[upbeat music] There's an old adage around the sports that says that in Brazil, even the past is uncertain.
Any observer of Brazilian politics will remember former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's convictions for corruption and money laundering in 2017. The decision was upheld by an appellate court in 2018.
Lula was made ineligible for office, and he spent almost two years in jail. Well, as far as the Brazilian judiciary is concerned, that conviction never happened.
The Supreme Court quashed all guilty verdicts against the center-left leader and sent his criminal cases back to square one.
And by overturning these convictions, the court restored Lula's political rights, bringing him back to the electoral game and setting up the showdown to end all showdowns in the 2022 election.
Lula, who was once the most popular leader in Brazilian politics versus Jair Bolsonaro, who is by any measure the most radical president in the country's history.
This clash is said to have major implications on Brazilian policymaking, electoral politics, and even the justice system as a whole.
As such, it is too big of a subject to condense into a 20-minute podcast episode, so we decided to split it into two. Today, we will talk about what that decision does to the legacy of Operation Car Wash.
After all, Lula was the anti-corruption task force's white whale. And in part two, we will discuss Lula's return to the electoral chessboard. My name is Gustavo Ribeiro. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Brazilian Report.
This is Explaining Brazil. [upbeat music] Early in the morning of March the 17th, 2014, federal marshals launched what would become known as Operation Car Wash.
[upbeat music] A group of detectives had been investigating a gang using a gas station just three kilometers from Congress as a front for money laundering schemes.
But what began as a small, unpublicized operation would later evolve into Brazil's biggest-ever corruption scandal, which has implicated thousands of people, including every single major political party, the country's most popular politician, and two former presidents.
Everything about Operation Car Wash is superlative.
The figures involved in the corruption schemes were astronomical, and they were carried out in Brazil's largest company, state-owned oil and gas firm Petrobras.
The investigation revealed that a cartel formed by Brazil's biggest construction companies paid bribes to Petrobras directors and to politicians and political parties tied to the designation of these directors in order to win huge contracts.
It all began when prosecutors busted a professional money launderer who operated above a gas station, hence the name Operation Car Wash.
That arrest ended up pulling a thread that nearly dismantled the Brazilian Republic and the political systems of other Latin American countries which had a hand in the scandal.
It tarnished the entire political class and gave Brazilians a sense of vindication. For the first time, they saw white-collar misdeeds being finally punished.
But through the years, Operation Car Wash's not-so-aboveboard methods have come to light, and many of its achievements were shattered due to procedural mistakes or flat-out illegalities.
It seemed that in a quest to clean up Brazilian politics, Operation Car Wash shredded due process and even operated in a skilled way.
So now that it has lost the biggest notch on its belt with Lula's convictions being quashed, what is left of the operation?
[upbeat music] Alex Rohli is a São Paulo-based political analyst and host of the Alpha Bunga Bunga podcast, which discusses contemporary politics.
Alex, when Operation Car Wash began, it seemed like a revolution.
For the first time in ages, maybe ever, Brazilians saw powerful politicians and hotshot businessmen in handcuffs, and they were not only thrown in jail, but they were staying in jail.
So when did things go wrong for Operation Car Wash? Okay, so firstly, I think we need to look at what Lava Jato was and not what we imagined it to be, um,
because I think having an idealist understanding of what Lava Jato was is wrong.
After all, it's a specific, concrete judicial investigation, uh, and is not anti-corruption as such, uh, no matter how groundbreaking, uh, and earth-shattering even it felt to see politicians and leading businessmen in handcuffs, um, which of course did create a certain euphoria at the time.
The other thing is that it's important to understand that it was a media event as much as it was a judicial investigation, and this isn't me being critical of it, but it's something that was part of the self-consciousness of Lava Jato.
It's something that Moro wrote about well before Lava Jato started because he recognized that a standalone judicial investigation would be too vulnerable and prey to more political forces trying to shut it down.
So he knew he needed allies in wider society.
Um, so specifically, Lava Jato benefited from the support of Globo, um, from, uh, the confluence between it and the post-June 2013 social uprising and, and waves of protests which continued, uh, well into 2016.
Um, and even indeed its alliance with impeachismo, with anti-Workers' Party sentiment, um, on the ground.
