Brazil’s Supreme Court in Crisis as Alexandre de Moraes Faces Investigation

With just a few weeks to go before the presidential elections, Brazil’s ruling establishment is reeling from a scandal of historic proportions involving the Federal Supreme Court (STF), the powerful Judge Alexandre de Moraes, and the Bolsonaro family. The so-called Banco Master case has exposed a network of questionable ties between high-ranking judges, far-right politicians, and financial elites, reigniting debates about the role of a judiciary — with several ties to the United States — that systematically interferes in the country’s political destiny.

The crisis erupted when the Federal Police lifted the confidentiality order on a 200-page investigation after seizing the cell phone of Daniel Vorcaro, former owner of Banco Master, a private bank that collapsed in 2025, who is currently in prison for a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme. 

The metadata analyzed from messages found on Vorcaro’s cell phone and in a series of documents revealed that powerful Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes was directly involved in the drafting and final editing of multimillion-real contracts signed between Banco Master and the law firm of his own wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, which provided for payments ranging from 25 to 131 million reais (up to US$25 million). Furthermore, the conversations suggest that Moraes and Vorcaro discussed various ways to use the judge’s influence to derail criminal investigations by the Federal Police and the Attorney General’s Office against the banker.

The unfolding crisis is serious because de Moraes is no minor figure. In recent years he has amassed unprecedented power within the STF. From that position, he led the effort to bar Jair Bolsonaro from holding political office until 2030, investigated the 2023 coup attempt, and ordered the suspension of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) for promoting fake news. 

But his track record shows not only attacks on the Right but also the judiciary’s interference in key aspects of Brazilian political life. In 2016, he harshly cracked down on protests against the impeachment and institutional coup suffered by Dilma Rousseff. He later served as Minister of Justice in Michel Temer’s coup-installed government, and in 2018 cast the decisive vote to deny Lula da Silva’s habeas corpus petition, paving the way for his imprisonment and electoral ban, which in turn paved the way for Temer’s victory in the elections.

The twist in this scandal is that Moraes has a direct connection to the Bolsonaro family, who have long portrayed the justice as their main public enemy. Investigations into Vorcaro had already uncovered audio recordings and messages in which Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president, negotiated with the jailed banker the delivery of multimillion-real funds.

The suspicious financial flow — which, according to the investigations, involved an agreement for 143 million reais and actual payments of at least 60 million (equivalent to US$10 million) — was formally justified as funding for “Dark Horse,” a U.S.-Brazilian biographical film about the life of Jair Bolsonaro.

The film, shot in English and starring far-right actor Jim Caviezel, features a screenplay co-written by pro-Bolsonaro Congressman Mário Frias. However, the Federal Police are investigating whether the film actually served as a front for money laundering to divert funds to the Bolsonaro family and cover personal expenses. The web of corruption is so complex that it was discovered that Fábio Faria, a close associate of the Bolsonaro family, was in fact responsible for organizing meetings between Vorcaro and Judge Moraes himself, demonstrating that both sides of the political spectrum were being funded by the same corrupt financier.

With the elections just weeks away, the scope and impact of this crisis is unpredictable. Flávio Bolsonaro has attempted to exploit the allegations by demanding Moraes’s impeachment for acting as the “banker’s lawyer,” even though his own financial ties to Vorcaro place him under criminal suspicion. This scenario opens a deep rift in the credibility of the STF, which has been the institution defining key political issues in recent years, and once again raises the risk that the electoral process will be influenced and manipulated by selective leaks orchestrated by the judiciary — that is, a caste of judges who were not democratically elected by the public.

The main beneficiary of this crisis is STF Justice André Mendonça, who was originally appointed by Jair Bolsonaro as Attorney General of the Union — that is, as the defender of the executive branch under the far-right government — and ultimately as a Supreme Court justice in 2021.

