Questões de Inglês

TEXT

  Brazil plowed billions of dollars into building a railroad across arid backlands, only for the longdelayed project to fall prey to metal scavengers. Curvaceous new public buildings designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer were abandoned right after being constructed. There was even an illfated U.F.O. museum built with federal funds. Its skeletal remains now sit like a lost ship among the weeds.

  As Brazil sprints to get ready for the World Cup in June, it has run up against a catalog of delays, some caused by deadly construction accidents at stadiums, and cost overruns. It is building bus and rail systems for spectators that will not be finished until long after the games are done. But the World Cup projects are just a part of a bigger national problem casting a pall over Brazil’s grand ambitions: an array of lavish projects conceived when economic growth was surging that now stand abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget.

  Some economists say the troubled projects reveal a crippling bureaucracy, irresponsible allocation of resources and bastions of corruption.

  Huge street protests have been aimed at costly new stadiums being built in cities like Manaus and Brasília, whose paltry fan bases are almost sure to leave a sea of empty seats after the World Cup events are finished, adding to concerns that even more white elephants will emerge from the tournament.

  “The fiascos are multiplying, revealing disarray that is regrettably systemic,” said Gil Castello Branco, director of Contas Abertas, a Brazilian watchdog group that scrutinizes public budgets. “We’re waking up to the reality that immense resources have been wasted on extravagant projects when our public schools are still a mess and raw sewage is still in our streets.”

  The growing list of troubled development projects includes a $3.4 billion network of concrete canals in the drought-plagued hinterland of northeast Brazil — which was supposed to be finished in 2010 — as well as dozens of new wind farms idled by a lack of transmission lines and unfinished luxury hotels blighting Rio de Janeiro’s skyline.

  Economists surveyed by the nation’s central bank see Brazil’s economy growing just 1.63 percent this year, down from 7.5 percent in 2010, making 2014 the fourth straight year of slow growth.

  President Dilma Rousseff’s supporters contend that the public spending has worked, helping to keep unemployment at historical lows and preventing what would have been a much worse economic slowdown had the government not pumped its considerable resources into infrastructure development.

  Still, a growing chorus of critics argues that the inability to finish big infrastructure projects reveals weaknesses in Brazil’s model of state capitalism. First, they say, Brazil gives extraordinary influence to a web of state-controlled companies, banks and pension funds to invest in ill-advised projects. Then other bastions of the vast public bureaucracy cripple projects with audits and lawsuits.

  “Some ventures never deserved public money in the first place,” said Sérgio Lazzarini, an economist at Insper, a São Paulo business school, pointing to the millions in state financing for the overhaul of the Glória hotel in Rio, owned until recently by a mining tycoon, Eike Batista. The project was left unfinished, unable to open for the World Cup, when Mr. Batista’s business empire crumbled last year. “For infrastructure projects which deserve state support and get it,” Mr. Lazzarini continued, “there’s the daunting task of dealing with the risks that the state itself creates.”

  The Transnordestina, a railroad begun in 2006 here in northeast Brazil, illustrates some of the pitfalls plaguing projects big and small. Scheduled to be finished in 2010 at a cost of about $1.8 billion, the railroad, designed to stretch more than 1,000 miles, is now expected to cost at least $3.2 billion, with most financing from state banks. Officials say it should be completed around 2016. But with work sites abandoned because of audits and other setbacks months ago in and around Paulistana, a town in Piauí, one of Brazil’s poorest states, even that timeline seems optimistic. Long stretches where freight trains were already supposed to be running stand deserted. Wiry vaqueiros, or cowboys, herd cattle in the shadow of ghostly railroad bridges that tower 150 feet above parched valleys. “Thieves are pillaging metal from the work sites,” said Adailton Vieira da Silva, 42, an electrician who labored with thousands of others before work halted last year. “Now there are just these bridges left in the middle of nowhere.”

  Brazil’s transportation minister, César Borges, expressed exasperation with the delays in finishing the railroad, which is needed to transport soybean harvests to port. He listed the bureaucracies that delay projects like the Transnordestina: the Federal Court of Accounts; the Office of the Comptroller General; an environmental protection agency; an institute protecting archaeological patrimony; agencies protecting the rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of escaped slaves; and the Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors. Still, Mr. Borges insisted, “Projects get delayed in countries around the world, not just Brazil.”

  Some economists contend that the way Brazil is investing may be hampering growth instead of supporting it. The authorities encouraged energy companies to build wind farms, but dozens cannot operate because they lack transmission lines to connect to the electricity grid. Meanwhile, manufacturers worry over potential electricity rationing as reservoirs at hydroelectric dams run dry amid a drought.

  Then there is the extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, a city in southeast Brazil where residents claimed to have seen an alien in 1996. Officials secured federal money to build the museum, but now all that remains of the unfinished project is the rusting carcass of what looks like a flying saucer. “That museum,” said Roberto Macedo, an economist at the University of São Paulo, “is an insult to both extraterrestrials and the terrestrial beings like ourselves who foot the bill for yet another project failing to deliver.” 

Adapted from www.nytimes.com/April 12, 2014.

According to the article, 2014 has been the fourth year of

TEXT 

  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. 

The sentences “I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics” and “I’m not a candidate for anything” are, respectively, 

TEXT 

  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. 

The sentences “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” and “Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative action in the United States” contain, respectively, a/an 

TEXT 

  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. 

The sentences “he explained that he strongly disagreed with the violence of some demonstrators,” “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 […] contending that the mentality of judges was ‘conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity,’ ” and “In the interview, he said some tension was necessary for the court to function properly” contain, respectively, a/an 

TEXT 

  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. 

Besides being the subject of public fascination for his crusade against corruption, the Chief Justice is also known for 

TEXT 

  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. 

Despite his rude manner, Mr. Barbosa is praised for some important rulings, like helping to