By Simon Pedro*
For Moro, the important thing was to do “justice” as a social type of revenge, in which respect for rules and legal formalities were of the least importance.
Moro was a provincial judge, narrow-minded and cruel to his enemies. He is the cynical face of our conservative and fascist elite. He emerges as the right-wing favorite candidate to beat Bolsonaro, but to reach his goal, the path will be arduous and full of pitfalls, identical to the one he himself created to get his enemies out of the way.
As my friend Marcos Antonio Rocha Júnior wrote to me, “Moro established himself as a public persona, being a righteous judge”. For him, the defense of the Democratic State of Law, respect for due process and individual guarantees were never priorities. The important thing was to do “justice” as a social type of revenge, in which respect for rules and legal formalities were the least. He has always been supported by a political, financial and media machine so that his will has a legal veneer, thus gaining public outcry for the “end of impunity and corruption.”
Thus, if what is important to combat is impunity, then what is important is punishment, social revenge. In other words, the result matters more than the process. Human rights and individual guarantees became secondary. This was more than demonstrated by the website The Intercept, with the leak of dialogues between prosecutors and Moro, in the scandal that became known as Vaza Jato and laid bare the methods and intentions of the then judge.
By persecuting PT leaders and undermining the Dilma government in its political support, with spectacular actions such as illegal coercive conduct against Lula to demoralize the former president, other politicians and businessmen, Moro grew in the approval of fabricated public opinion and believed he had become a god or at least a "myth" as they still call him.
The moralist crusade he lent himself to led Moro to be the main actor in the opposition to popular governments. Its role was the basis for the economic and political elites to defend the PT from the government and make possible the implementation of the ultraneoliberal agenda, which has withdrawn the rights of the working class conquered over the last decades, weakened national sovereignty and squandered natural resources and companies. state.
It is also worth remembering Moro's strong connection with the DEA, the US State Department, the body that develops the secret actions of the US empire in the world. Moro became a fixture in courses and events promoted in the US and his actions as a judge in Lava Jato directly and indirectly caused the collapse of Brazilian industry in the civil construction and oil chain, generating huge unemployment in the sector and the weakening of the giant Petrobras, which came to have great international protagonism under the Lula and Dilma governments. I never forget that when the Vaza Jato scandal broke at The Intercept, Moro left for the US without even having a defined agenda there, certainly seeking advice or asking for help from his real bosses.
Karl Marx, at The German Ideology, coined the following statement: “the ideas of the ruling class are, in each era, the dominant ideas”. And so it happened here. The ruling class, which holds economic power, made the majority of Brazilian society believe that the cause of our greatest problems was state corruption and that the PT was the “party that stole the most” or that “led the greatest corruption”. of history” and the vigilante judge played a decisive role in the construction of this narrative.
His main trophy was the arrest of Lula, in a forged and suspicious process, without any reasonable factual basis, all to remove him from the 2018 electoral game. The same set of forces built the false appearance that the rules of the democratic game were maintained and that the institutions were in full operation to “legitimize” the election of their chosen candidate, Geraldo Alckmin.
As part of the plan went wrong, that is, the candidate chosen by the Right, from the PSDB, did not take off, an appeal was made to the pitbull that was always trapped in the cage so that its threatening growls and barks were under control, but that, since the coup 2016, had been released to add sectors of the extreme right to the plan. Bolsonaro no longer agreed to go back to the cage and, especially after the stabbing episode and with Lula out of the running, he offered to defeat the PT. In desperation and appealing to the MMA of producing fake news and its dissemination through the Whatsapp network, the elites accepted the proposal. Afterwards, “if it doesn't work, take it out, like we took out Dilma” was another idea of the ruling classes assimilated by those who were contaminated by the wave of hatred and resentment against the PT and Lula. The plan was costly, but it worked!
But it was necessary to put a collar on Bolsonaro, to control his authoritarian impulse and his children's relations with the militias in Rio de Janeiro. Paulo Guedes, the “post Ipiranga” who would be responsible for running the economy, was tasked with sounding out and inviting Sérgio Moro to be a “superminister” and in Justice to guarantee the legality of the actions of the future government and unite Bolsonarism with authoritarian and conservative ideas, with lavajatismo and its facade moralist ideals. A hell of an idea that, to boot, would guarantee a touch of legality to the government's actions and would garner great popular support for it.
To compensate for the wear and tear and scandal of international proportions that Moro’s move to government would generate, after all, as a judge, his actions directly influenced the election result, he was sold as a kind of Bolsonaro moderator. I never considered this to be the situation. In my view, he would be the enabler of the formality of arbitration in an authoritarian government. He even showed signs of this, including in the “fight against crime” project that he sent, but which was dehydrated in the National Congress. For Lula, in fact, “President Bolsonaro is Moro’s creation”, as it was his actions as a judge that allowed the rise and victory of the narrow-minded and radical right-wing extremist in 2018. For Moro’s wife, he and Bolsonaro “are just one thing”.
Moro, in 2019, managed to survive the revelations of The Intercept, but he became entangled in webs of coups and tricks that he built with Rede Globo, with the toucans and with Temer's gang and a group of prosecutors, to the point that the System was unable to keep Lula in prison, as the revelations made public through the website, they reported on the action of the vigilante judge who, in practice, commanded the action of the prosecutors, which is illegal, influencing the production of evidence on the one hand and the trickery of ignoring others, of rushing the deadlines of the process, in the selective leak of audios and information for the mainstream press. In other words, he threw to the winds the principles of impartiality and impartiality of a magistrate, crimes that in a more serious country would have led to removal from office and made the judge suspect, annulling his decisions.
