"THE SATURDAY PROFILE
A Blunt Chief Justice Unafraid to Upset Brazil’s Status Quo
BRASÍLIA —
Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners
and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little
had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
But when
the chief justice, Joaquim Barbosa, strides into the court, the other 10
excellencies brace themselves for whatever may come next.
In one
televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he
would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his
cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr.
Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his
condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term
describing a hired thug.
In one of
his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and
only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison,
even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of
judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a
temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said
in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal
Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer.
“It’s because I speak my mind so much.”
His
acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force
behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings,
turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound
political power and the subject of popular fascination.
The
court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the
University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the
number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the
Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher
education.
In
another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway as chief justice and president
of the panel overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an anticorruption crusade,
he is overseeing the precedent-setting trial of senior political figures
in the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast vote-buying
scheme.
ASCENDING
to Brazil’s high court, much less pushing the institution to assert its
independence, long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest of
eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished city in Minas Gerais
State, where his father worked as a bricklayer.
But his
prominence — not just on the court, but in the streets as well — is so
well established that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his handling of the
corruption trial and posted them on YouTube, and demonstrators during
the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told pollsters
that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top choices for president in next
year’s elections.
While the
protests have subsided since their height in June, the political tumult
they set off persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now up in the air, with
Mr. Barbosa — who is now so much in the public eye that gossip
columnists are following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run.
“I’m not a candidate for anything,” he says.
But the
same public glare that has turned him into a celebrity has singed him as
well. While he has won widespread admiration for his guidance of the
high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every other prominent political
figure in Brazil, has recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called super-salaries awarded to some
members of Brazil’s legal system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa
on the defensive.
One
report in the Brazilian news media described how he received about
$180,000 in payments for untaken leaves of absence during his 19 years
as a public prosecutor. (Such payments are common in some areas of
Brazil’s large public bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability company, suggesting an
effort to pay less taxes on the property.
In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends that he has done nothing wrong.
In a
country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of
mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest
echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s
trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a
teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a
janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of
Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting
to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic
service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the
shore of the Baltic Sea.
Sensing
that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has
called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal
investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas
University in Paris.
Fascinated
by the legal systems of other countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on
affirmative action in the United States. He still voices his admiration
for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court
justice in the United States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing inspiration from
them as he pushed Brazil’s high court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no
decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into Brazil’s public imagination as
much as his handling of the trial of political operatives, legislators
and bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption scandal called the
mensalão, or big monthly allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
LAST
November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the high court sentenced some of the
most powerful figures in the governing Workers Party to years in prison
for their crimes in the scheme, including bribery and unlawful
conspiracy, jolting a political system in which impunity for politicians
has been the norm.
Now the
mensalão trial is entering what could be its final phases, and Mr.
Barbosa has at times been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have managed to avoid hard jail
time. He has clashed with other justices over their consideration of a
rare legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at the high court
are examined.
Losing
his patience with one prominent justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried
to absolve some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa publicly
accused him this month of “chicanery” by using legalese to prop up
certain positions. An outcry ensued among some who could not stomach Mr.
Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does
Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?” asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist
for the newspaper O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers does he think he has
just because he’s sitting in the chair of the chief justice of the
Supreme Federal Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the interview, he said some tension was necessary for the court to function properly.
“It was
always like this,” he said, contending that arguments are now just
easier to see because the court’s proceedings are televised.
Linking
the court’s work to the recent wave of protests, he explained that he
strongly disagreed with the violence of some demonstrators, but he also
said he believed that the street movements were “a sign of democracy’s
exuberance.”
“People
don’t want to passively stand by and observe these arrangements of the
elite, which were always the Brazilian tradition,” he said."
