Comment by hexage1814

You should expand on that more if it's actually unreasonable.. because what you wrote sounds exactly the same as the US. The court can issue legal subpoenas, and if they aren't complied with by the deadline specified, the court has the right to enforce those orders, which can include jail time. That's an important tool for the rule of law and an independent judiciary.

You might have been told that but there is no way jail is the first thing a judge will issue. First comes an order, then fines, lots of them. A company will only get anyone arrested if they willingly ignore judicial decisions for a very long time. The only path I see for a company deciding to keep their "compliance" department away from the country would be if they're not planning on complying at all. Judges have a lot of power but they're still bound by process.

Brazil is a conservative leaning country with neoliberal aspirations that looks up to the US (florida specially) like the paradise on earth. Judges are friendly to business and it takes a lot to piss them off if you're part of the circle (rich). These examples from twitter are a niche where the company is caught between the politics of the supreme court and what it sees as threats (some times correctly, sometimes too much and dangerously overbearing).

Supreme court judges are not elected, they are appointed by the president. As a tradition during the years where the current party was in power before Bolsonaro the court itself made a list of candidates that they voted for and the president was asked to pick from the top three (as a request, not binding), Lula and Dilma always picked the top candidate to avoid any showing of interference. President Temer picked the second choice and Bolsonaro picked someone outside the list (twice) and that tradition will likely die down because of it, Lula already picked from outside the list too now.

Another fact people seem to ignore/disregard, the Brazilian STF cannot just issue orders without a request from the prosecution or lower courts. An example where Judges exert the god like power is on lower courts where the prosecution aligns politically with a judge and work together like they did on the Lula trial and ended up overthrown by the supreme court for it. If they do it for someone less popular, they get away with it.

True, but given the fact that Brazil has in recent years voted the left in, then the right, and now the left again it doesn't strike me that a dictatorship has been established.

Usually you can't, but not always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Chilean_presidential_refe...

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I did. And rare were the autocrats government which came in power from a non-rigged, open election.

Two exemple which are frequently used as exemple are Italy and Germany in the 1930´s but neither Hitler nor Mussolini came in power through the election, but by strong arming the power in place, and after that (at least for Germany) use the excuse of rigged election to validate their power.

You forgot all the votes you need to win to be able to cast your first vote. It’s not easy part, at least in a more-or-less healthy democracy.

In France, for exemple, you need first to have majority in both chambers (Senate and parliament) to validate the content of the modification. Then you need to have of 3/5 of parliament OR the majority in a referendum for apr roving the modification and putting it in the constitution.

And for almost every healthy constitutional democracy, it the same order of difficulty.

You speak as if institutions didn't exist.

for me that’s exactly how it’s work. For a government to be a dictatorship, you need a dictator. And one key element which define a person as a dictator is that his word is law, that’s in the name. doesn’t seem to be the case in Brazil right now. The second key element, which more implied in the modern definition of dictator, is that it stay in position of power against the will of the majority of it’s country inhabitants. Against, doesn’t seem to be the case in Brazil right now.

I would welcome any elements which would invalidate my (quite incomplete, I recon) perception of the situation.

Thats exactly how it works. See russa, turkey, hungary now. Germany in 1930s.

You know that the case for most occidental democracies which doesn’t follow the anglo-saxon model ?

No. That’s factually false.

Hitler was named chancellor of the weimar republic by the government. Not elected as such.

And it was part of a plot from the weimar government to be able to continue to work without casting new elections, as asked by the laws.

> Bolsonaro unlike the Supreme Court, never crossed a red line

Crossing the line and failing is not the same as "never crossing the line".

Anyway, Bolsonaro was quite supportive of that same structure. Because he wanted the money-flow that came with it (previously illegal flow, but since 2021, well, it's up to be seen). Just like Lula, and Dilma, and Temer...

> And here we are in 2024, Bolsonaro is not president anymore, the elections (organized by people who pretty much opposed Bolsonaro btw...) are over

Crimes committed 2 years ago don't prescribe this fast, Bolsonaro will probably go to jail still.

Are we just going to ignore all the people that were camping in front of military barracks? The manifesto that was going around in the Army, in support of a coup to prevent Lula from taking power? How the US government, thanks to Biden, pressured generals in Brazil to uphold democracy (which means if Trump was president, there might have been a successful coup?).

We have the documents. We have the witnesses. Don't play disingenuous games and try to gaslight us that it is all in our heads. Alexandre de Moraes will go down in Brazilian history as a men who did everything to keep Brazil a democracy.

Not the full story. You are omitting the fact that Bolsonaro made several allegations of voter fraud on social media, and Brazil had their own version of January 6th after he lost (what you called "at best rioters"). These decisions are a response to those events, but your post paints him as a blameless victim.

It sounds very misleading to frame those responsible for storming into the Congress on January 8th, while attempting to "stop the steal" that the elections supposedly were, as simply "at best rioters, to 17 years in prison because they broke some stuff".

This would only sense if you also believe the rioters of 6th of January that stormed the capital also "just" broke some stuff.

Otherwise, this argument is just not okay.

I admire Glenn, he did a great job reporting on Snowden revelations and the Vaza-Jato scandal in Brazil. I believe his stand is principled, but he appears to have the shortcoming of often trying to apply concepts from the US legal and institutional framework to places where it simply doesn't apply, like trying to fit square pegs to round holes. This sent him into a wild goose chase in this case.

Greenwald is an odd one, I'll give you that. He seems to see this issue from a libertarian perspective. He would also say that Germany banning Nazi speech is censorship, for example. It's worth nothing that his last professional occupation was being a stooge in a far right show.

A huge chunk of them were made public: https://apnews.com/article/brazil-twitter-elon-musk-x-censor...

To the people disagreeing with my parent statement, could you find one non far right affiliated legal scholar who would say those orders are illegal?

...how is that different to EU court rulings? Take your comment, and swap out "Brazil" with the name of any other country, and absolutely nothing changes.