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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.
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 supersalaries 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.
When Mr. Barbosa was a teenager, he was
employed as a