Can someone who knowingly surveys synagogues for Hezbollah escape terrorism liability because he did it for money? Lucas Passos Lima, a Brazilian national, traveled to Lebanon twice in 2023 for recruitment and training linked to Hezbollah. Back in Brazil, he researched and visited potential Jewish targets, including synagogues, a Jewish cemetery, and the Israeli Embassy, and acquired surveillance equipment and untraceable radios. The money he received from Lebanon was intended both to fund the planned attack and to compensate him for his participation. Brazil’s Federal Prosecution Service (MPF) charged him with preparatory acts of terrorism and membership in a terrorist organization.
On Sept. 15, Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice (STJ), which ensures consistent interpretation of federal statutory law nationwide, unanimously answered that question in the negative. In its opinion published on Sept. 21, the five-justice chamber specializing in criminal matters known as the Sixth Panel granted a special appeal (recurso especial) filed by the MPF in Operation Trapiche and reinstated Lima’s conviction for preparatory acts of terrorism, which a regional appellate court had set aside. The STJ held that acting for money does not rule out an antisemitic purpose. The court also held that the Anti-Terrorism Act applies to someone who knowingly and willingly helps carry out a terrorist plan for payment, even without sharing its ideological motives. The outcome closes a gap that would have shielded paid operatives from terrorism liability precisely because they were paid.
The dispute exposed a structural problem in how Brazilian law treats contemporary terrorism. Transnational organizations rarely require every participant to share the same ideology with equal intensity. They recruit intermediaries, criminals, logisticians, and local contractors because these actors offer access, skills, and deniability. Iran’s overseas operations illustrate this pattern. The New Yorker has documented the use of hired criminals, including the Romanian men who attacked journalist Pouria Zeraati in London in 2024. In the United States, two organized crime figures were convicted in 2025 of plotting to murder Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad on instructions from Iranian officials. If financial motivation neutralized terrorist purposes whenever a perpetrator acted for payment, outsourcing would become a defense.
The more effectively a terrorist organization divided labor, the harder it would be to prosecute those who made its plans possible. The same logic could allow even ideologically committed members to invoke payment as a defense, giving terrorist organizations an incentive to put their own operatives on the payroll.
That was the practical effect of the
What Operation Trapiche Established
Brazilian federal police launched Operation Trapiche in November 2023, following reports of Hezbollah recruiting Brazilian nationals. The operation unearthed concrete preparations for a Hezbollah-supported attack on Brazilian soil, a first for the Brazilian justice system, rather than conduct limited to fundraising or logistical support.
Brazilian authorities presented evidence that Lima traveled to Lebanon twice in 2023 for recruitment and Hezbollah training. After returning to Brazil, he sought people with technical or operational skills, researched and visited potential targets connected exclusively to the Jewish community, acquired surveillance equipment and untraceable radios, trained with firearms, and discussed routes that could evade immigration controls. The mapped sites included synagogues, a Jewish cemetery, the Israeli Embassy, and other Jewish institutions in and around Brasília. He also returned from Lebanon carrying $5,459, 65,000 Lebanese pounds, and 275 Turkish lira, which he used to pay for the preparations.
In September 2024, the trial court, the Third Federal Criminal Court of Belo Horizonte,
Readers outside Brazil should note that the country has no national list of designated terrorist organizations, and Hezbollah is not designated by the United Nations Security Council, whose sanctions Brazil implements under Law No. 13,810 of 2019. Unlike the United States, which uses an administrative designation made by the executive branch, Brazilian courts had to establish the organization’s terrorist character on the evidence.
The Regional Judgment’s Contradiction
On June 25, 2025, the TRF-6 partly granted appeals filed by both the defense and the prosecution. The regional panel upheld the Article 3 conviction, finding consistent and reliable evidence that Lima had joined a terrorist organization. The regional court also stated that the
The acquittal rested instead on the court’s reading of the special motive required by Article 2 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. Brazilian law defines terrorism as acts committed for reasons of xenophobia, discrimination, or prejudice based on race, color, ethnicity, or religion, with the purpose of causing social or generalized terror and exposing persons, property, public peace, or public safety to danger. The regional court recognized that this special motive also governs preparatory acts under Article 5.