So like it or not, um, that need for more support among society already opened it up in some sense to politicization and- Um, as we'll go forward and maybe talk about why that in, that kind of central contradiction ended up, um, undermining Lava Jato.
But, you know, you asked at the start, when did it stop, when did it stop being good, or when did it start, um, perhaps some of its, uh, contradictions start undermining it?
And I think, you know, throughout the 2015, even 2016 period, it was accused by PT, even by the wider left of being too partisan.
Um, and although it did take down, target and take down politicians and businessmen from all across society, all across the political spectrum, there was a sense that maybe it was a bit too soft on PSDB, and Moro was seen as being very close to PSDB.
So there was already suspicions there. But that at least was something which was, uh, particular to a certain section of society, to the left, maybe let's say to 30% of the population, however you wish to measure it.
But that already showed a problem because unlike in Italy, and I'll mention maybe Italy kind of interspersed as we go along, and maybe I'll talk about Italy a little bit more at the very end.
But Moro modeled the investigation very much on what happened in Italy in the early '90s with the Mani pulite investigations. He modeled his investigation on that and tried to compensate for the mistakes it made.
Um, and we'll see that actually, it, uh, Moro's investigation in Lava Jato, uh, didn't actually succeed in that.
But what he saw in that was needing wide support in society, and whereas in Italy, the, those investigations in the early '90s had support from across society, in Brazil it was a little bit more limited, and it, it became
slightly potentially partisan, and that increased as it went along. But I think it was still successful up until maybe 2018, really.
The problem emerged in 2018 when the overweening focus on Lula led Lava Jato to take, try to take Lula out of the political game, to, um, have him arrested and sentenced in a pretty speedy trial.
So already at that time, there were suspicions that that trial had been conducted perhaps not with sufficient evidence, perhaps it had been rushed through, and rushed through in an election year to take the leading candidate out of the game.
And so those suspicions already, even for those more s- uh, more sympathetic to Lava Jato and who really wanted to see it root out, uh, corruption, to take politicians out of the game, even if you liked Lula, you maybe think, "Well, you know, if he's been corrupt, then, you know, he deserves to, to be behind bars."
The problem is, is that it already seemed to be a, a quite politicized process.
That was then really confirmed when he joined Bolsonaro's government, and I think that was the first real, um, dagger in the heart of the investigation because that made it seem much more politicized to a broader section of people, even those who weren't sympathetic to PT, for example.
So you touch on a point that allows us to make a comparison between Lula and Moro.
At one point, Lula said that, uh, he realized that to have a broader impact on Brazilian society, he needed to move from just being a trade union leader and having a voice in politics.
So that's when he moved from leading a metal workers union to founding a grassroots political party. Interestingly, Moro said something similar when he joined Bolsonaro's cabinet.
He said that in order to reach his anti-corruption goals, he had to leave the bench and get into politics and policymaking. What were the effects of that gamble for Moro and for Operation Car Wash?
In its own terms, it seems to make sense.
As I already recognized, and as Moro himself recognized right from the start, that just a purely judicial investigation would not be enough, that at, at the very least you need allies in civil society, as I already mentioned, allies in the media, support from the streets, and so on.
But also, you need to go further, that you probably need to take it onto a directly political terrain, not make it a purely legal, judicial matter.
And so in its own terms, it seems to make sense then that Moro joins, uh, joins the political struggle effectively, um, and makes himself a, a warrior for anti-corruption.
I think there's a certain limitation to that because, again, you cannot have a completely apolitical anti-corruption struggle.
You need to have a certain vision of society, um, beyond just keep everything the same but remove corruption.
Um, and, or even indeed, if you want to keep everything the same, then that seems to be a fairly conservative sort of politics. And so there was always this element to which
it was a bit suspect that Moro never really announced what his politics were and said that they were only against corruption.
But the problem with the specific move that he made, not with his general entry into politics, but the specific move that he made in joining Bolsonaro is that if you remove all the names and tell someone what happened, tell them just a very brief story of what happened, that you basically have this judge who speedily locks up the number one leader in the polls in an election year, and then after...
and then joins the second in the poll when he wins the election. You'll probably say, "Well, that just sounds like some banana republic nonsense." Um, it sounds completely illegitimate.
