Brazil is awake

The full story, for anyone who wants to go deeper. Told step by step, with dates, names and documents.

Part one: what Lava Jato found#

In March 2014, the federal police were investigating money laundering at a petrol station in Brasília. The money trail led to Petrobras. Hence the name Lava Jato, Car Wash.

The scheme was simple enough to follow. Large construction firms agreed among themselves who would win each Petrobras contract, inflated the prices, and paid part of the excess to executives of the state company and to political parties. Executives were arrested. Some confessed and gave up the others.

Here a word needs explaining, because it will come up often: delação. A delação premiada is an agreement in which the accused confesses and names accomplices in exchange for a lighter sentence. In the United States it is called a plea bargain. For companies there is the leniency agreement: the company admits the crimes, pays a fine and keeps operating.

The federal prosecutors' own tally, six years on: 70 phases of the operation, 1,343 search warrants, 500 people charged, 253 convictions against 165 people, 2,286 years of sentences, 185 plea bargains and 14 leniency agreements. Around US$ 2.7 billion in agreed repayments, of which more than US$ 770 million was actually returned, US$ 580 million of it to Petrobras.

Odebrecht's confession in New York, in December 2016, reached twelve countries. The global penalty was at least US$ 3.5 billion, the largest in history for foreign bribery. In Peru, four former presidents faced proceedings tied to that money. One of them killed himself when the police arrived to arrest him.

Among those convicted in Brazil were construction company chief executives, state company directors, party treasurers, a former Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, today president again.

Lula was convicted twice.

The first conviction concerned a triplex apartment on the São Paulo coast. Prosecutors said the construction firm OAS had refurbished it for him in exchange for Petrobras contracts. The sentence was handed down by Judge Sergio Moro in July 2017. The appeals court upheld it in January 2018, and the Superior Court of Justice, the court just below the STF, reduced the sentence to 8 years and 10 months in 2019.

The second concerned renovations at a country property in the town of Atibaia, paid for, prosecutors said, by OAS and Odebrecht. That sentence is from February 2019.

Lula always denied owning the triplex and the property. He always said the cases were political persecution.

The evidence against him included filmed testimony from executives of both companies, obtained through plea bargains. People who reduced their own sentences in order to talk. A plea bargain is negotiated evidence, and that has to be said plainly. It also has to be said that he spent 580 days in prison, from April 2018 to November 2019, and that the imprisonment kept him out of the 2018 election, won by Jair Bolsonaro with 55% of the vote.

Part two: the dismantling#

In November 2019, the STF ruled, by 6 votes to 5, that no one in Brazil serves a sentence before exhausting every appeal. Lula walked out of prison the next day. The ruling applied to thousands of prisoners and said nothing about his guilt.

In March 2021, a single justice ruled that the judge in Curitiba had no jurisdiction to try Lula, because the facts had no direct connection to Petrobras. The full bench upheld it by 8 to 3.

That same week, a panel of five justices ruled, by 3 to 2, that Moro had been biased. It weighed that Moro had left the bench in 2018 to become justice minister under Bolsonaro, the political opponent of the defendant he had convicted. It also weighed messages exchanged between the judge and the prosecutors, stolen by hackers and published by the press in 2019.

The convictions were annulled. No court examined the facts again.

The cases were sent to Brasília. In January 2022, the triplex case was dismissed at the request of the prosecutors themselves. The Curitiba evidence could not be reused, and Lula was over 70, the age at which the limitation period is halved in Brazil. Any conviction would already have been time-barred. The country property case ended the same way.

The defence calls this judicial persecution and proof of innocence. The prosecution called it the statute of limitations. You decide what to call it. The fact is that no one acquitted him.

Then came the part that readers abroad almost never hear.

In September 2023, Justice Dias Toffoli declared void all evidence obtained from Odebrecht's internal bribery accounting systems, the same evidence the company handed to the American court. The nullity applied to every case, at every level.

In December, he suspended payment of the US$ 2 billion fine from the leniency agreement of J&F, owner of the world's largest meat processor. In February 2024, he suspended US$ 1.6 billion in fines against Odebrecht itself. Also in 2024, he annulled every act of the Curitiba judge against Marcelo Odebrecht, the executive who had confessed, halted the proceedings, and kept his plea bargain valid.

The annulments extended to a former finance minister, to one of the owners of OAS, to the financial operator whose sentences totalled more than 120 years, to a former governor from another party, and to a senator from the president's party. By May, 28 defendants in more than ten countries had already invoked those rulings, and Brazil suspended judicial cooperation with Peru on the Lava Jato cases.

