The controversy surrounding the prosecution's persecution of the "inconvenient" Judge Ivo Rosa promises not to abate. The case involved convenient anonymous letters, illegally opened inquiries, compromises with the media, selective leaks of information, as well as a group of protagonists from the Lisbon prosecutor's office and police who dedicated themselves to destroying the judge's reputation and trying to find some wrongdoing on his part that would disqualify him from his profession.
The description of the case made weeks ago by the targeted judge himself to the new president of the republic, the socialist António José Seguro, identified a case of state corruption that apparently no one dares to stop. In a civilized state, at this moment the prisoners would be crammed into prison cells in Évora, starting with the then Attorney General, as well as the former district attorney general of Lisbon, the former director of the DCIAP (Central Department of Investigation and Prosecution), the director of the police, and the coordinator of the police's "fight against corruption".
On May 21, Portuguese lawyer and former politician António Garcia Pereira requested the immediate resignation of Amadeu Guerra (current Attorney General) and to his chosen friend Rui Cardoso (current Director of DCIAP) due to the Public Prosecutor's Office's (MP) handling of long-standing inquiries targeting desembargador judge Ivo Rosa. Pereira brought the complaints directly to top state figures, arguing that the MP's actions are a direct violation of constitutional principles. He has decried the secrecy and methods used as indicative of the MP acting as a "State within the State" to undermine judicial independence. Pereira classifies the three-year investigation into Rosa by the MP as "intolerable" and a fundamental threat to the rule of law. He claims the investigation constitutes a form of technical and judicial persecution aimed at retaliating against the judge for his decisions in high-profile cases. He has strongly criticized the MP for attempting to obscure the case file and preparing to destroy the original complaint.
In the end, it seems that the names are changed – the end of Lucilia Gago, beginning of Amadeu Guerra, end of Albano Pinto, beginning of Rui Cardoso – and yet everything remains exactly the same, as if they were clones of each other.
What has Amadeu Guerra been doing?
The work of Amadeu Guerra since he was appointed a year and a half ago has stood out for being a replica and continuation of the performance of his socialist predecessor Lucilia Gago. What he has done can be summarized in two sentences. The DCIAP's endless processes continue according to the "initial strategy," regardless of how they originated and whether they violated laws and people's rights. On the other hand, Masonic lunches are always spaces of comfort and conversation. On april 17, Attorney General Amadeu Guerra was present at a controversial lunch that brought together figures from the worlds of politics, government, justice, and Freemasonry. The gathering was organized around figures associated with a Portuguese Masonic structure and along with the Procurador-Geral da República (Amadeu Guerra), the table included Luís Neves (Minister of Internal Affairs and former PJ director). The intent behind the lunch was broad networking among the nation's political, judicial, and security elites.
Criticism surrounding this lunch highlights public concerns regarding the blurred lines between party power, the justice system, and Masonic networks in Portugal. Critics and independent observers often view Freemasonry through a lens of disapproval, arguing that the fraternity functions as an exclusive network for mutual advancement, favoritism, and cronyism within business, politics, and the legal system.
Independent individuals always reject membership because they value complete autonomy and distrust secret or oath-bound societies that require allegiance to a group. In addition, the private ceremonies, traditional regalia (including ceremonial aprons, sometimes perceived by outsiders as skirts), and complex allegorical symbols are often dismissed by critics as childish.
The naming of the current Attorney General
Regarding the naming of the new Attorney General, Amadeu Guerra, the Government and the Minister of Justice Alarcão Júdice formally proposed him in September 2024 to succeed Lucília Gago, highlighting his career as a magistrate and his leadership of the Central Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DCIAP).
Alarcão is the daughter of lawyer José Miguel Júdice, who has a documented, long-standing relationship with former socialist Prime Minister António Costa. Neither José Júdice nor António Costa was ever charged with or convicted of trying to interfere in one of the most controversial cases of pedophilia in known European history, targeting minors completely abandoned by society and supposed protected in a state institution called Casa Pia.
The claim that the two friends attempted to stop Operation Casa Pia in the early 2000s, including alleged attempts to contact the Attorney General at the time (José Souto Moura), is a subject of historical public controversy and political debate in Portugal until today. These allegations trace back to the interception of phone calls in 2003 involving prominent political figures. However, the investigator of the case, who never allowed himself to be swayed by third-party powers and who never lost his independence before corrupt freemasons, was the honorable prosecutor João Guerra, who curiously had officially converted to Judaism in the Porto synagogue in the 1980s.