Um, and the only reason you would defend it is because you might look at those names and go, "Yeah, but Moro actually, I believe he's a good guy, and therefore he's justified in doing it."
But in practice, it's completely illegitimate. So entering the political arena, yes, if he had done so under his own name, under his own party, perhaps.
But as it happens, he joined not only the person who was number two in the polls and who massively benefited from Moro locking up Lula, but also joined the, the government of someone who was already, let's say, not beyond suspicion.
I mean, I think anyone well-connected would already have known that Bolsonaro or his family was, uh, maybe had certain schemes going on in Rio, and so it wasn't like he was joining someone who was squeaky clean.
Um, he was joining someone who had spent 21 years in Congress. So, you know, it's already, it's already pretty suspect and shows really poor judgment on his part.
But then what really demoralizes the whole thing is the Intercept's revelations, the Vaza Jato revelations. Which basically proved everything that PT had been claiming about Lava Jato.
And that, I think, probably had a much wider impact.
And especially in a society in which we're, we're all suspicious of corruption, we think that loads of practices are corrupt, to learn that the, the judges and, uh, the, the, the prosecutors are corrupt too, is probably maybe not comes as such a big surprise.
You go, "Well, yeah, that's another, that's another institution that's also corrupt."
Um, and which can be very demoralizing, not just in relation to that investigation, but demoralizing in relation to institutions as a whole, because the great white hope himself shows also to be corrupt.
So one thing is interesting. Even knowing everything we do know today, more than half of Brazilians still support the convictions against Lula.
They think the Supreme Court made a mistake in sending the cases back to square one, even if those cases were tried in the wrong venue.
And I mean, as we know, form is almost as important as content when it comes to due process. And it seems as if we're often bouncing between impunity and disregarding due process to pursue the, quote, "greater good."
I think that shows that it has become a partisan game because I think you could only claim that if you really have taken a side on this, um, that you have taken a side against the PT and that you see the PT specifically as the nucleus of all corruption.
Um, now, I think it is completely deluded and crazy to believe that Lula is innocent.
But I think it's equally or even more deluded and crazy to believe that there was no corruption before PT came into office or that Lula himself was the orchestrator of this whole scheme and that, um, without Lula's intervention, there would have been no corruption.
I mean, especially knowing the Br- the history of Brazil, that corruption has been deeply rooted as a means of doing politics. It's a system. It's, in fact, a, a regulated market, I guess.
Um, and it has been throughout Brazil's history. Um, so to assume that simply taking Lula out of the game will remove corruption, I think is, as I say, quite deluded. Right.
So the icing on the cake came last year when Sergio Moro resigned from the Justice Ministry, claiming that Bolsonaro was trying to undermine any anti-corruption effort he pushed forward.
And then he said that under the Workers' Party, law enforcement was allowed to work without direct and clear political interference. Yeah, no, exactly.
And you think that would be a moment when Moro leaves after Bolsonaro has in- has overhauled the money laundering agency, made disclosure of the public prosecutor a requirement, um, interfered with the federal police in, in, in, in any sense, basically, um, interfering with, uh, with, with the judiciary's work and basically, um, opening up the possibility for more corruption.
So Moro leaving seems to save Moro some face, but all it does is reveal how poor Moro's judgment was in the first place to have entered a government, um, in which this would happen.
Surely he knew or suspected, um, knowing who Bolsonaro was, and I think to say that, um, he was just an innocent who, who was, uh, who had the wool pulled over his eyes by Bolsonaro, [laughs] um, takes a, a lot of credulity.
Um,
so I mean, I think, you know, and you even have a, have the, a, a disciplinary, uh, investigation now of the chief prosecutor of, uh, Deltan Dallagnol for having claimed precisely that Lula was at the center of this huge scheme in this really poorly designed PowerPoint presentation, which became a meme [laughs] back when it came out.
So you have not just the demoralization of the Lava Jato investigation, as I explained, but also, um, it's, uh, you know, it's basically institutional removal, and so, uh, you have basically the end of, the end of the investigation.
Alex, I remember being interviewed by Time Magazine and telling them that I believe Moro was the most influential Brazilian in the 2010s. The anti-corruption effort he led helped to bring down a president.
