Donald Trump’s government redoubles his commitment against Brazil. Those suffered were found before even the end of the term of August 1. The White House did not wait any longer and confirmed Wednesday that the South American giant will be exposed to 50%tariffs, the highest in the world.
The White House linked the punishment of “the recent policies, practices and actions by the Brazilian government that constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security, foreign policy and the United States economy.” While it is very hard, it excludes from the tariff punishment of the most emblematic companies in the Brazilian national industry. The company’s shares rose more than 7% in the São Paul bag barely known the news. It also were exempted from 50% of tariff products such as silicon, tin, wood pulp, precious metals and fertilizers.
The punishment left the commercial issues aside – United States has a surplus with Brazil for years – and focused on policies: the alleged persecution of the Brazilian authorities against former president Jair Bolsonaro, prosecuted for an alleged attempt at the coup d’etat. The judge of the Supreme Court who sat on the bench, Alexandre de Moraes, will face more sanctions already an almost total economic blockade in the United States.
The decree confirmed by the tariff speaks of “intimidation and censorship” of the Brazilian government against Bolsonaro and its supporters, despite the fact that the process is led by the Supreme. Lula has complained several times that Trump does not recognize that in Brazil there is separation of powers. who accuses of abusing his judicial authority to intimidate his political opponents. Shortly before, the United States government applied to the magistrate the so -called Magnitsky Law, designed for human rights violators.
It also loads against the judge for his battle against the impunity of hate crimes and misinformation in social networks, remembering that when United States technology companies have refused to fulfill their orders (based on Brazilian legislation) they have been imposed fines, criminal proceedings have been opened on their managers or active ones have been frozen. It is an veiled allusion to the confrontation with X (formerly Twitter), which after repeatedly refusing to fulfill judicial decisions at the end, Elon Musk surrendered and complied with the law. The attempts of the Brazilian authorities for holding large technology companies for the content published on social networks, and the economic impact that this generates, are an important part of Trump’s anger with Brasilia, beyond Bolsonaro’s personal issues.
The so -called Magnitsky Law will now be applied to the judge. In case you have companies in the United States, they will be blocked. Nor can financial transactions with companies or citizens of the country with American flag credit cards.
The judge was included in the List of Sanctioned of the United States Treasury Foreign Treasury Control Office. The Treasury Secretary himself, Scott Besent, explained that the decision has to do with Bolsonaro’s judicial problems. “Moraes is behind an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary arrests that violate human rights and processes judicialized with political motivation, including former president Jair Bolsonaro,” he said.
The most media judge in Brazil has been in the spotlight for a long time. In the middle of the month, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced that the entrance visas to the United States of Moraes and other judges of the Supreme and his relatives were revoked. Not all, only those that the Trump government considers accomplices of the “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.
The possibility that the magistrate was punished sounded for a long time, since it was the primary objective of deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro in his personal crusade against the judge. The former president, installed in Washington for months to press in favor of blackmail to Brazil, celebrated it as a “historical milestone” and took the opportunity to demand that the Brazilian congress be approved an amnesty for his father and the rest of the alleged coup plotters to “restore peace.”
The rule that is now used against Brazilian justice was created in 2012 in tribute to Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in jail after denouncing a money diversion scheme by Russian authorities. The initial idea was to punish oligarchs and members of the Russian government, but four years later it was decided that the law could be used in broader cases of human rights violations and apply to citizens around the world.
For the extreme Brazilian right, Moraes is the symbol of everything they hate and the main target of radical hatred, even more than President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The most obvious reason is that he leads the trial against Bolsonao, which in September could face a sentence of up to 43 years in jail for having led an attempted coup against Lula after the 2022 elections.
But the neglect towards the judge comes from afar. Before Bolsonaro sat on the bench, he had sent dozens of participants to jail in the altercations of January 8 in Brasilia, when thousands of Bolsononistas invaded Congress, the Supreme and the headquarters of the Government. And before that he had already leading a fight against misinformation and hate speeches in social networks that resulted in loud encounters with large technological companies in the United States. The shy attempts to regulate the Internet jungle that Brazil has given in recent times have also solved the Trump government, which cited the alleged fence to the ‘big techs’ in their justifications to punish Brazil with the highest tariff in the world.