Toffoli grounded the rulings in the collusion he saw between the judge and the prosecution, expressed in the hacked messages. The prosecutors have always said the messages were obtained through a crime, were never forensically examined, and prove no collusion. Both versions are in the case file.

Without adjectives, the tally is this. The largest case of transnational bribery ever admitted by a company in court had its evidence voided by a single justice. Those who benefited cut across parties, sectors and borders. No one was acquitted. Evidence and acts were declared void.

And there is a detail from 2025. Brazil has a law, called Ficha Limpa, the Clean Slate law, barring those convicted of certain crimes from running for office for eight years. In 2025, Congress changed how that period is counted. Because of that, the former Speaker convicted in Lava Jato is a candidate for Congress in October, depending on how the STF rules on the change this week.

Part three: the other side#

If you are expecting this letter to argue that only one side protects itself, stop here. The documents say otherwise.

Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 against the system Lava Jato exposed. He governed for four years.

In that time, the investigation into salary skimming in the office of his son Flávio was closed after courts annulled the evidence. The country had more than 700,000 deaths in the pandemic, and a Senate committee found the government at fault for omissions.

In October 2022, Bolsonaro lost re-election to Lula by 50.9% to 49.1%, the narrowest margin since the return to democracy. He did not publicly concede.

On 8 January 2023, a week after Lula took office, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed and ransacked the seats of all three branches of government in Brasília. If you are American, think of 6 January. Bolsonaro was in the United States and said he had no connection to the attack.

In June 2023, the Electoral Court, the court specific to elections, barred him from running until 2030 over a meeting with foreign ambassadors in which he attacked the voting system without evidence.

On 11 September 2025, a panel of five STF justices convicted him, by 4 votes to 1, to 27 years and 3 months in prison. The crime: leading a criminal organisation that attempted a coup d'état after his defeat. Generals, the former justice minister and the former intelligence chief were convicted alongside him. The central evidence was the plea bargain of his former aide-de-camp, together with draft decrees, messages and a recorded cabinet meeting.

Bolsonaro denies planning a coup and calls the case persecution. He has been in custody since November 2025, under house arrest since March 2026. The federal police also named him as a suspect over jewellery received from foreign governments and over fraud in vaccination records. None of those investigations has produced a conviction so far.

The yardstick here was quick and hard. He was tried by five of the eleven justices. The rapporteur, the justice who leads the case, was the judge he had attacked for years and who appeared as a target in part of the plot under investigation. The defence challenged both the jurisdiction and the rapporteur. The court rejected it.

The yardstick also reached people with no name. Débora Rodrigues dos Santos, a hairdresser from Paulínia, in the interior of São Paulo, 39 years old, mother of two, wrote "Perdeu, mané" — roughly, "you lost, loser" — in lipstick on the statue of Justice outside the STF on 8 January. The phrase had been used by a justice of that court to a Bolsonaro supporter in 2022. She spent two years in pre-trial detention. In April 2025, the same panel of five justices sentenced her to 14 years for five crimes: violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d'état, armed criminal association, aggravated damage, and destruction of listed heritage. The reasoning was crowd crime, in which responsibility is shared even without proof that she entered the buildings. Three justices voted for 14 years; one voted for 11; Justice Fux voted for a year and a half, for the graffiti alone. She has served her sentence at home since September 2025 and is one of roughly 190 people the April 2026 law is expected to reach.

In April 2026, Congress overrode Lula's veto of a law changing how those sentences are calculated. Bolsonaro's is expected to fall to around 20 years, with a little over two years behind bars, and about 190 people convicted over 8 January should have their sentences reviewed. His son Flávio is a candidate for president in October and is in a statistical tie with Lula in the run-off.

To summarise. One side had its convictions annulled over jurisdiction and judicial bias, with no ruling on the merits. The other was convicted by five justices, with a rapporteur who was part of the plot, and then had the sentence cut by a vote in Congress. Neither path looks, from outside, like the normal functioning of a court. The question this letter asks is a different one: why the yardstick changes size depending on who is being measured.

The court that cannot judge itself#

You have probably heard about Brazil three times since last year and never connected them.

In August 2025, the president of the United States imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods and cited, among his reasons, the trial of a former president. Weeks earlier, the US Treasury had sanctioned an STF justice under the law created for human rights abusers and corrupt officials; the sanction was lifted months later. In October, a police operation in Rio de Janeiro killed 121 people in a single day.

