In June, The Intercept Brasil began to
publish a series of reports showing
that former Brazilian federal judge
and current Justice Minister Sérgio
Moro guided the actions of prosecutors
working on the Lava Jato (Car Wash)
operation. The latter became famous
worldwide for investigating corruption
cases involving state companies and led
to several well-known politicians being
convicted by Judge Moro, including
former Brazilian President Lula, who
claims he is innocent.
The Intercept – edited by Pulitzer Prize-
winning journalist Glenn Greenwald- received a massive amount of infor-
mation from an anonymous source that
included copies of text and audio message
exchanged via the Telegram app.
Judge Moro and the prosecutors, who
had their modus operandi exposed, said
that the content disclosed was the result
of illegal leaks and that they could not tell
whether it was genuine. But even if it were
genuine, they said, they saw no problem
with it – a Schrödinger’s cat of a response.
That view was not shared by many
Brazilian and foreign jurists, nor jour-
nalists from media outlets invited by The
Intercept to examine and co-publish the
material. In their view, the exchanges
demonstrated that Judge Sérgio
Moro had abandoned the impartial-
ity required of his position by helping
prosecutors to organize their cases.
The defendants’ rights were effectively
curtailed.
Moro’s conviction of Lula paved the
way for the latter’s imprisonment in
April 2018 and prevented him from
running in the presidential elections
as the Workers’ Party candidate. Even
in prison, Lula continued leading in
the polls. But in the end the main ben-
eficiary of Lula’s imprisonment, which
barred him from candidacy in elections,
was Jair Bolsonaro. Once elected presi-
dent, Bolsonaro nominated Moro as his
Justice Minister – which was seen as a
thank-you for services rendered.
Moro appears to be proud of having
broken the rules and ignored Brazil’s
Federal Constitution in order to advance
what he considers to be the greater good.
He thus mistakes a judge’s role for that of
a vigilante, taking fully to heart his fans’
description of him as a ‘superhero’.
Since the revelations, Moro has been
encouraging the cult of his own person-
ality. On 30 June, as thousands of his
far-right supporters gathered across the
country, he tweeted ‘I see, I hear’ – along
with photos of the demonstrations. The
phrase echoes a passage from the Book
of Exodus, in which God responds to the
plight of the Jews in Egypt.
A supporter’s banner in Rio de
Janeiro read: ‘You have delivered us
from darkness’. That ‘you’ was not God,but Sérgio Moro. It doesn’t get more
explicit than that.
When a public servant who has been
raised to the position of a hero is called
upon to account for his actions, his fol-
lowers see it not as a comment on that
individual’s conduct but an attack on the
set of values that their hero has come
to represent. It becomes a challenge to
the personal beliefs of those who follow
him. Many will act as watchdogs for
their hero’s life story, shutting down any
debate involving their idol, including
healthy discussion focused on facts.
Moro’s popularity and his nomination
to the Supreme Court has taken a hit. But
at the time of writing the majority is still
not calling for him to leave the ministry.
In the end, each society deserves the
idols it creates for itself. O
LEONARDO SAKAMOTO IS A POLITICAL SCIENTIST
AND JOURNALIST BASED IN SÃO PAULO. HE IS A
LEADING ANTI-SLAVERY AND FORCED LABOUR
CAMPAIGNER WITH THE INVESTIGATIVE NGO
REPÓRTER BRASIL, WHICH HE ESTABLISHED IN 2001.The judge who became
vigilante – and then ‘God’VIEW FROM
BRAZIL
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 73ILLUSTRATION:^KATECOPELAND