Brazil's attorney general Jorge Messias has responded to a Guardian investigation revealing that the Trump administration was pushing to direct over $175m of State Department human rights funding toward a slate of politically charged awards — including a $1m grant titled "Countering lawfare and censorship in Brazil" aimed at civil society groups opposing Brazil's supreme court. Messias called the report "an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty" and said foreign interference in Brazilian institutions "cannot be tolerated." His office filed a criminal complaint to investigate potential wrongdoing. The timing is surgical. Brazil votes in three days in a presidential election pitting the leftwing incumbent Lula da Silva against far-right challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, son of convicted ex-president Jair Bolsonaro. The race is neck and neck. The $1m grant would specifically fund opposition to the supreme court — the institution that convicted Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years for attempting to seize power after losing the 2022 election, and the institution Bolsonaro's movement considers its primary enemy. This is not the first round. Last year, the Trump administration deployed sanctions and tariffs in a failed attempt to pressure Lula's government and the supreme court over the elder Bolsonaro's coup trial. Trump called the prosecution a "witch-hunt." More recently, Washington designated two Brazilian organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations — a move Brazilian critics see as timed to boost Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign and weaken Lula. The broader $175m funding slate includes a $40m anti-communism fund and support for a group advancing white Afrikaner rights in South Africa. The Brazilian tranche specifically targets Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw Jair Bolsonaro's trial and is widely credited with thwarting the authoritarian plot that culminated in the 8 January 2023 riots, when Bolsonaro supporters trashed the presidential palace, congress, and supreme court — with the court sustaining the most severe damage. Moraes is not without controversy. A recent scandal has linked several judges, including Moraes, to Daniel Vorcaro, a banker at the center of Brazil's biggest banking scandal. Vorcaro reportedly gave the Bolsonaro family more than £9m, supposedly to produce a biopic about Jair Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. On the eve of Vorcaro's arrest last November, Flávio Bolsonaro messaged him: "Brother, I'll always be with you." Vorcaro's lawyers deny wrongdoing. The extraction logic here is clear: Washington is using its diplomatic funding apparatus to directly intervene in a foreign democracy's judicial and electoral systems, backing one faction's grievances against the institution that held them accountable for an attempted coup. The costs flow to Brazilian democratic sovereignty and institutional independence. The benefits flow to a specific political faction aligned with U.S. geopolitical preferences. Messias framed the stakes plainly: "It is the right of each generation of Brazilians to freely decide their destiny, protect their institutions, and hand over to their children a country that does not accept decisions about Brazil being made outside of Brazil. Our democracy belongs to Brazilians."
