Posted on 09/15/2025 7:15:27 AM PDT by karpov
A Brazilian Supreme Court panel voted 4-1 last week to convict center-right former President Jair Bolsonaro of leading a conspiracy to overthrow the leftist government of President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Mr. Bolsonaro received a sentence of 27 years in prison.
The verdict is a major blow to Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters. But many other Brazilians, while not fans of the former president, had also hoped for a different outcome. They’ve been concerned about the politicized Supreme Court for years. Now the high court has allowed the federal prosecutor to bring the former president to trial in Brasília, skipping lower courts, with the express purpose of locking him up. Rule of law be damned.
There was some encouraging news on Wednesday. Justice Luiz Fux rendered a 452-page dissent laying out the many violations of due process in the case, including the court’s lack of jurisdiction. He cited the prosecution’s continual data dumps—not cataloged or organized and without the knowledge of the defense—which reached 70 terabytes, including 225 million messages. He noted the glaring lack of evidence to back up charges. Justice Fux, who was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2011 by Lula protégée President Dilma Rousseff, voted to absolve Mr. Bolsonaro on all counts.
The court was ideologically stacked against Mr. Bolsonaro. The presiding justice in the case was Alexandre de Moraes, a notorious Bolsonaro adversary. He voted to convict on all five counts. So did Justice Flávio Dino, a former justice minister for Lula. Mr. da Silva’s former personal lawyer, Justice Cristiano Zanin, also voted guilty. That was enough to convict, although a fourth justice, nominated by Lula, also joined the majority.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Brazil will be next after Venezuela is fixed.
The sooner the better, for Bolsonaro’s sake.
It feels like a trip to a Brazilian jail is prologue to a mysterious death. Remember the left tried to kill Bolsonoro before. Now he’s out of sight of the public locked in an institution they control.
Yes, exactly.
It’s an international movement, it’s not “the Brazilian way”. They came very close here, and they have locked up or disqualified dozens of political figures with even the mildest of nationalist views, all over the world but especially in Europe.
We have institutionalized respect for an independent judiciary, but we have allowed them to become independent of the constitutions and statutes that created them.
This is going to have to be stopped, one way or another.
bkmk
Dictatorships have got to dictate in order to maintained their images.
Brazil is a huge country geographically, with many natural resources. There are both Catholic and Protestant establishments in Brazil. We should be natural allies in the Western Hemisphere. This is a very sad development. Pray for Brazil and Bolsonaro.
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