That premise was not the decisive problem; its application was. The judgment described financial gain as Lima’s primary motive. It discounted his antisemitic statements made after his return from Lebanon as isolated remarks that might reflect indoctrination or an attempt to appear more integrated into the organization. The court then held that proof was required to show the discriminatory motive under Article 2 exclusively motivated his conduct. Because it regarded money as the intrinsic motive, the court held that the preparatory conduct did not meet the statutory definition of the offense and acquitted him under Article 5. The remaining Article 3 conviction resulted in a sentence of six years, eight months, and 18 days—a reduction of almost 10 years.
The result is difficult to reconcile on its own terms. The same judgment held that Lima knowingly joined Hezbollah, recognized the material preparation for attacks, identified exclusively Jewish targets, and acknowledged antisemitic speech contemporaneous with the operation. Yet the judgment treated payment as incompatible with the terrorist character of those preparations, converting the relative weight of two possible motives into an all-or-nothing test that the statutory text does not contain.
The Mercenary Exception
Prosecutors from the MPF challenged that interpretation in a special appeal to the STJ, a procedure for reviewing whether a lower court correctly interpreted federal law. The prosecution’s argument had two branches. First, the record did not establish an exclusively financial motive. Antisemitic statements, the selection of Jewish targets, and the use of the funds received to carry out the operation supported the presence of the discriminatory purpose required by the statute. The law does not require that purpose to be the actor’s sole or predominant motive. Mixed motives are common in organized violence, and payment does not erase another purpose proved by the circumstances.
Second, even a perpetrator motivated only by money may knowingly adhere to a terrorist plan conceived and directed for ideological or discriminatory reasons. Criminal responsibility in a coordinated enterprise does not depend ordinarily on every participant experiencing the principal’s motive as a private conviction. What matters is knowledge of the criminal plan and voluntary contribution to its realization. A hired operative who knows that he is surveying synagogues for Hezbollah does not cease to assist an antisemitic terrorist plot because his personal reason for accepting the assignment is profit.
I coined the term “mercenary exception” (excludente de mercenarismo) in lectures and in an article published shortly after the regional ruling. The expression is analytical; it does not name a defense found in Brazilian legislation. The term identifies the exemption implicitly created by the regional court’s reasoning: A perpetrator could intentionally advance a terrorist plan, with full knowledge of its discriminatory purpose, yet avoid terrorism liability by showing that money mattered more to him than ideology. Payment would thus become an exculpatory factor, even though Article 62(IV) of the Brazilian Criminal Code expressly treats committing or participating in a crime for payment or the promise of reward as an aggravating circumstance.
The exception would also reward organizational design. Modern terrorist and proxy networks compartmentalize tasks. Leaders define strategic objectives, recruiters identify candidates, financiers move resources, facilitators arrange travel or documents, technical specialists provide communications, and local operatives conduct surveillance or violence. Some participants are committed militants; others are criminals, brokers, or contractors. Requiring proof that every link personally embraced the organization’s worldview would allow leadership to insulate an operation by placing paid actors between decision-makers and targets.
This is why the financial motive is not an incidental detail in Operation Trapiche. The use of local recruits can reduce detection, obscure foreign direction, and create plausible deniability. Analyses of the case have identified Hezbollah’s recruitment of Brazilian nationals for payment, through intermediaries, as a notable tactical feature. Emanuele Ottolenghi describes it as a departure from the group’s traditional reliance on operatives of its own External Security Organization. Under that model, the mercenary profile may be part of the terrorist method itself.
The Broader Brazilian Problem of Disbelief
The regional ruling also reflects a broader difficulty in Brazil: Terrorism is often treated as something that happens elsewhere. Geographic distance from the Middle East, the absence of large-scale attacks in recent decades, and political discomfort with the legal category have encouraged an assumption that criminal conduct must remain ordinary crime unless the defendant resembles an ideologically pure militant.
That expectation is poorly suited to clandestine operations. Terrorist organizations rely on conduct that appears lawful or conventionally criminal when viewed in isolation: travel, commerce, smuggling, document fraud, money laundering, cryptocurrency transfers, surveillance, and the purchase of communications equipment. The terrorist character emerges from the relationship among acts, actors, targets, and purpose. When institutions examine each fragment separately, terrorism can disappear from the legal description even though the operational chain remains visible. The result is what may be called a “dark figure of terrorism”: Conduct connected to terrorist organizations is detected and prosecuted, but only under ordinary criminal labels. Research and policy work on the crime-terror nexus has warned that hybrid actors exploit precisely this boundary between law enforcement and counterterrorism, combining ideological objectives with criminal markets, service providers, and financial incentives. The same dynamic is also present in Latin America, as a 2024 United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute study of the region’s crime-terror nexus documents.
