The real coup was perpetrated by the supreme court itself. Judges have always been "gods" in this country, and the supreme court in particular has been blatantly grabbing power since at least 2019.
The side that storms the capital sort of gives up its ability to call the other illegitimate in a democracy.
That doesn't mean they're right. Just that the situtation in Brazil clearly escalated to the point that suspending the status quo is if not merited, highly historically precedented.
If only that had been enough to fix things. I watched those judges censor political speech as "fake news" throughout the entire 2022 election. Then they showboated in public about how they had been personally responsible for the former president's defeat.
Brazil also has a history of military coups, something that mob explicitly sought to provoke [1]. It makes sense for the system to learn from past failings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_January_Bras%C3%ADlia_attack...
A military coup is attempted when armed forces actually show up to overthrow you. When the heroic brazilian military showed up, it was to arrest the protesters.
Wat.
(EDIT: Sure? In a country with a history of not managing this well, however, it’s also dangerous. When manifested as a riot, that danger becomes clear and present.)
> it was to arrest the protesters who were begging the military on their knees to save them
Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state…
I appreciate your directness. But respectfully, I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval, or vice versa, those “protesters” which would find your judgement.
Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship.
Did you know the Lua programming language was born in it? The military wanted to replace technology imports with native products. That gave rise to industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers once. That bit of history has been posted to HN at least once.
I can totally see why they'd prefer that to the current Brazil which is essentially the world's soy farm, to say nothing of the endless corruption scandals and crushing taxation.
> Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state
Protesters from the current ruling party have set fire to those buildings before. It's nothing new.
> I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval
I would approve of their resignation.
Fair enough. I imagine the military dictatorship wouldn’t be too happy with folks trying to overthrow it. Part of designing a stable state is maneouvering against such volatility.
Let’s say that’s true. How is this structurally dissimilar from the military being in charge?
The people in power right now are communists and socialists. It's not even an understatement. Nazis go straight to jail but these socialists walk our soil completely unpunished even though they are far more damaging.
Developing, yes. (Socialist, I don’t know.)
> we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building
Protests are pretext.
The Brazilian protests didn’t anticipate overthrowing the government themselves. They wanted the military to depose the elected government. In America, a protest would be used either as an excuse to impose ersatz martial law or a sign that the people don’t agree with the election (or whatever). The actual killing moves are rendered by those who can command guns.
In any case, other, "softer", coups have been happening with alarming frequency in South America, Brazil included.
Exactly! You, just like the people that was there and now are in jail, wanted that to "fix things", or calling it for the right name, a coup. It didn't work well.
Awaiting 4 years for the next election is not that painful.
Supreme court judges are not elected. They don't even have to pass tests.
No, they don't. They can do whatever they want and nobody can do a thing about it. Whatever they write on a paper becomes law, simply because police enforces it.
The fact they weren't and aren't following the constitution was a major cause of January 8th. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. And political censorship is exactly what they engaged in. They just happened to use euphemisms like "fake news". I remember one case where they censordd a documentary before it was even published. A priori censorship, something not seen in these lands since the military dictatorship.
> And judge criminals.
Supreme court's purpose is to judge politicians with immunity and assorted privilges. Not common citizens.
I do hope I'm still around to post about it when it does. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone. Even you, someone who thinks I should be imprisoned for my thoughts, should not be censored and persecuted for it.
pretty much the opposite: when the same STF changed laws to put Lula in jail, I did not supported people that wanted to overthrow the rule of law. You do. Now. But at the time you were in favor of the same supreme court change the law in favor of your ideology, which removed Lula from the election that he was leading.
> I do hope I'm still around to post about it when it does. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone.
Do you think you have it hard? That this is some kind of torture? The same people that worship coronel Ustra?
> Even you, someone who thinks I should be imprisoned for my thoughts, should not be censored and persecuted for it.
You should not be imprisoned for your thoughts. But corrupt politicians and criminals should not be protected by unrestricted free speech.
I don't doubt you. Feel free to elaborate on the matter if you'd like, in good faith.