It took the leading candidate of a presidential election out of contention and paved the way for the Bolsonaro presidency.
But he only managed to do so much because higher courts upheld his decisions and endorsed his methods.
Now, some of these same courts are making a U-turn, calling foul play on a lot of Car Wash's moves and essentially destroying the operation's legacy.
As we speak, the Supreme Court is holding a trial on Moro's alleged bias against Lula, which could see his Car Wash decisions overturned.
So, I mean, firstly, that kind of motor which kept Lava Jato going was precisely this hyper-accelerated media cycle, um, and the daily revelations and so on.
But that always was going to run out of steam, or maybe out of gas, if it's a gas, uh, if it's an internal combustion engine, actually, to continue the metaphor. Um,
so there was gonna be a, a certain moment when people's interest in anti-corruption faded.
Um, and I, again, here's an interesting parallel with Italy, which I'll talk about maybe, uh, again towards the end, where there also it faded. And so there's a limit to what it can achieve
through, um, instrumentalizing the kind of media cycle to, to keep people's interest and outrage, uh, sustained over a long period of time.
Um, and so I think maybe in that sense, we should be realistic in evaluating Lava Jato and not supposing that it could have rooted out corruption.
We, you know, it, it w- did its job in locking up politicians and locking up business people, um, and that had its impact.
Now, though, I think if we were to analyze it from the vantage point of today, we can say that actually it ended up perhaps possibly even contradicting its own aims in a more fundamental sense and having no positive legacy at all, um, even, uh, if we would like to, if we wish that it, that it had done.
So one of the consequences was the politicization of the judiciary. And this is something, as you just mentioned, that, you know, the Supreme Court now has inter- has intervened, um, to, to quash Lula's convictions.
The, the problem is, is that you've had the Supreme Court and other courts already politicized for a long time. So-
The, the Supreme Court has been more expressly politicized already since 2005, since the Mensalão scandal, um, the vote-buying scandal in Congress, which, uh, act- in fact, lost PT some supporters, and it lost its, uh, sort of aura of, uh, of a clean anti-corruption party that it had up 'til then.
That already happened, um, you know, already kind of, uh, 15 years ago.
So y- and through this process of the judicialization of politics, effectively what is often called lawfare, the pursuit of political enemies through, um, anti-corruption investigations, ends up politicizing the judiciary.
And that's one of the real negative consequences of this because while Lava Jato militated in favor of a balanced, independent, and strong judiciary, uh, who would uphold the rule of law and end the impunity of the strong, it actually ends up politicizing the judiciary itself.
And we can already see just one small example of this.
Fachin, the Supreme Court justice who made the ruling to, to quash the convictions of Lula, um, already noted a, a, a month ago about the threats to democracy, um, in a, a sort of not very coded attack on Bolsonaro.
So he talked about Bolsonaro without mentioning him by name, his threats to institutions, the voting system, um, even the liberalization of gun ownership. Uh, he attacked that.
Um, and he also said that he wanted to defend Lava Jato, but attacked Lavajatismo, effectively, um, Lava Jato's cheerleaders who would see nothing wrong with it no matter what proofs there were that there had been wrongdoing and miscarriages of justice and so on.
So already there, you already see a s- to a certain degree that Fachin's statement then and his actions now are in some sense strategic, so it wants to promote certain ends.
He's worried about democracy, and letting Lula back into the political game, to a certain extent at least, prev- presents an alternative to Bolsonaro and, to a certain extent, disciplines Bolsonaro, act- makes him act perhaps a little bit more reasonably, as we've already seen.
He started wearing a mask. [laughs] Um, pretty superficial example, but, um, already shows that the fact of the existence of political opposition disciplines the, the government to a certain degree.
So I think already there, you know, you see this politicization of the judiciary in that example that I've given, and there's many others, of course, where they're entering the arena as political actors.
And this is a facet of the fact that politics has been judicialized.
So rather than politics being a matter of citizens grouping together into political parties and political parties transmitting those interests to the state, that there's a conflict of, of competing social interests, what you end up is politics happening in the back room, right?
Happening, uh, in factional fights between the judiciary and elected politicians and other, uh, groups and the media and so on.
And indeed, uh, Lava Jato itself became a, a sort of power base within the state rather than being, um, sort of an, an independent arbiter of, uh, you know, of, of malfeasance, basically.
