From Madrid to Buenos Aires and New York, leading international news organizations turned this week to the messages exchanged between Banco Master banker Daniel Vorcaro and a phone number attributed to Alexandre de Moraes, a justice of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF). Spain's El País called the revelations an "atomic bomb"; Argentina's La Nación spoke of a "political and institutional earthquake". The coverage followed the release on Tuesday of a Federal Police report on the so-called Master case, after the justice handling the matter at the court, André Mendonça, lifted the document's secrecy.
Among the messages is an exchange from November 15, 2025, two days before the Federal Police arrested Vorcaro in Operation Compliance Zero. "Do you think I should already be out by Monday?", the banker wrote to the number attributed to Moraes, in a conversation disclosed by the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. According to reports by g1 and BBC News Brasil that collected the foreign reaction, the messages show the two discussed a strategy to frustrate the arrest warrant issued by the 10th Federal Court of the Federal District, and that Vorcaro allegedly asked Moraes to intervene on his behalf with the Federal Police director, Andrei Rodrigues, and with Brazil's prosecutor general, Paulo Gonet.
Why the case resonates abroad
For Brazil, the timing is delicate: the revelations land less than five weeks before the October 4 presidential election, which Argentina's Clarín described as a direct contest between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. El País notes that the Master case touches the opposition candidate directly, because Vorcaro allegedly gave Flávio Bolsonaro 10 million dollars, supposedly to finance a biopic about his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro. The winner of the election, the Spanish paper argued, will be able to appoint justices to three vacancies opening at the court and could shift a majority that currently favors Moraes.
The foreign interest has distinct angles. El País focused on the electoral clock and the internal dispute inside the court; Argentina's main papers, on the institutional shock; Bloomberg, the US financial news agency, on the risk to the court's credibility. "Moraes remains silent in the face of these revelations, which fell like an atomic bomb less than five weeks before the elections", El País wrote. According to the paper, the first suspicions of a relationship between the two men surfaced months ago, when it emerged that the law office of Moraes's wife had been hired by the banker.
Earthquake and a decisive test
"Alexandre de Moraes, considered the most powerful judge in the country and the rapporteur of the 2023 coup attempt trial, found himself at the center of an unprecedented scandal on Tuesday, after evidence emerged of an excessively close relationship with former banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is imprisoned and under investigation for multimillion-dollar financial frauds involving the now-defunct Banco Master."
The passage is from La Nación, in the translation published by g1. The Argentine paper assessed the impact of the revelations as "seismic because of Moraes's own weight" and wrote that, with the case now before the court's full bench, the man who personified Brazil's Supreme Court "prepares to face the hardest test against his own chambers". Bloomberg reported that the documents put Moraes back at the center of a case that had already threatened the credibility of Brazil's highest court, and that his opponents renewed calls for his removal. The agency recalled that the justice gained international prominence in clashes with tech billionaire Elon Musk and in the trial that convicted Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, and described him as a figure who divides Brazil, drawing the ire of conservatives who accuse him of censorship in his crackdown on so-called fake news.
El País also reported that Mendonça, who released the messages, and Moraes "have been locked in a silent power struggle inside the court for months". The case now awaits a decision by the full bench, and the foreign outlets' quotes reached Brazilian readers through translations published by g1 and BBC News Brasil.