Brazil is to move forward, however, the judiciary needs to go back to being a faceless institution. And all Brazilians need to have the right to be judged in a court of law.
When you tear yourself away from the news to go to the toilet, the risk is not that Brazil will have changed when you get back in front of the TV, but that yet again it will be business as usual.
Translated by Lisa Shaw
