A masterful article published in Gazeta do Povo about our Brazilian enlightened thinker, the peacock of recivilization!

In the book Sem ‘data venia’: um olhar sobre o Brasil e o mundo (Without ‘data venia’: a look at Brazil and the world), Minister Luís Roberto Barroso dedicates an entire section of the autobiographical part of the work to discussing his intimacy with the US.

Without blushing, he praises the merits of the US stemming from its liberal economy, while confessing that, while still on American soil, he took the trouble to register at the Brazilian embassy in Washington to vote for Brizola in the first round of the 1989 elections. And for Lula in the second round—the same Brizola who, according to Barroso, gave him the opportunity to leave his career in the Rio de Janeiro state prosecutor's office when "money in the public service became very tight" during the socialist governor's second term.

Barroso was an exchange student in the US Midwest at the age of 15. He studied at Yale. He worked at the Arnold & Porter law firm. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

The US seemed like a second home. "I went in January, July, and during long holidays to study and write," he says. And later he confesses: "The truth is that I fell in love with Cambridge — the city of Harvard University, next to Boston"; confiding: "I made the place my academic refuge, where I hide to write and study," even after donning the robe of a Supreme Court justice.

He rightly boasts: “Today, I hold a position at the Harvard Kennedy School as a Senior Fellow. I give lectures to professors, students, and the board of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, with which I am affiliated.” Now a Supreme Court justice, he says: “I return to Yale once a year for a meeting of supreme court justices from different parts of the world.”

Although Barroso does not mention it in the book, journalists have already discovered that the minister keeps a considerable portion of his assets in American companies; he owns real estate in the US; and, according to Timeline magazine, Barroso's son lives in the US, where he works at a financial institution.

Even the infamous “You lost, fool,” laconic but full of meaning, was uttered on American soil, when Barroso was on his way to a LIDE Group conference in New York. Barroso's life is half there, half here. If Brazil is his home, the US is his temple. A place to commune with the goddess of reason. A place to profess the faith of the Enlightenment. The US embodies, to a large extent, the liberal values that Barroso professes, and has become his place of worship.

When his visa was canceled by order of the US Secretary of State, Barroso trembled. No one reported it, but I imagine that, upon discovering his misfortune, years of constitutional theft suddenly flashed before his eyes like a movie. Suddenly, his pupils dilated and scales of lies broke and fell from his eyes.

If it already seems common sense that the riots of January 8 were nothing more than vandalism, without leadership, without weapons, without victims, in the middle of a recess, on a Sunday... Barroso, who knows how to weigh things up, must have had an epiphany in seeing the exaggeration of calling it an "attempted coup d'état," condemning thousands of people to prison just to ensure the ruin of a political enemy.

Upon receiving the news of the canceled visa, feverishly, partiality exuded from his pores like yellow, acrid sweat: the bile of factional judges. With the loss of the visa, Barroso avoided talking about the subject. His statements revealed his shock. The dark circles under his eyes, his weak and reticent voice, his depressed frown, his downcast posture. Barroso was transfigured.

But now that statements from US government agencies indicate that the minister is on the verge of suffering the penalties of the Global Magnitsky Act and being listed among habitual human rights violators, it would be like dying. Dying while alive and becoming the first zombie on the Supreme Court: that is a minority without representation.