Opinion: Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice André Mendonça – prudent or coward?

By Paulo Polzonoff Jr.*

(Opinion) I meant to write about Justice André Mendonça – theoretically, the democratic black sheep in an increasingly authoritarian STF.

The character intrigues me. After all, he was put there because he is “terribly evangelical” – whatever that means.

I imagined him as a Luther in my semi-infantile delusions, provoking the necessary schism in that den.

And yet, recently, André Mendonça has only been an observer of this depressing spectacle that the Alexandrian Protodictatorship has become.

Between expelling the vendors of the Temple and turning the other cheek, André Mendoça has chosen to be (almost) always the honorable but defeated vote.

There is no sign that he will one day opt for confrontation, especially against the owner of Brazil and the country’s second most beautiful bald head: Alexandre de Moraes.

Hence the doubt expressed in the title of this text.

Is the STF Justice nominated by Jair Bolsonaro and treated as a “conservative hope” being prudent?

(And here, it is worth remembering that, despite our justice-oriented impulses, prudence is the mother of all virtues).

Or would he have surrendered to office blessings, preferring coward omission to heroic struggle against the Nine Horsemen of the Legal Apocalypse?

But before readers come out en masse to exercise their right to perversity and label Justice André Mendonça as the Chief Coward of the Democratic Republic of Brazil, one should ask:

Acting per the Constitution he swore to respect, how could the supposedly anti-Alexandrian Justice act differently?

On the tail end of this question is another:

Amidst the moral corruption that has taken over the STF, is the Constitution an efficient weapon against the evil that has taken over and perverted it?

Many questions, I know. All unanswered.

But someone needs to ask these questions.

Even if the question marks hang in the air like heavy clouds irrigating a land sown with paranoia and conspiracies of all kinds.

POLL

In my Twitter poll about the attitude of Justice André Mendonça, cowardice beat prudence to the punch: 85.2% against 14.8% (I love the illusion of accuracy of decimals).

It could not be any different. Social networks are places given to reduced, intuitive and rabid judgments.

It seems to me that no one who answers a Twitter poll dwells on the subject for more than ten seconds. And that is – so they say! – the fun.

Those who consider “Bolsonaro’s Justice” a coward breathe the undeniably Machiavellian air that contaminates the public debate.

They are the same people who wish that the right wing (it is always tricky to use these reductionist terms, but… ah, you get the idea!) had a pinscher-doberman-like Senator Randolfe Rodrigues to call their own.

Are you one of those? Damn, I’m not.

It is indeed tempting to see the only Justice who is not theoretically part of the group as a coward.

After all, many of us have become used to reducing people to extreme opposites.

Soon, he, who is not a hero, is a villain; he, who is not courageous, daring, smart, activist, or violent, is a coward and negligent.

But isn’t courage precisely in clinging to prudence when everyone demands an intemperate attitude?

And I don’t like the Justice very much, ever since I noticed when I was following his revision test in the Senate that there was too much reverence for the position to which the then-Minister of Justice had been appointed.

To the point that, at some moments, I believed that André Mendonça would apologize for being a Christian.

In fact, at some moments, I thought he would even deny the faith that supposedly qualified him for the STF.

It’s just that I am an exaggerated person.

Anyway, and as much as the prudence of the only Justice still worthy of some respect in that court of wolves in sheep’s clothing may sound strange to the impatience of our times, it seems to me that what we have here, there, and everywhere, is a typical confusion of modernity.

We want Justice for yesterday, and Justice has its own time.

And we insist on confusing what is efficient (the successive decisions of the gang) with what is simply right.

*a journalist, translator, and writer.