With Moraes on the ropes, Mendonça — who ordered the lifting of confidentiality regarding the evidence against his colleague — has amassed extraordinary power as the reporting judge in the Master and INSS cases (the latter being a case related to fraud in the Brazilian pension system in which social security funds were embezzled through bogus loans, with Banco Master as the primary recipient). Furthermore, as vice president of the Superior Electoral Court, Mendonça directly oversees complaints regarding disinformation and campaign propaganda — a role he has already exercised by censoring a video linking Flávio Bolsonaro to the banker Vorcaro, highlighting how the Bolsonaro camp could now use judges to tip the electoral scales.

The caste that has been gaining influence for years represents a form of “Judicial Bonapartism”: the growing autonomy of unelected state bureaucrats — judges, prosecutors, and police chiefs — who, amid successive crises of the political regime, present themselves as a “moderating power” capable of arbitrating the country’s social and political conflicts. This role has deep historical roots in the imperial and slave-owning tradition, which the Armed Forces inherited and exercised throughout the 20th century.

This judicial caste does not act in isolation — it has deep ties to U.S. imperialism. In recent decades, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and U.S. universities have shaped a veritable “American generation” within Brazil’s judiciary and Federal Police. Judges like Sérgio Moro, who participated in the U.S. Embassy’s Bridges Project and was behind the Lava Jato case against Lula, and André Mendonça himself, who in 2010 received training in Washington under anti-corruption programs at George Washington University, were formed within these circles of legal intervention and plea bargaining. 

This influence of U.S. imperialism takes on special significance at a time when the Trump administration has launched his “Doneroe Doctrine,” through which it seeks to exert direct interference over Latin American countries. This effort ranges from intervention through statements, money, or other more covert means — such as its operatives in bot farms and fake news campaigns targeting electoral processes — to direct intervention, as in Venezuela, which has now become a neocolonial protectorate. These U.S. ties are not limited to the judiciary but are also evident among the high-ranking police officials currently leading the Banco Master case under Mendonça’s supervision, many of whom graduated from the FBI Academy in Quantico or earned master’s degrees in irregular warfare from the U.S. Department of Defense.

This crisis will bring no real benefit to Brazil’s working people if it is resolved by the regime’s own rules. The judiciary has demonstrated its class character: while its justices enjoy astronomical salaries and maintain million-dollar contracts with major bankers, they are the very same people who enforce labor reforms against workers and endorse the mass incarceration of the Black population.

That is why our comrades in the Revolutionary Workers’ Movement (MRT) and Esquerda Diário, part of the International Network La Izquierda Diario in Brazil, denounce that — from the “progressive” camp — the Workers’ Party (PT) itself and even left-wing organizations like the PSOL have raised false hopes and legitimized this authoritarian framework. By creating the illusion that the STF and judges like Moraes were the “saviors” of democracy, these leaderships emptied the streets, paralyzed the unions, and prevented any serious mobilization against the far right in favor of stability and conciliation under the current Broad Front government, allowing the judicial caste to consolidate itself as the ultimate arbiter of the republic.

The MRT argues that the only truly democratic solution to this institutional decay will not come from patching up the STF or replacing one judge with another, but from the independent mobilization of workers and the popular sectors to establish a Free and Sovereign Constituent Assembly, free from the control of Congress, the STF judges, or the Armed Forces.

This Constituent Assembly must address the structural problems that the current regime refuses to resolve, such as putting an end to the grueling six-day workweek, reducing the workweek without a pay cut, reversing the anti-worker counter-reforms dating back to Temer’s coup government, annulling privatizations, and recovering the nation’s strategic resources — such as oil and rare earth minerals — from imperialist plunder. 

To put an end to the privileges of the judicial caste, a radical reorganization of the justice system is necessary: all judges and justices of the Supreme Court must be elected by direct popular vote, their terms must be revocable, and their salaries must be equivalent to those of a public school teacher, while also abolishing the reactionary and useless Senate that today blocks the rights of the working people. Only the strength of the class struggle and independent organization can impose this perspective in the face of a system designed to defend the property of a small capitalist minority.

Originally published in Spanish on September 2 in La Izquierda Diario