The dictatorship and the thievery

Brazil is living through something it has never seen before: the half-baked, bargain-bin dictatorship. It’s something unprecedented in 525 years of history in a land where, regardless of ideology or regime, every government has always been obsessed solely with ruling for itself and against the people. What we have now is a regime without the guts to call itself a world-class dictatorship such as North Korea or Cuba—or one that just might not pull it off. But for all practical purposes, the current system functions just like those “good, old, honest” dictatorships we know so well. The only law that carries any real weight is the will of whoever controls the police and the military. And those who hold power aren’t even the classic villains—a Hitler, a Fidel Castro, a Louis XV. No, what we’ve got is a “collective” of judges, unelected, unable, running the show like a tribal council from some backwoods village everyone’s terrified of. And they’ve been running Brazil for six years straight.

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This cut-rate dictatorship gets away with it only because it’s staring down the weakest, most cowardly political class Brazil has ever seen—maybe since the colonial governors. And these justices are absolutely shameless, showing off in public like, “Hey, we’re the Supreme Court and we run the place now.” “We’re not just some technical office anymore,” says Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso. “We are now a political power, forced to govern the country because the Brazilians and their elected representatives are too inept to govern themselves.” In other words: this is what the Supreme Court thinks, and since they believe it, you’d better not “bother,” you “sucker”—or else Alexandre de Moraes will have you thrown in jail as a “coup plotter.” In their latest episode of narcissistic, mean-spirited grandstanding, the little gang pulls the strings at the Court—the others are just seat fillers, just warm bodies like they used to say about soccer players back when you couldn’t sub out the injured—have pulled off a real marvel.

According to Folha de S.Paulo, the Supreme Court has negotiated a bill—a bill, for crying out loud!— to soften the brutal sentences that Moraes slapped on the folks involved in the January 8th riots. Come again? Now the Supreme Court is brokering laws with Congress? This isn’t just out of line, it’s out of this world. Even if the Brazilian Constitution mattered just as much as a fake knockoff Rolex, neither the Court nor Congress should be “negotiating” anything. ing laws? That’s Congress’s job and only Congress’s job. The Supreme Court has no business anywhere near it. It’s supposed to interpret the law, not make, approve, veto, or “negotiate” what the legislature decides. But Brazil hasn’t been a democracy for a long time. These days the Supreme Court rules, and Congress is on its knees begging, “Please, boss, hit me again!”

Is this for real? The Supreme Court must give its stamp of approval before anything moves through Congress? What if Justices Moraes and Flávio Dino—who, again according to Folha, “agreed” to the bill to reduce sentences—hadn’t agreed? No law at all? It’s not just absurd—it’s monstrous, it’s yet another mutation growing out of this cozy little love affair between the Court and the government. During Bolsonaro’s term, the Court blocked the government at every turn. Now, under Lula—freed from jail and perched in the presidential palace—they are running the country together with the Workers’ Party (PT), PSOL, PCdoB, and similar “companions,” in a system of mutual flattery and favor-trading. On even days, the Court is Lula’s babe. On odd days, Lula is the Court’s darling. Right now, Lula’s figured out that throwing a hairdresser in prison for fourteen years, and all the other nutty stunts, just isn’t winning him any hearts or votes. He can’t accept amnesty—neither his faith nor his character allows it—but he’s fed up with being partner to Moraes’s judicial bullying. Apparently, he’s also getting tired of endlessly applauding the Supreme Leader for every outrageous decision. The government, then, cooked up this sentence reduction—so it can release everyone without officially granting amnesty (and possibly losing a vote). The Court, on its day as Lula’s babe, plays along.

So, what now? The Supreme Court was dead set against reducing anyone’s sentence—not for a second. If anything, they’re still drooling for more punishment, more prison, more fines, more dragging and dogpiling and public shaming for all Alexandre de Moraes’s “coup plotters” and his adoring fans—both at court and in the media. Now they’ve changed their minds: the terrible has been upgraded to the merely bad, for reasons that neither the Court nor Lula will explain. But what about all those months of hysterical, hardline preaching, swearing there was an armed coup attempt with airtight “evidence,” and that saying otherwise was practically a crime of “Bolsonarista rightism”? And what about the editorials saying amnesty is unacceptable, unthinkable, and unconscionable? So: no amnesty, but blanket release is fine? Was there no coup at all? It makes zero sense. But making sense is the last of this regime’s concerns. What matters here is brute force, not reason. That’s rule number one of any dictatorship.

The regime of exception imposed by the Supreme Court-Lula consortium isn’t about ideology. Of course, they love to talk about “income redistribution,” “public policy” to end poverty, that is, socialism in general. They’re obsessed with their pro-equality, pro-taxing-the-rich slogans, and the endless campaigns to let men legally become women and the women’s basketball team—or the ladies’ room. They’re ferociously anti-climate-change, anti-“racism,” anti-middle-class—never mind their hatred of agribusiness, processed food, or the green and yellow national colors, now branded as “fascist” symbols. Above all, they nurse a deep loathing for the working class that dares dream of a better life. But all these “causes” are just a smokescreen. Their real agenda is far simpler.

