In Brazil, democracy is being suffocated by a network of censorship, judicial persecution, and political manipulation. The January 8 Files, recently leaked, confirm what censored media outlets such as La Derecha Diario have been denouncing for years: Lula da Silva's regime used the Supreme Court to criminalize freedom of expression and consolidate a judicial dictatorship in the Cuban or Chinese style.
The episode of January 8, 2023, when supporters of Jair Bolsonaro entered public buildings in Brasília, was presented by the pro-government press and Lula himself as a "coup d'état." However, new documents show that many of those detained did not even participate in violent acts. Elderly people, the sick, and peaceful protesters were equally labeled as "terrorists" and imprisoned.
The files reveal the existence of a clandestine task force led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a direct ally of President Lula. This team operated illegally through a secret WhatsApp group, where "intelligence reports" were fabricated or lacked judicial validity.
According to the documents:
Detainees were kept locked up while their social networks were scanned for anti-government posts.
Biometric databases were used without judicial authorization to identify individuals.
Access to evidence was denied to defense attorneys.
Pretrial detention was ordered based solely on social media posts, violating constitutional principles.
The objective was to legitimize a false narrative: that of an alleged coup d'état driven by Bolsonaro, which would serve as a basis to ban him politically. Lula himself publicly labeled the protesters as "fascists," and Moraes treated them as "enemies of the State."
This authoritarian system targeted not only ordinary citizens but also independent media. La Derecha Diario, the first media outlet censored by the regime, was blocked in Brazil in 2022 for revealing concrete evidence of electoral fraud. That censorship was later extended to the entire social network X, after Elon Musk refused to remove accounts of Brazilian opposition figures.
