Will Hate Speech Laws Claim a New Victim in Brazil?

In early February 2026, as newly released documents detailed Jeffrey Epstein’s network of influence, Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza posted an Instagram video making explosive claims. Epstein, he said, was “the most perfect product of Jewish Zionism” and “was not only funded by the Jewish lobby.” The pedophilia network “only existed to later serve as blackmail to Israel regarding billionaire politicians, especially Americans, to have support for Israel’s murderous practices.” He claimed the “Jewish Holocaust was pimped out by Zionism, with the help of Hollywood and all the world media, dominated by the Jewish lobby.”

Within hours, the video was deleted. Within days, a criminal complaint had been filed under Brazil’s strict hate speech laws. Within weeks, Souza faced potential imprisonment.

The Confederação Israelita do Brasil, Brazil’s umbrella Jewish organization, issued a statement calling it “regrettable that Prof. Souza uses his academic standing as a platform to spread hatred against Jews.”

Souza’s apology satisfied no one. According to CNN Brasil, he maintained that “Epstein is a product of Zionism as a racist and murderous ideology.” He acknowledged erring by failing to distinguish between the “Zionist lobby” and the “Jewish lobby,” and said he had “several non-Zionist Jewish friends.” In his statement to CNN Brasil, he claimed he “did not accuse individuals or collectivities, but a ‘structure of power.'” He also criticized “two years of absolute silence in the face of the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

On February 11, 2026, state deputy Guto Zacarias and Renato Battista filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, arguing Souza’s remarks violated Article 20 of Law 7,716 of 1989, which criminalizes inciting discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. The penalty is one to three years imprisonment plus a fine.

Hate speech laws are often associated with Europe, but such laws have made their ways to the tropics over the past century. Brazil’s hate speech framework emerged from a 1950 incident when African American dancer Katherine Dunham was refused rooms at São Paulo’s Hotel Esplanada because she was Black. The incident gained wide media attention. Congressman Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco proposed Law 1,390 of 1951, making racial discrimination in public places, education, and employment a contravenção penal (misdemeanor) punishable by fines and short jail terms.

The law was largely symbolic. Brazil’s Black movement denounced it for decades as ineffective. No one was ever convicted. In 1979, the Movimento Negro Unificado held a symbolic burial of the Act to protest its futility. The critical transformation came during Brazil’s re-democratization. The National Constituent Assembly of 1987 to 1988 brought together social movements suppressed during military dictatorship. The Brazilian Black movement drove anti racism provisions into the new Constitution.

Carlos Alberto Caó, a Black lawyer, journalist, and federal deputy imprisoned under military dictatorship, was the single most important legislator. A Democratic Labour Party member and student movement veteran, Caó successfully inserted Article 5, Section XLII into the 1988 Constitution, declaring racism a non bailable crime with no statute of limitations, an extraordinarily severe classification in Brazilian law.

Following ratification, Caó proposed Law 7,716 of January 5, 1989, the Lei Caó, criminalizing preventing or hindering access to employment, commercial establishments, education, restaurants, transportation, housing, or armed forces based on race, color, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. Penalties ranged from one to five years imprisonment.

The framework expanded multiple times. In 1997, Senator Paulo Paim, a Black steelworker turned politician, authored Law 9,459, broadening scope to explicitly cover religion and national origin alongside race, introducing the crime of racial disparagement. The law also criminalized manufacturing, selling, or displaying Nazi symbols including swastikas for purposes of promoting Nazism, with penalties of two to five years imprisonment.

The connection to Holocaust revisionism crystallized through Siegfried Ellwanger, a Brazilian of German descent who founded Editora Revisão and published Holocaust revisionist books from Porto Alegre. His most notorious work was “Holocausto: Judeu ou Alemão?” published in 1987.

The Movimento Popular Antirracista, a coalition uniting Jewish, Black, and human rights movements, filed criminal denunciations. The CONIB, along with the Federação Israelita do Estado de São Paulo and Federação Israelita do Rio Grande do Sul, filed complaints and supported prosecution under the Caó Law.

The Supreme Court upheld Ellwanger’s conviction in September 2003 by an 8 to 3 vote, ruling that antisemitism constitutes racism under Brazilian law. The Court declared that “the division of human beings into races results from a process of merely political social content” and that Ellwanger’s Holocaust revisionism constituted the crime of practicing racism. This became one of the most important free speech and hate crime rulings in Brazilian legal history. The Ellwanger precedent established that Jewish identity is a racial category for criminal law purposes. This is the legal foundation on which the complaint against Souza rests.

The Black-Jewish alliance that prosecuted Ellwanger emerged in late 1992, when both communities formed an unprecedented coalition against racial hatred, described as the first time in Brazilian history that Blacks and Jews united politically around a common struggle. In November 2022, Jewish representatives participated in São Paulo’s March of Black Consciousness under the banner “Jews Against Racism,” declaring that “Blacks and Jews are the many stories rich in discrimination processes and our tradition impels us to resist the fight against racism.”

The legacy of this alliance appears in unexpected forms. Guto Zacarias, who filed the complaint, is a 27-year-old state legislator from São Paulo, the youngest ever elected in 2022. His great grandfather was José Benedito Correia Leite, a historic Black activist. Despite his Black heritage, Zacarias has established a pattern of acting as legal advocate for Jewish organizations, particularly CONIB. In January 2024, when former Workers’ Party president José Genoíno suggested boycotting “certain Jewish companies,” Zacarias promptly filed a criminal complaint for racism.

Zacarias did not act alone. He was joined by Renato Battista, the national coordinator of the Movimento Brasil Livre and one of MBL’s most prominent political operatives. Like Zacarias, Battista has cultivated a visible pro-Israel persona. On October 7, 2025, the second anniversary of the Hamas attack, Battista posted a photo of himself at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. “Just as this Wall has withstood centuries of wars and destruction, Israel and its people remain standing, reminding the world that faith is stronger than terror,” he wrote. An earlier post from January 2025 showed him at the same site “giving thanks for having arrived this far.”

This pro-Israel activism by Brazilian right-wing figures mirrors the institutional posture of CONIB itself. CONIB was founded May 30, 1948, weeks after Israel’s independence. It gathers 14 state Jewish federations and explicitly identifies as pro-Israel and Zionist. Following October 7, 2023, CONIB documented a 961% increase in antisemitic reports.

CONIB has pushed for adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which Rio de Janeiro adopted in November 2023. The definition controversially includes examples relating to Israel criticism, such as claiming Israel’s existence is “a racist endeavor” or comparing Israeli policy to Nazism. When President Lula compared Gaza to the Holocaust in February 2024, CONIB condemned it as “a perverse distortion of reality,” triggering a major diplomatic crisis.

Far from being confined to the Euro-American space, the long arm of Judah now imperils tropical realms like Brazil. It’s part of organized Jewry’s global campaign to bend every Gentile—be they leftist radicals, right-wing stalwarts, Whites, Blacks, or other racial pairings—to its inexorable will. Souza’s fate illuminates the pivot: Jewish machinations spare no ally on the Left who dares challenge the Sanhedrin’s power. Only when Gentiles shatter the polarization vortex engineered by Jewish machinations can the authentic struggle—Jew vs. Gentile—unfold, correcting the multitude of errors committed during the 20th century and restoring ethnic hierarchies to their rightful order.