So that is one of the, the main sort of negative consequences of Lava Jato. And I think here, again, being realistic, could it have achieved more as a, a judicial investigation or a media event?
Probably not, and it was always going to be open to this sort of politicization.
I think if we're serious about what Lava Jato promised, uh, and I believe very much in what Lava Jato promised, and I think it was a great event, at least initially, um, as you already said, you know, seeing politicians and leading businessmen in handcuffs is a, is a major event in, in Brazilian political history.
But if you're serious about that, then you need to be serious about the fact that you're not just taking out a few bad apples from, uh, the political system or even a lot of bad apples, and that then the system will carry on in a more clean, pure fashion.
The fact is you're taking on huge power structures, and so that will lead to a very serious political confrontation.
That will open up, um, possibly the fall of even, of, of the Republic, which is something that happened in, in Italy in the early '90s.
So are you willing to see through all the political consequences and open up the possibility of whole new forces entering politics?
If you are, then fine, but you need to take Lava Jato further than just a judicial investigation or media event.
And if you're worried about that, and if you're worried about the radicalism that that entails, then you decide, very much like the Centro, the big center, all the kind of old, small, physiological, corrupt parties in Brazil, that Lava Jato has probably gone too far.
There's too many risks and better to shut the whole thing down.
So I say all that just to be, to kind of urge a certain realism about what Lava Jato could achieve, and that if you're really serious about it, you need to be far more radical than, uh, Lava Jato ever was, and really, it needs to go far beyond Lava Jato and take root as a sort of democratic movement, um, in society to really establish a, a new republic if, if, ef- effectively, because the 1988 constitution has locked in place lots of practices which are corrupt or corrupting.
Um, and only overturning those would Brazil be able to actually have a less corrupt political system.
So you made a few parallels between Italy's Operation Mani Pulite and Brazil's Operation Car Wash, and that was a comparison that the Brazilian prosecutors always encouraged themselves.
But the Italian anti-corruption task force paved the way for Silvio Berlusconi, failed to make structural changes, and people say that today's [laughs] Italy is actually more corrupt than it ever was.
But is Operation Car Wash's ending even more melancholic than Mani Pulite's? Yeah, I think so.
I mean, even if you were just to take the most superficial comparison, which is Berlusconi versus Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro is a far more dangerous figure in terms of, uh, in terms of the, the continuation of democracy, and Brazilian democracy weaker even than Italian democracy was at that time.
But to dig a little bit deeper, I mean, I think it's interesting. I mentioned earlier the fact that the enthusiasm for Lava Jato and the sort of media spectacle of it could only last so long.
Eventually, you become exhausted, um, even just as a, as an audience of, of this whole spectacle. In Italy, in 1996... So Mani Pulite starts in 1992.
By 1996, corruption, those holding that corruption is the number one or number two most important problem in Italian politics is 30% of the population, so quite a, quite a significant, uh, uh, group of people.
And those holding that it's at least somewhat of a problem, um, or You know, holding that corruption is a serious issue, but not one of the most important issues was like 90%.
So, you know, very widespread support for anti-corruption as a form of politics. By 2001, it had dropped to 5%. By 2008, it had dropped to less than 1%.
So all that enthusiasm about rooting out corruption just completely dissipated, completely disappeared over the course of a decade. And you can imagine similar thing happening in Brazil.
And the problem with Manipulite is that every time it failed to convict, and I think its conviction rate was worse than in Brazil, but every time it failed to convict, it actually increases the sense of impunity.
And then you also have this Darwinian sort of process where the dumbest criminals get caught.
So all the low hanging fruit gets caught and everyone else learns to be a bit smarter about how they go about their business, making sure those deals have no record, have no trace, make sure you pay off the right people so that they won't speak to judges or the press or whoever else.
Right. So in that sense, it actually could be seen to have created an ecosystem where corruption has just become a bit smarter. There was also a lack of reform laws passed to make corruption more difficult.
The only thing which actually helped with that was joining the Euro and certain European integration measures, which made kind of introduce certain anti-corruption measures.
But they bear with them maybe their own problems, but we won't get into that now. But it also led very much as in Brazil to this conflict between politicians and judges.