The Hopeless Case
The synagogue in Porto seems destined to be an obstacle to the free functioning of the Portuguese political system. Its construction, begun in 1929, led to the "Portuguese Dreyfus" case, which still shames the country on the international stage. A century later, the synagogue's name became associated with a case that the state defined as "Open Door," but which the community calls "Open Door to State Corruption."
In books and films, as well as in documentary demonstrations to the Israeli security apparatus invested with the mission of protecting Jewish communities in the diaspora, the community denounces the trafficking of favors between powers that should be separate and that, nevertheless, united to trample on a Jewish institution, as if this could be done without attracting future consequences.
Brief history of a Corruption case
On December 6, 2021, supported by an opinion from Professor Rui Pereira, the community responded to the socialist executive branch of António Costa, Francisca Van Dunem, and Augusto Santos Silva that the government's intention to overturn a law in favor of Jews had to be done in accordance with the constitution. On December 18, the establishment newspaper published fake news that attacked the community. On December 23, the government approved the decree it desired. On December 28, the government sent the fake news to the Lisbon prosecutor's office, which at the time included the very same protagonists who persecuted Judge Ivo Rosa. Yet, as the newspaper article was speculative, outlandish, and served no purpose, the prosecutor's office and the police decided to gather anonymous, slanderous letters against that community whose reputation they aimed to destroy.
In this sequence, in March 2022, the Porto synagogue was illegally raided by police and prosecutors from the DCIAP (Central Department of Investigation and Prosecution) of Lisbon. The state's theft of documentary and digital archives was rampant. The accusers brandished convenient anonymous letters accusing community leaders of corrupting land registries. The fiasco was total, because the accused didn't even know the address of any land registry office. Supposedly the wealthy Jewish man Patrick had donated large sums of money to community leaders. The fiasco was also total, as the accused never knew Mr. Drahi, nor anyone similar, and never received money from anyone, rich or poor. The house of Dreyfus's granddaughter was raided by police shouting that they wanted to find supposed suitcases of money, to which she replied in a letter for posterity: "But who do they really think they are?"
In short, the synagogue was raided because the socialist political, media, and judicial powers used anonymous letters written in the asylum at their whim, and are now preparing to arrest the authors of the letters. The fiasco will be total once again, because the community's leadership has already publicly stated that it does not accept this scenario from a corrupt state that has become accustomed to using all means to achieve its ends (in this case, the destruction of a law and the only relevant Jewish community in Portugal) and, when pressured, arrests half a dozen fools as being responsible for the illegal and immoral actions that the state itself deliberately carried out.
A "mode of death"
Amadeu Guerra often says that working in the prosecutor's office "is not a way of life, but rather a way of death." The Jewish Community of Porto has shown agreement with this statement. The Public Prosecutor's Office can be indeed a way of death, but for the victims of the establishment, which in practice is more about trafficking in favors than about "rule of law," “legality”, "separation of powers," respect "for religious freedom," and love for "national Judeo-Christian history."
In a recent article titled "The Soviet Civilization of the Marquis de Sade", David Garrett, the system's main target in 2022, showed what he considers to be a "way of death" caused by the state itself: "State agents associated with corrupt journalists is guilty of tens of thousands of hate messages against the community, guilty of the terror imposed in children, guilty of the health problems they caused to the elderly, guilty of the lists of Jews in the newspapers, guilty of the attempted poisoning of Israelis at festivals, and guilty of any terrorist attack that may occur against the community whose reputation they intentionally destroyed when they contradictorily called the community "nothing" and "opulent". Okay, good job, a historic Fiasco. We will see who tried to kill Ilan Cohen and if the system is to blame."
In the same article, the author, whose wedding was presided by a Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel and is a member of both the legal team of the European Jewish Association and the group representing the global diaspora leadership chosen by the Israeli Ministry of Education, left another message for the Portuguese system: "No other community in the EU brings together synagogues, museums, cinema, painting, literature, music, and more, in a single association. The heart of a Jewish community is religion and with more than a decade of permanent and uninterrupted minyan, and the destiny of the coming decades entrusted to Chabad Lubavitch, the new generation of community leaders is established and prepared for the challenges of the future. Community assets belong to the Sochnut (the Jewish Agency), and the elderly today can die peacefully and be buried in the cemetery they built. End of story."
