Brazil: A Cautionary Tale

There’s a nation I dream about.

I want to live there one day. 

It is a representative democracy with three branches of government.

It recently had a populist president who rose to power amidst widespread discontent with the ruling left-wing party.

This populist president began to fix many of this nation’s endemic woes.  

Its patriotic spirit flourished. 

Its economy boomed.

But the left-wing legacy media hated the man who led this revival. 

And the entrenched establishment — government bureaucrats, unions, the educational elite — feared him. 

They harassed him throughout his first term in office. They forced him to fend off slander after slander, investigation after investigation. And yet, despite their best efforts to derail him, even impeach him, he advanced his agenda.

When new elections rolled around, the president’s enemies saw their chance. They had a plan. Change the election rules to favor their candidate. It worked. 

They won — just barely.  

Many of the president’s supporters weren’t convinced, however. 

Everywhere they looked, they saw fraud. The election was rigged, they said. Others used a harsher word — stolen.

Upon the new president’s inauguration, tens of thousands protested. Some stormed the capital. Many were arrested; many were thrown in prison.

But the now former president refused to fade away. This infuriated the new left-wing regime.  They accused him of inciting the rioters. Using the courts, they tried to bankrupt him, remove him from the ballot, and imprison him — anything to stop him from returning to power.

The nation I have described is… Brazil. 

It’s my home country. My roots go very deep. In fact, my grandfather was the President of Brazil from 1979 to 1985. 

I was the host of Brazil’s top-rated political TV show. I had 5 million followers on social media. In the election of 2018, I supported the populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro. I supported him again in 2022 against a left-wing opponent, Lula da Silva. 

Da Silva, or Lula as he is commonly known, is a committed socialist. He and his party ran the country from 2003 to 2016. During that time, Brazil faced the worst economy in a century. Corruption, which was always a problem, got even worse.

In 2017, Lula was convicted of money laundering and bribery. He was sentenced to 9 years in prison. But in 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Court, which Lula and his allies had packed with leftists, invalidated his conviction.

So now Lula was free to run for office again. Having trashed the country once, he was ready for a second go.

The media and the bureaucracy backed him all the way.

But that wasn’t Lula’s greatest asset. He had control of the electoral process which in Brazil is fully electronic and centralized. The man running this process, Alexandre de Moraes, was a sworn enemy of Bolsonaro.

The fix was in. 

Lula won the election. Or at least that’s what we were told. And if we questioned it, we were called conspiracy theorists.

When I began to probe into how Brazil’s secretive elections agency had counted the votes, my life suddenly became very complicated.

The same actor, Alexandre De Moraes, a justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court and the head of the country’s Superior electoral court, froze my bank accounts, blocked my social media, and canceled my passport.

Brazil’s Justice Department forced my TV network to fire me. I wasn’t the only one. Other conservative journalists suffered the same fate or worse. 

The only reason I’m not in a Brazilian prison right now is that I’m not in Brazil.

I now live in exile in the United States. 

But I need to tell you: what is happening here is eerily similar to what is happening in my home country. You have no doubt noticed the parallels. 

Here like in Brazil, conservative politicians and their supporters are harassed, brought up on spurious charges, harshly fined, even imprisoned.

Here like in Brazil, the powers-that-be censor speech they dislike.

Here, like in Brazil, in key states, voter rolls are not maintained, ballot security is unserious, there’s little oversight of the people who count the votes, and there’s no way to conduct a timely audit of the election. 

All of this was unthinkable a few short years ago.

Freedoms Americans and Brazilians took for granted have been suspended under the guise of “protecting our democracy.” But, of course, what this phrase really means is that the left can do whatever it deems necessary to keep itself in power.

There’s a well-known saying in Latin America. “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” And the law is whatever they want it to be. 

That’s Brazil today.

America is not there … yet. But it could be. Tomorrow. If you’re not careful. 

Brazil is a cautionary tale.

Save yourself, America. 

You are the last, best hope of freedom-lovers all over the world.

I’m Paulo Figueiredo for Prager University.