And they tried to stamp out constantly the arbitrary power of judges, a sense that the judges had overreached.
And so what you end up with is unlike in Brazil, where Moro joins with Bolsonaro, Di Pietro went off and formed his own party, which I think was perhaps a more honest course of action.
He created the Italy Values Party, but it became a minority interest because it didn't really wield any other politics with it. It just became about remoralizing politics.
And other people are more interested in maybe having lower taxes for small business or having more state support or, you know, whatever it might be.
But you actually have some concrete politics attached to it, whereas a purely moralistic politics that Di Pietro tried to wield didn't really have any support in the new Italy.
So I think if you look at its overall consequences and why Manipulite had such a short term impact, and I think we again, we see a lot of parallels with Brazil, is that there was an overemphasis on the magistrates.
Again, just an emphasis specifically in Brazil on Delagnol and on Moro as these white knight crusaders who could root out corruption on their own. Right.
And one thing that strikes me is that during anti-corruption protests, you would never hear people saying, I believe in the justice system, but rather they would say, I believe in Moro or I believe in Delton Delagnol, the lead prosecutor.
Exactly. It became incredibly personalized. And of course, when you take those leaders out of the game, it no longer has any support. And it's actually notable that since
Bolsonaro has interfered so much with anti-corruption investigations and Lava Jato has been put an end to basically, you haven't seen any protests, really any significant protests defending Lava Jato.
None of the right, the political right, who in many cases defended and supported Lava Jato have in any way manifested themselves against it.
In fact, they're all quite happy to see the back of Lava Jato, which shows how fleeting the support was and how instrumental the support for Lava Jato ever was.
So those people who are real Lava Jatistas, real hardcore Lava Jatistas end up seeming to be actually quite a small section of Brazilian society at the end.
And part of the problem is that this whole process being a media spectacle and a judicial investigation, it means that civil society, that people on the street delegate effectively a political struggle to renew the political class to the judiciary, which it's unable to do on its own.
It turns us all into spectators. In fact, something I wrote already in 2016 was complaining the fact that Lava Jato had turned us all into spectators, not as political agents.
And again, the only way that you diminish corruption society is by re-democratizing politics, making it more accountable. And the problem with media spectacle is that you're a passenger, you're just a mere audience.
And so it's only by bringing political parties closer to people, making them real vehicles for interest and making politics the subject of, yeah, effectively competing interests and visions of society that you're able to reduce corruption.
So I think the lesson to learn from it is that anti-corruption can only be a consequence of more democratic politics rather than the cause of it in and of itself.
So in Italy, you ended up with deep pessimism about institutions and indeed the delegitimation of those institutions, something that's happened here as well.
And that delegitimation and pessimism and indeed cynicism about politics ends up actually with greater tolerance for corruption. So really, it ended up a sort of boomerang.
And you could argue that though that Manipulite made corruption worse and actually had social effects, which were far more damaging to democracy than even that initial corruption was.
If the convictions may not endure for long, one legacy Operation Carwash seems to have left is the delegitimization of politics in Brazil. So what problems does that cause? I think there's two things.
One is that the delegitimation of formal politics, however corrupt the formal political arena is in Brazil, and it is deeply corrupt, has led to new actors coming in. And so Bolsonaro obviously is one of them.
But the other one is that you have increasingly entrepreneurs entering politics and at the same time, politicians maybe even pursuing entrepreneurial projects.
So what happens is that you end up a deeper interlinking or rather maybe better put a more blurring of the boundaries between public and private, between politics and business.
And that itself is the root, that nexus is the root of corruption. So that's another deleterious effect.
I think one thing to keep an eye on looking to the future is that the Biden administration is in some sense importing Latin American anti-corruption politics to the US and will re-export it as well.
And that will bring with it its own problems because it will follow the same sort of elite technocratic approach to politics, to rooting out corruption, which has led at the end of the day to delegitimation of formal democratic structures.
So I think that's something to keep an eye out for and indeed be concerned about. Alex, thank you very much for your thoughts. We'll be keeping an eye on those issues.
And tomorrow we will be back with part two of this podcast, Lula versus Bolsonaro. If you like Explaining Brazil, please rate us with five stars. That will help more people find out about this show.
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See you tomorrow.