Sergio Moro’s own words about Jair Bolsonaro are returning to Brazil’s political debate as the former anti-corruption judge prepares to run for governor of Paraná with support from Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), according to single-source reporting from Folha de S.Paulo.
Moro, who became nationally known as the judge in Operation Car Wash, the sweeping anti-corruption probe that began in 2014, wrote in a 2021 book that Bolsonaro helped weaken Brazil’s anti-corruption system to protect his son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Moro now says those disputes belong to the past.
A Book Reopened
The book, “Contra o Sistema da Corrupção,” was published in December 2021, when Moro was preparing a presidential bid that was later abandoned. The Workers' Party (PT), the center-left party led by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and its allies now plan to use it to portray Moro as politically inconsistent.
Requião Filho, a member of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT) and Moro’s expected opponent in Paraná, told Folha that Moro “never had coherence” and now does not stand by what he wrote. Arilson Chiorato, the PT president in Paraná, said Moro’s own account proves that Bolsonarismo did not fight criminal factions.
Moro left the judiciary in 2018 to become Bolsonaro’s justice minister. He broke with the then president in 2020, resigning from the government after a public rupture that reshaped Brazil’s right-wing politics.
The Bolsonaro Dispute
One of the central passages cited by Folha concerns Bolsonaro’s decision to approve the “guarantee judge,” a legal figure created by Congress as part of an anti-crime package. Moro wanted Bolsonaro to veto the measure. Bolsonaro sanctioned it.
Moro wrote that the decision ended his “illusions” about Bolsonaro’s real commitment to fighting crime and corruption. He also wrote that the president’s commitment to the anti-corruption agenda was not “firm or coherent.”
The book also revisits the “rachadinha” case involving Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian term used for an alleged salary kickback scheme in which public employees return part of their wages to a politician or aide. At the time, Dias Toffoli, then president of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF), suspended investigations across the country that relied on financial-intelligence data obtained without judicial authorization from agencies such as Coaf, Brazil’s Financial Activities Control Council.
Moro criticized the Bolsonaro government for not acting against that decision. He wrote that Brazil could not accept the dismantling of its anti-money-laundering system to save “someone’s son” from the law, even if that person was the president’s son.
A New Alliance
Folha also reported passages in which Moro described relief inside the Planalto Palace, the seat of Brazil’s executive branch, after the decision favoring Flávio Bolsonaro and Fabrício Queiroz, a former aide linked to the case. Moro also wrote that the Planalto pushed to replace Coaf’s president, though he said he learned that only later.
The former minister also complained in the book about the cancellation of transfers of leaders of the First Capital Command (PCC), one of Brazil’s most powerful criminal organizations, to federal prisons. The transfers had been part of his security agenda.
Asked whether he still stood by what he wrote, Moro said the disagreements were in the past. In a statement to Folha, he argued that the alliance with Bolsonaro’s camp is justified by the need to defeat Lula and the PT.
Moro said he joined Bolsonaro in presidential debates against Lula in 2022, even though Bolsonaro had not supported his Senate campaign. He added that he had spent the past four years aligned with the PL in opposition to Lula’s government.
He also said Flávio Bolsonaro is the only candidate able to defeat the PT’s presidential project. Moro argued that another four years of PT government would deepen Brazil’s fiscal, security and corruption problems, and said past disagreements do not prevent building a future political alliance.