Brazil defended himself from his democracy. Why not the United States?

For years, politics in Brazil has been the house version of the United States House. The dynamic was never clearer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally accused the former president of the extreme right Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 conspirators, with crimes connected to an expanding plan to overthrow the democracy of the nation and cling to power after losing an election in October 2022.

That charges against Bolsonaro sound relatives for Americans is not a coincidence. Bolsonaro Consulted with figures in the orbit of Donald Trump in search of his electoral denial strategy. But the accusation against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader was much further than Trump, supposedly leading the high -ranking military officers to a plot of blow and signing a plan to have killed prominent political opponents.

In this, as in many things, Bolsonaro is presented as a more raw and more Thug version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, cunningly, trying to retain his electoral viability after his defeat on January 6; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He tried such a violent power that the institutional immune system in charge of protecting Brazil’s democracy was surprised.

The distortion in the mirror is more pronounced with respect to this institutional response. While American prosecutors are dissimilar Yo‘Sy crossed TBrazil’s institutions seemed to understand from the beginning that they faced an existential threat of the former president. Less than seven months after the coup attempt, the Supreme Electoral Court of Brazil governed Bolsonaro is not eligible to defend the position again until 2030. Curiously, that decision was not even transmitted as a consequence of the coup attempt itself, but by the abuse of Bolsonaro of official acts to promote itself as a candidate, as well as its insistence on The launch of doubt, without evidence, about the equity of the elections.

The United States could have done the same. In December 2023, the Secretary of State of Colorado refused to allow Trump’s name in the main vote of the State, after the Judgment of the Supreme Court of the State that his role in the events of January 6, 2021 LO He did not eligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the movement and the case He arrived before the United States Supreme Court. The judges could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did, they rejected that the abuses of power and attempts to cancel an election were disqualified for the highest position on the earth. On the other hand, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand up.

My country of origin, Venezuela, faced an approximately analogous situation in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez moved to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite the Constitution of Venezuela, which did not contain any provision to do so. Covered, the Supreme Court allowed him to move on. The justice of Venezuela, Cecilia Sosa, wrote A letter of furious resignationsaying that the court had “committed to avoid being killed.” The result in Venezuela was the same as in the United States: the rule of law was dead.

I can’t help wishing US jurists have shown the nerve of their Brazilian counterparts. In his accusation documents against Bolsonaro, Brazil prosecutors do not murmur technicalities: they accuse him of trying a coup d’etat, which is what he did. The Brazilian police did not join knots who appoint special advice; The attorney general, Paulo Gonet, announced the charges himself. The conspiracy “had as leaders the President of the Republic and his candidate for the vice president, General Braga Neto. They both accepted, encouraged and carried out acts classified in criminal statutes as attacks against the … Independence of the powers and the State Democratic law, “Gonet said.

Anne Applebaum: What felling in Brazil learns from Americans

Contrast that with proceduralism at the center of the case against President Trump. After an endless delay that finally did all the debatable exercise, the special lawyer Jack Smith accused Trump for not trying to overthrow the government but for “conspiring to obstruct the official procedure” (that would lead him to lose power), as well as ” conspiring to disappoint the United States ”, such an abstract crime that only a constitutional lawyer knows what it really means.

In the Bolsonaro ruling not eligible to run for a position, the Brazil Electoral Court did not dedicate itself throughout discounts In the jurisprudence of the nineteenth century, as did the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Colorado: they said that he had abused his power in series, which is what he did, and that it is what makes him not suitable for the post. This frankness, this will to call a shovel per shovel, was something that the American Republic, despite all its institutional sophistication, seemed unable to match.

As recently as 2014, one would have been difficult to find anyone willing to predict that Brazil’s institutions would be more effective than those of the United States to protect democracy from populist threat. Perhaps the Brazilians feel more comfortable and are used to taking into account national leaders: the current president of the central left, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, spent more than two years in prison for corruption after their last period in power in power . (Lula was finally released and was allowed to defend the position again when the courts ruled that the judge in his initial prosecution It was partial.) Or perhaps it was the speed of the response: instead of waiting for months or years to move against the rioters who took over the country’s government institutions, the Brazilian police began to imprison them and investigate the conspiracy of blows almost immediately After it took place.

But the biggest difference is that the dictatorship is a much more real threat in Brazil, a country that democratized only in the 1980s, which in a country that has never experienced it. Major Brazilians carry the scars, in many literal cases, of their fight against dictatorship. This struggle for them is visceral in a way that is not, however, for Americans.

Brazil has shown how democracies that are valued are defended. The United States could have done the same.