I don't support "judicial activism" at all. Judges should be machines that implement the law exactly as written to each individual case, no more and no less. Any deviation from that is a power grab. In other words: judges must not legislate, that is the job of our elected representatives.
Any attempt from a judge to legislate is a small coup against the people. Actual lawyers have told me: "instead of applying the law, the surpreme court decided to legislate". This is normal in Brazil and it shouldn't be.
Law is not that simple and is full of tricky edge cases and outright vague ambiguity.
Lower Courts can easily rule to a clear letter of law as stated in a great many cases.
eg: Does evidence exist to prove a defendant broke into locked premises or not? Does a jury all agree that multiple pieces of submitted evidence are sufficient to establish a conclusion on balance despite all pieces of evidence having some issue?
High Courts and Supreme Courts exist to ponder whether lower courts have correctly applied the laws.
This would not be required if it were at all possible to have machines that implement the law exactly as written, no more and no less.
That's not true. At the very least, they need to be Law Bachelors. Furthermore, after being nominated by the President they need to get approval from the Senate.
Every other judge is a law professional who studied hard to pass the test. They compete for the judge positions with thousands and thousands of other professionals. The supreme court judges did not necessarily pass such a trial. Therefore, it is entirely possible and even likely for the judges of lesser courts to be more knowledgeable about law than the supreme court.
Just yet another example of how backwards this country is.
Those are essentially admission tests. They're not meant to test the knowledge or ability of the candidates, but rather as a way to filter out the excess because there's higher demand than offer of those jobs.
The Supreme Court justices don't have to do that because they are selected by the President instead.
> Every other judge is a law professional who studied hard to pass the test.
Some of the supreme court justices might have not passed admission tests for jobs they were not interested in but that says exactly nothing about their intelligence or knowledge of the law.
> Therefore, it is entirely possible and even likely for the judges of lesser courts to be more knowledgeable about law than the supreme court.
No doubt it's possible but I find some of the foundational premises of your chain of causation to be misguided at best.
If these tests were actually that good in filtering the cream of the crop, how do we end up with people like Sérgio Moro who can't follow simple logic and has repeatedly demonstrated a profound ignorance of how the Brazilian Civil Law system differs from his FBI training on Common Law concepts and strategies?
One of the largest corruption scandals in the history of the country ended up mostly annulled because it was so full of vices that Cracolândia junkies seem productive and well adjusted in comparison.
Furthermore, you have complained in other comments that the justices are not elected. Leaving out any arguments around why that's the case, and why this is a desired feature of the system, how is that compatible with the lack of admission tests? There are so many goalposts in your messages that it's very difficult to understand what you actually think could be any better than what's currently in place.
I disagree. I have far more confidence in judges who competed vigorously for their positions than in judges who were merely appointed by presidents.
> If these tests were actually that good in filtering the cream of the crop, how do we end up with people like Sérgio Moro
Every test has the potential for false positives and false negatives. We want to select good judges and reject bad judges. There is an inherent risk of selecting bad judges and rejecting good judges.
Of course, the exact statistics have never been determined. It's reasonable to assume that the tests optimize for low false positive rate. Rejecting good judges is not as bad as accepting a bad judge.
By reading court cases, I formed a very positive opinion of concursado judges. I've always found their argumentation to be lucid and persuasive, even when I didn't agree with their rulings. I simply can't say the same of the supreme court.
> One of the largest corruption scandals in the history of the country ended up mostly annulled
That fact deeply disgusts me. It really does. I wish things had worked out differently.
> how is that compatible with the lack of admission tests?
It's not. I believe supreme court judges should also have to pass admission tests. That should be the one and only way to become a supreme court judge.
I claim the supreme court has amassed so much power it is now openly legislating. It's effectively running the country. These people are not elected representatives. Therefore, it follows that Brazil is not actually a democracy. That is the point I sought to make in this thread.
I don't actually want judges to be elected. I just think that's a requirement for Brazil to be called a democracy at this point in time. If we're a democracy, and judges hold all the power, then we should be able to vote for them.
The only reason I go out of my way to point out that these are unelected judges is to highlight the fact that Brazil is a democracy in name only.