In 37 New York Times articles published between January 2015 and April 2018 about the US DoJ-backed Lava Jato operation, which culminated in Lula’s illegitimate election-year arrest, judicial overreach was barely alluded to at all. The New York Times ( 8/25/17) depicted Judge Sergio Moro as “the face of the national reckoning for Brazil’s ruling class.” When compared to the way the Times portrayed the Lava Jato (or “Car Wash”) anti-corruption investigation, and its political persecution of (then former) President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and other members of the leftist Workers Party, however, it looks like as though the Times is using its traditional double standard of going soft on right-wing extremists while portraying leftist Latin American governments as authoritarian. To an average news consumer who hasn’t paid much attention to the last eight years of Brazilian history and is unfamiliar with Brazilian law, the Times’ claims that courts may be overstepping their boundaries may look legitimate. However it also further develops a narrative it has been building since Brazil’s 2022 election season of an authoritarian court system that engages in judicial overreach to persecute political enemies. Describing the differences in how Brazil and the US treated candidates who tried to seize power after losing the election, the New York Times ( 7/1/23) highlighted “widespread claims of overreach” in Brazil, noting criticisms that the Brazilian system is “prone to more abuse” and that its courts may be “in a repressive mode.”įormer Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted on June 30 of the first of 16 charges of election fraud levied against him in Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, and sentenced to an eight-year ban from running for political office.Ī July 1 New York Times article, headlined “Why Bolsonaro Was Barred in Brazil but Trump Can Run in the US,” does a fine job of explaining the differences in the two nations’ electoral systems.
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