The sanctioned justice is the same one handling that operation's case at the STF, and the same one the court is now debating whether to investigate. Here is the present.

In November 2025, the Central Bank wound up Banco Master, and the federal police arrested its owner, Daniel Vorcaro, on suspicion of the largest banking fraud in the country's history. Since then, the case has reached the STF through every door.

The first rapporteur was Dias Toffoli, the same justice behind the Lava Jato annulments. He left the case in February 2026, after the press revealed US$ 6.7 million from funds tied to Vorcaro at a resort he co-owned. He remains on the court.

At the end of 2025, the newspaper O Globo revealed the US$ 25 million contract, over three years, between the law firm of Justice Alexandre de Moraes's wife and the bank, signed in January 2024, with some US$ 14.5 million paid up to the wind-up, according to O Globo and Estadão. In October 2025, the bank issued credit cards with a US$ 58,000 limit for each of the justice's two sons, at the firm's request; the firm says they were never used. Moraes says he never favoured the bank and never ruled on cases involving it.

On 1 September 2026, the new rapporteur, André Mendonça, released a 218-page federal police report on Vorcaro's phone. In it, conversations with a contact saved as "Alexandre de Moraes BRASILIA" and notes in which the banker asked the other party to hold back the head of the federal police and the Prosecutor General. Moraes denies exchanging the messages, calls the dialogues fanciful, and accuses Mendonça of staging a farce for electoral purposes.

One detail that matters: Mendonça was appointed to the STF by Bolsonaro; Moraes by Michel Temer; Toffoli by Lula. This cuts across every side. And the Prosecutor General's son, according to the journalism agency Pública, was invited on a trip to London paid for by the bank.

On 15 September, the full bench met to decide whether to open an investigation into Moraes. Two justices did not vote: Nunes Marques disqualified himself after the press published messages linking him and his family to the same banker; Toffoli recused himself for bias. The remaining eight decided, by 4 votes to 3, to handle the Moraes and Mendonça cases separately. Flávio Dino, who had voted to join the cases, requested the case file before the result was proclaimed, which suspends the judgment for up to 90 days. The two people who ought to be investigating, the Prosecutor General and the head of the federal police, both appear in the banker's notes.

Since 9 September, by decision of the court's president, Moraes no longer leads an inquiry opened by the STF itself in 2019 to investigate attacks on the court. He ran that inquiry for seven years, with no deadline and no random assignment, and it was the basis for many of the rulings the world saw: arrests, account takedowns, the shutdown of a social network.

Meanwhile, the STF operates with ten justices, not eleven. The seat has been vacant since October 2025. In April 2026, the Senate rejected Lula's nominee by 42 votes to 34, the first rejection in 132 years. Senators say the seat will stay empty until after the election. The president of the Senate, named as the architect of that rejection, is the same person who decides, alone, whether impeachment requests against justices move forward.

How the system decides not to decide#

The mechanics explain the rest. I will go slowly, because this is where readers abroad usually get lost.

The STF has eleven justices. Each is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and serves until the age of 75. The only way to remove a justice is impeachment, tried by the Senate, requiring 54 of the 81 votes.

But before reaching the floor, the request has to pass through one person. Under the rules, the president of the Senate decides whether it moves or goes in a drawer. There is no deadline. There is no obligation to explain. There are currently 109 requests against ten justices, 66 of them against Moraes. Not one has been processed.

Congress has two chambers: the Chamber of Deputies, with 513 members, and the Senate, with 81. Amending the Constitution requires three fifths of the votes, in two rounds, in each chamber. Overriding a presidential veto requires an absolute majority in both, as happened in April with the sentencing law.

And the budget has a mechanism you need to know about. It is called the congressional earmark: billions of dollars a year that each member of Congress is entitled to direct to public works and organisations in their own region. Something like American earmarks, but on a far larger scale, and with a control over where the money lands that the STF has spent two years trying to make transparent. This is the money majorities are bought with, for any government.

The price#

This costs money. The money is mine and my neighbours'.

The tax burden reached 32.4% of GDP in 2025, the highest level since the series began in 2010. That is around US$ 670 billion a year in taxes.

Government debt passed 80% of GDP in April 2026. The market projects 83% by the end of the year and 86.5% in 2027. The Senate's fiscal institution calculates that it would take savings of 2.1% of GDP a year to stabilise it, and the country has spent more than it collects since 2014. In May 2026 alone, the public sector paid US$ 21 billion in interest.

