Why is the New Yorker sucking up to Latin American tyrants?

How does a judge ban one of the world’s biggest social-media platforms, nakedly target political opponents and repress reporting on a colleague’s involvement in the biggest corruption scandal in his country’s history, and still get to be portrayed as a champion of democracy? Only, it seems, if the journalist is working for the New Yorker.

In April, the leading American magazine hailed Alexandre de Moraes as ‘The Brazilian judge taking on the digital far right’. Moraes, whose most notorious achievements to date include banning X and driving political opponents into exile, was presented as the only thing standing between his country and autocracy. According to journalist John Lee Anderson, Moraes is a ‘pugnacious jurist’ who has repeatedly saved his country from ‘digital militias’. The article even described the judge as ‘conspicuously fit’ and praised his ‘sharp cheekbones’.

It’s a good thing this terrible article was published in America, rather than Brazil, which remains in a well of authoritarianism that Moraes is in no small part responsible for. For many Brazilians, Moraes’s unprecedented assault on free speech is a fresh and depressing memory.

Most Brazilians received their first taste of his authoritarian streak in 2022, the year current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro. Many Brazilians took to the streets to protest the result, centering on the capital, Brasilia. While the protests had an uncomfortable whiff of America’s ‘January 6’ riots the previous year, ordinary voters were right to feel a little aggrieved. ‘Lula’ had served just over 18 months of a 12-year prison term after he was convicted of corruption, before his charges were overturned by a Supreme Court that now included Moraes, a longstanding political ally.

The riots that occurred in Brasilia in January 2023 were serious, but hardly the threat to democracy and national security they were made out to be. For example, they occurred on a Sunday, meaning government buildings were largely empty. Critically, Bolsonaro wasn’t even in the country – he was in Florida, where he had been since losing the election.

None of this lessened the severity of the judicial crackdown, which Moraes was all too happy to spearhead. Hairdresser Débora Rodrigues dos Santos, a mother of two, was jailed for 14 years for writing, in lipstick, ‘you lost, fool’ on a statue during the demonstrations. She was only recently granted house arrest after a public outcry, and only then after a humiliating apology. Her case is one of many.

Moraes is the embodiment of a phenomenon that has taken over the Brazilian Supreme Court. Most of the judges seem utterly convinced that ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ must be criminalised and that populist movements like Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s are not part and parcel of democracy, but something to be fought by fair means or foul.

Still, few could have predicted the outright crackdown on dissent the world witnessed in August, when Moraes banned X for the country’s more than 20million users. Predictably, he claimed his draconian actions were necessary to combat ‘disinformation’. Depressingly, it seems Moraes was just warming up. In February, he issued a nationwide ban on video platform Rumble, once again on the spurious pretext of defending democracy.

Critics have pointed out that the Supreme Court’s habit of banning platforms and accounts is a violation of Article 19 of the Marco Civil, Brazil’s main internet law. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether Article 19 is ‘unconstitutional’.

For the first time since the military dictatorship, which officially ended in 1985, Brazilian political opponents are mainly overseas. There’s podcaster Bruno ‘Monark’ Aiub, who would have been jailed for a year and a half for calling a communist member of the Supreme Court a ‘fatty’. Journalist Rodrigo Constantino and former judge Ludmila Lins Grilo are others who have had their passports revoked and their bank accounts frozen.

To its shame, the New Yorker touched on none of this. Instead, the article reads like a press release for an increasingly authoritarian figure. The magazine has betrayed Brazilian democrats. Alexandre de Moraes, who seems to possess almost limitless political power, doesn’t need the help of the foreign press. The people he is silencing do.

Eli Vieira is a Brazilian freelance journalist. Follow him on X: @EliVieiraJr