FORTUNE
Elon Musk has threatened to leak damaging evidence he believes will prove one of Brazil’s top judges has betrayed the country, escalating a showdown over the censorship of social media in the country.
The owner of X now finds himself squarely in the middle of a political struggle in Latin America’s largest economy, one that pits the forces of former President Jair Bolsonaro against the Lula da Silva government in Brasilia that the ex-president allegedly sought to bring down.
Bolsonaro is accused of hatching a plan in November 2022 to overturn his election defeat—plans that included the arrest of supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Weeks later, Bolsonaro supporters stormed the country’s capital of Brasilia, flooding the congress, presidential palace, and supreme court in a Jan. 6–style uprising that quickly failed.
Testimony from senior military commanders published last month implicated Bolsonaro, a Donald Trump–style populist, in a coup attempt.
One of the leading figures in this ongoing conflict has been de Moraes. The president of the Superior Electoral Court has sought to clamp down on claims spread online by supporters of Bolsonaro that the October 2022 election was unjustly stolen from him.