The benchmark interest rate, which the Central Bank uses to hold down inflation, stands at around 14% a year, among the highest in the world. Inflation projected for 2026 is 5.1%, above the target ceiling.

In 2025, 2,466 companies filed for judicial reorganisation, Brazil's equivalent of Chapter 11, the highest number since Serasa, the country's largest credit data company, began counting in 2012. In January 2026, 8.7 million companies were in default. The Correios lost US$ 1.6 billion in 2025 and US$ 600 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

It would be dishonest to stop there. Unemployment is at 5.4%, the lowest in the series for a second quarter, and average worker income hit a record. The number of active companies grew 22.5% in 2025. The government passed a consumption tax reform that economists had been calling for over thirty years, and exempted from income tax anyone earning up to around US$ 1,000 a month.

Brazil pays the interest rates of a bankrupt country without being bankrupt, to sustain a state that cannot police itself, and the bill falls on the people who work.

The street#

Brazil records more than 40,000 violent deaths a year.

Two syndicates fight over territory. The Comando Vermelho was born in the prisons of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s. The PCC, Primeiro Comando da Capital, was born in the prisons of São Paulo in the 1990s and today has legal and illegal businesses in ten states, as well as a presence on the cocaine route to Europe.

In 2020, during the pandemic, the STF restricted police operations in Rio's favelas to exceptional cases, after the state recorded record numbers of people killed by police. The case became known as the ADPF das Favelas. Governors and police say the ruling handed territory to the syndicates. Human rights advocates say it reduced the deaths of innocent people. In April 2025, the court set permanent rules: body cameras, ambulances and mandatory forensic examination.

On 28 October 2025, the Rio state government sent 2,500 officers into the Alemão and Penha complexes against the Comando Vermelho. The result: 121 dead, 117 of them suspects and 4 police officers; 81 arrests and 72 rifles seized. The governor called the operation a success. The justice handling the case at the STF, the same Moraes, ordered evidence preserved and forensic reports delivered.

Both things are true at once. The Brazilian state can kill 117 suspects in one morning and cannot investigate a banker without half the court declaring itself conflicted.

In August 2025, Operation Carbono Oculto revealed the other side of the PCC: investment funds on the most expensive avenue in Brazilian finance, refineries, ethanol plants, a port terminal, 1,600 lorries, and around US$ 10 billion moved over five years. President Lula called it the largest state response to organised crime in history. That is true. It is also true that the scheme ran for five years inside the regulated financial system.

In 2020, an STF justice ordered the release of one of the PCC's leaders, André do Rap, applying a rule Congress had passed months earlier. The court's president overturned the decision the next day. He had already fled. He remains a fugitive.

Outrage in numbers#

I am not going to describe my country's outrage with adjectives. I am going to count it.

Thirteen former STF justices, among them the judge who tried the biggest corruption scandal of the 2000s and the justice who presided over the court until 2023, wrote to the court's current president in September. They called for a public session and a rigorous inquiry, and described the moment as the most acute crisis in the court's history.

One hundred and fifty-seven people published a manifesto on 9 September. Among them, two former central bank governors, the economists who designed Brazil's currency in 1994, the founder of one of the country's largest retailers, and one of the most popular television presenters. Three demands: a full, fast and independent investigation; the suspension of anyone formally under investigation; and a binding code of conduct for the higher courts and for the investigative and prosecutorial bodies. They wrote that they were not signing against individuals, and that what has surfaced is the consequence of a sick system. The São Paulo industrial federation, the country's largest business body, is organising a manifesto with three thousand organisations representing 90% of GDP.

The country's three largest newspapers, which Bolsonaro supporters routinely accuse of hostility, published editorials on 1 and 2 September calling for Moraes to leave the court.

In March 2026, 43% of Brazilians said they did not trust the STF, the highest figure since Datafolha, the country's main polling institute, began measuring in 2012. Those who trust it a great deal fell from 24% to 16%. In September, 76% said the justices have too much power. Seventy-nine per cent think a justice should not rule on cases involving relatives' clients; the code of conduct that would prevent this is what the manifesto is asking for.

There are 109 impeachment requests against justices in the Senate. On Independence Day, 7 September, there were demonstrations calling for Moraes's removal on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, on the Esplanada dos Ministérios in Brasília, and in 14 other cities.

And there are those who left. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs counted 3.1 million Brazilians abroad in 2010; 4.2 million in 2020; almost 5 million in 2023; 5.3 million in 2025. If they were a state, they would be the 13th most populous in the country.