For years now, politics in Brazil have been the fun-house-mirror version of those in the United States. The dynamic was never plainer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally charged the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 co-conspirators, with crimes connected to a sprawling plan to overthrow the nation’s democracy and hang on to power after losing an election in October of 2022.
That the charges against Bolsonaro sound familiar to Americans is no coincidence. Bolsonaro consulted with figures in Donald Trump’s orbit in pursuit of his election-denial strategy. But the indictment against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader went much further than Trump did, allegedly bringing high-ranking military officers into a coup plot and signing off on a plan to have prominent political opponents murdered.
In this, as in so many things, Bolsonaro comes across as a cruder, more thuggish version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, shrewdly, to try to retain his electoral viability after his January 6 defeat; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He attempted so violent a power grab that the institutional immune system tasked with protecting Brazil’s democracy was shocked into overdrive.
The distortion in the mirror is most pronounced with regard to this institutional response. While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030. Interestingly, that decision wasn’t even handed down as a consequence of the attempted coup itself, but of Bolsonaro’s abuse of official acts to promote himself as a candidate, as well as his insistence on casting doubt, without evidence, on the fairness of the election.
The U.S. might have done the same thing. In December 2023, Colorado’s secretary of state refused to allow Trump’s name on the state’s primary ballot, following the state supreme court’s judgment that his role in the events of January 6, 2021, rendered him ineligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the move, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.
My home country, Venezuela, faced a roughly analogous situation in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez moved to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution, which contained no provision for him to do so. Cowed, the supreme court allowed him to go ahead. Venezuela’s then–chief justice, Cecilia Sosa, wrote a furious resignation letter, saying that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being murdered.” The result in Venezuela was the same as that in the United States: The rule of law was dead.
I can’t help but wish that U.S. jurists had shown the nerve of their Brazilian counterparts. In their charging documents against Bolsonaro, Brazil’s prosecutors don’t mumble technicalities: They charge him with attempting a coup d’état, which is what he did. Brazilian law enforcement didn’t tie itself up in knots appointing special counsels; the attorney general, Paulo Gonet, announced the charges himself. The conspiracy “had as leaders the president of the Republic himself and his candidate for vice president, General Braga Neto. Both accepted, encouraged, and carried out acts classified in criminal statutes as attacks on the … independence of the powers and the democratic rule of law,” Gonet said.
Contrast that with the proceduralism at the core of the case against President Trump. After an interminable delay that ultimately rendered the entire exercise moot, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump not for trying to overthrow the government but for “conspiring to obstruct the official proceeding” (that would lead him to lose power) as well as “conspiring to defraud the United States”—a crime so abstract that only a constitutional lawyer knows what it actually means.
In ruling Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office, Brazil’s elections court did not engage in lengthy disquisitions on 19th-century jurisprudence, as the U.S. Supreme Court did in the Colorado case: They said that he had serially abused his power, which is what he did, and which is what renders him unfit for office. This bluntness, this willingness to call a spade a spade, was something the American republic, for all its institutional sophistication, seemed unable to match.
As recently as 2014, one would have been hard-pressed to find anyone willing to forecast that Brazil’s institutions would prove more effective than those of the United States at protecting democracy from populist menace. Maybe Brazilians are just more comfortable with, and accustomed to, holding national leaders to account: The current center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, spent more than two years in prison for corruption after his last stint in power. (Lula was ultimately freed and allowed to stand for office again when courts ruled that the judge in his initial prosecution was biased.) Or maybe it was the speed of response: Rather than waiting months or years to move against the rioters who took over the country’s governing institutions, the Brazilian police started jailing them and investigating the coup conspiracy almost immediately after it took place.
But the biggest difference is that dictatorship is a much more real menace in Brazil, a country that democratized only in the 1980s, than it is in a country that’s never experienced it. Older Brazilians carry the scars, in many cases literal ones, of their fight against dictatorship. This fight for them is visceral in a way it isn’t—yet—for Americans.
Brazil has demonstrated how democracies that value themselves defend themselves. America could have done the same.
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