Let’s call things what they are. All the talk about “collective ownership,” “surplus value,” and the old-school, big-beard communist fairy tales is meaningless. None of these left folks care at all about “socialism,” let alone abolishing private property. They’re in it just to steal—steal everything. Steal from elderly pensioners, steal unbuilt hospitals and non-existent respirators, steal overpriced construction jobs, steal boxed lunches for the poor, and on, and on, and on. Sociologists dread hearing it, but facts are facts. In 2003, Lula’s left took power—and the thievery began. And it never stopped to this day (see Silvio Navarro’s article in this issue).

That’s the true purpose of this Supreme Court-Lula two-headed dictatorship: to loot the National Treasury in broad daylight. The basic logic is: corruption is far easier, more lucrative, and safer when backed by a totalitarian regime—starting with courts that decide who goes to jail and who gets to walk free. Sure, Brazil has always been corrupt, but the PT and its cronies stumbled onto something new: there are two kinds of corruption. One is old-school: sooner or later an Operation Car Wash kicks the door down, billions would be seized, and fat cats would land in jail. The other kind? Stealing with zero chance of a Car Wash or any real risk to the thieves’ impunity. Once corruption is protected, swiping money from the National Treasury becomes safer than going to church— and if dictatorship’s the price, then hail the dictatorship! Why not? You can loot R$6 billion from retirees and nobody even loses their job. That’s a whole new game.

Nowadays, Brazil’s new motto, more sacred than “Order and Progress,” is: “Steal as much as you want—the Supreme Court has your back.” By now, there’s an entire body of case law ensuring robbers are bulletproof. Show the Court you stole from the State? Get acquitted—and maybe even get financial compensation. If you’re a cabinet minister, like in the Social Security heist, you get to keep your post. If you’re the national soccer association (CBF), Lula brags the Supreme Court itself is at your service. The basic premise is: the State needs to collect more taxes to “give to the poor.” The reality: they privatize the State for their own enrichment, and taxes go straight into their pockets.

The classic modus operandi (as the police would say) was: shovel billions to contractors, contractors hand back fat kickbacks. Or, in the Lula-Dilma era, plunder Petrobras to the brink of bankruptcy—or sink money into junk refineries and deep-sea rigs that never saw daylight. The earthquake of Operation Car Wash was a once-in-a-generation earthquake—nobody expected it. Suddenly, there were whistleblowers, courtroom confessions, and robber barons serving real jail time. The system had to adapt—priority number one: kill Car Wash. Once that was done, they doubled down, scheming for a “Direct Treasury Transfer.” Four million reais siphoned out of the Treasury via Correios (the state-run postal services) and right into the pockets of singer and former minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, just as a for-instance.

Bu that’s just a drop in the ocean. Consider the full scale. There’s the R$6 billion looted from seniors, the R$20 billion handed to Odebrecht and the Batista brothers, rice auction scams, boxed-lunches heists, and more, stretching to the end of the world. They’re stealing so much, so fast, sometimes they can’t even steal it all. Pro-government artists and Lula’s pet stars were greenlit for nearly R$17 billion through the Rouanet Law in 2023 alone—yet they only managed to take R$2.2 billion. They couldn’t even steal as much as the government hoped. Once again, Social Security was promoting a grotesque “payday advance” loans—at interest—until the banks themselves objected, since they’d have to front the money. It’s almost slapstick—if it wasn’t so pathetic.

This all makes it plain as day—and saves the reader from a migraine—to see the bone-deep, carnal connection between the end of Operation Car Wash (beat up dead by the Supreme Court to bring the fight against corruption to a halt) and the cobbled-together dictatorship we see now.

With big shots from PT and the grand lords of thievery staring down real prison time, the party had to end. To save their own skins (and bank s), they just scrapped the rule of law—so that the Supreme Court, Lula, and the left could seize outright totalitarian power for themselves, which they wield to this day. Sure, crooked politicians outside the PT also reap the benefits, but who cares? The so-called “progressive camp” stopped worrying about bad company and ideological purity a long, long time ago.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: the left abandoned the worker’s world and dove headfirst into the fantasy land of material riches—about as odd as the Catholic Church giving up the Creed, the holy communion, and the rosary altogether. Just look at daily life and you’ll see. Today’s biggest “cause” is the four-day workweek. But who wants it? Not laborers—no, it’s college kids who’ve never worked a day in their lives shouting the loudest.

 This past May Day, the Lula government didn’t bother holding any public acts. They didn’t want to repeat the disaster of last year’s Worker’s Day event—no, they’d rather spend their time cozying up to Alexandre de Moraes, the “Mottas,” the “Alcolumbres,” and the crooks fleecing the National Treasury round-the-clock.

There was a time—does anyone ?—when the ultimate leftist commandment was, “Workers of the world, unite!” Under Brazil’s Supreme Court-Lula junta, the slogan is something else entirely: “We have to stop the bleeding.”