As a minister, Moro was a failure, suffering defeats in Congress and even within the Government. He tried to legalize the proposal of imprisonment after conviction in the 2nd instance – thesis overturned in the STF and which allowed Lula’s release – and the one that would allow the police forces the license to kill through the excrescence called exclusion of illicitness, both through a package of measures that ended up being dehydrated by Parliament and had to swallow the creation of the figure of guarantee judges who, if they existed during the Lava Jato processes, would have taken away from him the possibility of judging the accused since he was the instructor of the processes. He expected Bolsonaro to veto this proposal included in the law by parliamentarians, but the president did not. He also lost control of COAF, the body that controls the financial transactions of Brazilians and companies.
Thus, the initial condition of "superminister" was being emptied and he gradually lost internal strength, despite maintaining high approval ratings in public opinion, protected as he has always been by the mainstream media, especially Rede Globo, which maintains the same a strategic partnership. Before society and sectors of public opinion, his figure was diminished by turning a blind eye and even protecting, in a contradictory way with his previous speeches and actions, crimes and accusations against government figures or members of the Bolsonaro clan. He started by wiping the confessed crime of using Caixa 2 in the campaign of Minister Ônix Lorenzoni, ignored the embezzlement of Electoral Fund resources by the Minister of Tourism and President of the PSC, the party used in elections by the family and its political allies, crimes that became popular as the “PSL orange grove”, he made light of the investigations into the barbaric murders of councilor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson in RJ by militia bandits close to the clan.
Bolsonaro swallowed Moro in his government, but never admitted that the minister had more approval and popularity than him and started to treat the minister as a mere subordinate and demand that he control the Federal Police to control and influence investigations into the crimes committed by his children. and parliamentarians from the base of the government. This, added to the disagreement with the president’s behavior in relation to the Coronavirus crisis and the discomfort with the summary dismissal of the fellow Minister of Health, sealed the split in the alliance between Lavajatismo and Bolsonarism in Moro’s dismissal.
Living like the bad politician he always was, he took the opportunity to shoot Bolsonaro, accusing him of intending to control the actions and investigations of the PF and end his independence. With that, he sought to disassociate himself from the president and regain his reputation as a champion of fighting corruption and honesty. He left positioning himself as a candidate for president and using the well-defined positive image in the polls to try to be the alternative of the right in 2022.
He knows that Coronavirus is out of control due to the president's genocidal vision of ignoring the severity of the disease and still encouraging the population to take to the streets and ignore social isolation. He certainly has also noticed that the economy has sunk even more and is hardly recovering, with Paulo Guedes being the main culprit of this situation with his policies that failed to generate growth and jobs, but remaining as the only guarantor along with the fascist government's military.
But, in his haste, he made mistakes, such as confessing to a crime committed when, upon accepting an invitation to the ministry, he negotiated the illegal payment of a lifelong pension to his family, “in case he missed it”, which is typified as a crime. of passive corruption by Article 317 of the Penal Code. And he was also “reported” by the president, who branded him a liar and accused him of proposing the replacement of the PF superintendent with his appointment to a vacancy in the STF. This reinforced Lula’s defense action before the United Nations Court of Human Rights for the annulment of the absurd sentences of the Brazilian judicial system against the former president and the action for Moro’s suspicion before the Federal Supreme Court, both still without a decision.
Now without the positions of judge and minister, if Moro loses the overprotection he earned in Lava Jato, he will definitely betray a lot of people. However, he knows that it is a living file. Would he hand over more things from the president, the family and other characters, being able to incriminate himself definitively? His candidacy for the presidency remains, which depends on the support of Globo, the North Americans, Lava Jato and the toucans. But their enemies have always been the PT and especially Lula, and that's why Moro became what he became. Will they want to adjust the cannon once and for all against Bolsonaro who, even according to current polls, even after the ministers were dismissed, still remains a relevant political force? Or will they continue, with Guedes and the military as guarantors, maintaining the current scheme and raffling Torquemada de Curitiba? Guedes is the main economic actor in the government of the scheme that gave relevance to Moro. If it falls, it may be that something changes more radically, but it may also be that the market decides to just change the holder to maintain the same economic policy of destroying rights and public property.
Apart from this internal political game between creator and creature, the pandemic brings a new reality to the country. The current government is betting on social chaos to capitalize, for example, the Emergency Basic Income and maintain political cohesion of fascism and its electorate. The common people, mediated by the “organic intellectuals” of Bolsonarism – neo-Pentecostal pastors, agribusiness leaders, unscrupulous businessmen, among others – credit Bolsonaro with this income, as they have precedent with the release of the FGTS and PIS/Pasep. Its political base controls the political narrative with the tactic of defining an enemy on occasion, among them is Moro.
However, the pandemic is corroding the country socially and economically. Can the effect of the stone thrown into the lake of the middle class pans reach the rest of society? It is not known, since it amalgamated into anti-PTism and fascism. Bolsonaro's bet on chaos, denying the science and cruel reality of the virus, is a very high risk bet, because it underestimates the action of Covid-19, as it initially happened in Italy, Spain and the USA, with disastrous results and that now approaching in Brazil.
In this scenario, Moro has an advantage, since one of his main allies, Rede Globo, has maintained a critical coverage of the federal government's incompetence in dealing with the pandemic and, above all, of Bolsonaro's nefarious role, which aims to encourage even more contagions. and the deaths. The idea is to provoke, in addition to the deterioration of the image, a movement that leads to the departure of the current representative. However, outside the institutions that provided power and glory and with the new reality posed by the pandemic, the majority sectors can elect a new political actor, more accustomed to their nest, like the current governor of SP João Dória, who has stood out in the fight to the Coronavirus and confronted Bolsonaro in his genocidal actions, things that Moro never did until the moment of his departure.
*Simao Pedro he was state deputy (2003-2015) and municipal secretary of services in the Haddad administration