Operation Trapiche forced the Brazilian justice system to confront that blind spot. The regional court did not deny Hezbollah’s presence in the case; it upheld the conviction for joining the organization. The difficulty was subtler. By demanding an individualized ideological purity that contemporary terrorist operations neither require nor usually display, the judgment recognized the organization while legally disassembling its operation.
What the STJ Changed
The STJ’s decision reverses that outcome. The Sixth Panel unanimously reinstated the Article 5 conviction. The court remanded the case to the TRF-6 to address Lima’s request for a greater sentence reduction under Article 5, paragraph 1—a part of his appeal that the regional court had left unresolved because his acquittal made it moot. For sentencing, reinstating the conviction therefore does not automatically restore the original sentence of 16 years and six months. The TRF-6 must decide that request, recalculate the aggregate sentence, and set the initial prison regime. Beyond this appeal, other remedies remain available to the defense.
Nonetheless, the STJ panel accepted the first branch of the prosecution’s argument: Article 2’s discriminatory purpose does not have to be the defendant’s exclusive or predominant motive. The court observed that human conduct commonly reflects several simultaneous motives and that the statute contains no exclusivity requirement. The STJ pointed to Lima’s antisemitic statements, the exclusive selection of Jewish targets, and the use of the money he received to finance the operation as evidence that financial and discriminatory motives coexisted. The court also distinguished an earlier decision in a separate case, where the terrorist motive had not been identified; in Lima’s case, the regional court defined the motive and supported it with the facts it accepted.
The STJ also accepted the prosecution’s independent argument based on the ordinary rules of Brazilian criminal law governing participation in an offense. Under Article 30 of the Criminal Code, a personal circumstance extends to another participant when it constitutes an element of the offense and the participant knows of it. A paid executor therefore need not personally share the principals’ hatred. Liability requires proof that he knew the discriminatory purpose and voluntarily adhered to the plan. On the facts already established, the court found that Lima’s links to Hezbollah, his two funded trips to Lebanon, the training and directions he received, and his exclusive focus on Jewish targets demonstrated that knowledge. His financial interest explained why he acted; it did not change the nature of the plan he knowingly advanced.
The consequence is nonetheless significant. Financial interest cannot operate automatically as a barrier between a knowing perpetrator and the terrorist project he voluntarily advances. Courts must examine knowledge, conduct, targets, and a plot’s structure, rather than isolate one personal incentive and allow it to control the legal classification.
The STJ ruling also restores coherence between the two offenses at issue. A person found to have knowingly joined a terrorist organization does not receive a categorical exemption for preparatory acts performed for that organization merely because the relationship involved payment. Liability limits still depend on the facts of each case, and the prosecution must prove every statutory element. The reversal does not dispense with the special motive required by Brazilian law; it prevents courts from treating financial motive as a substitute for that analysis.
Why the Ruling Matters Internationally
The judgment’s importance extends beyond Brazil. Iran and Hezbollah have long used transnational networks, intermediaries, and local facilitators to raise funds, gather intelligence, and support clandestine activity. Latin America offers commercial, diasporic, and criminal environments that can be exploited without deploying a conventional cell composed entirely of foreign operatives. Operation Trapiche illustrates a model in which external direction meets local recruitment and criminal know-how.
Legal systems that focus only on the inner beliefs of the paid operative may miss the organizational relationship that gives their conduct meaning. The relevant distinction is not between ideologues and mercenaries. It is between a person who unwittingly provides an ordinary service and one who knowingly and voluntarily contributes to a terrorist plan. Payment may be evidence of recruitment, task allocation, and control. It should not become an immunity mechanism.
The STJ decision therefore carries a practical message for international cooperation. Intelligence sharing can reveal foreign direction; financial investigation can show recruitment and operational support; digital evidence can connect surveillance to selected targets; and criminal law can assess each participant’s knowledge and contribution without requiring emotional identification with the sponsor’s ideology. This approach matters especially for proxy operations, where distance and deniability are strategic assets.
Brazil’s STJ has closed a significant gap opened by the TRF-6 regional judgment. The STJ’s opinion confirms that financial and discriminatory motives can coexist and that a paid operative who knowingly adheres to the terrorist plan does not escape liability merely because he acts for profit. Terrorism does not lose its character when an organization hires someone else to carry it out. A legal system that treated mercenarism as an excuse would invite terrorist organizations to outsource more. By restoring the conviction, the court declined that invitation.
Source: www.lawfaremedia.org
