The Economist - UK (2022-04-30)

74 The Economist April 30th 2022
Culture

LavaJato

The policemen’s tale

A

t six o’clockone morning in June 2015

nine  agents  of  Brazil’s  Federal  Police

raided  a  mansion  in  Morumbi,  a  swanky

neighbourhood in São Paulo, and arrested

its owner. Marcelo Odebrecht was the boss

of a family business—Latin America’s larg­

est  multinational  construction  conglom­

erate—and  his  detention  was  a  watershed

in  a  police  investigation  into  the  promis­

cuous  relationship  between  money  and

political power in Brazil. 

Originally  focused  on  Petrobras,  the

country’s  state­controlled  oil  and  gas

giant,  the  investigation  was  dubbed  Lava

Jato (Car Wash) because one of the money­

launderers  used  an  exchange  house  at  a

petrol station in Brasília. Odebrecht’s man­

agers  would  eventually  confess  to  operat­

ing  a  “bribes  department”  which  handed

out  nearly  $800m  to  politicians  and  offi­

cials  in  a  dozen  countries;  in  return,  they

secured  more  than  100  overpriced  public­

works  contracts  across  Latin  America  and

Africa. Brazilian prosecutors charged doz­

ens of politicians. In 2017 they secured the

jailing  of  Luiz  Inácio  Lula  da  Silva,  the

country’s president from 2003 to 2011 and a

herooftheLatinAmericanleft.

Led by a new generation of young, often

foreign­educated,  detectives,  prosecutors

and judges, Lava Jato seemed to be a deci­

sive  offensive  against  ingrained  corrup­

tion in Brazil. Yet the sentencing of Lula by

Sergio  Moro,  a  crusading  judge  in  the

southern city of Curitiba, to 12 years for al­

legedly receiving a penthouse from a con­

struction magnate, both marked its apogee

and signalled its overreach. 

The wrongdoing uncovered by Lava Jato

and the political controversy surrounding

it have spawned a large literature in Brazil.

“The Mechanism”, an early journalistic re­

port by Vladimir Netto in which Mr Moro is

the  hero,  became  a  Netflix  series.  Deltan

Dallagnol, the lead prosecutor in Curitiba,

published  a  personal  account.  The  most

notable  contribution  is  “A  Organização”

(“The Organisation”), a thorough and read­

able  chronicle  of  the  rise  and  fall  of  Ode­

brecht by Malu Gaspar, another journalist.

Now  comes  “Operation  Car  Wash”  by

Jorge  Pontes  and  Márcio  Anselmo,  first

published in Brazil in early 2019 and trans­

lated  into  English  by  Anthony  Doyle.  The

authors are federal policemen. When Lava

Jato began, Mr Pontes had recently retired

after a distinguished career which includ­

ed campaigning to set up an environmen­

tal­crimes division of the force. Mr Ansel­

mo  led  the  team  which  arrested  Mr  Ode­

brecht.  Their  thesis  is  that  Brazil  suffers

from  “institutionalised  crime”,  by  which

they mean “a fraudulent system that oper­

ates with the blessing of the nation’s power

structures  and  the  support  of  a  network

that pervades all three powers of the state”. 

This system involved all the main polit­

ical parties, who shared out state procure­

ment  jobs.  Construction  companies  re­

ceived  padded  contracts  in  return  for

bribes, many of which went to finance po­

litical campaigns. Although it dates back at

least  to  Brazil’s  military  dictatorship  of

1964­85, the authors claim that the system

was  perfected  under  the  governments  of

Two law­enforcement officials reflect on a Brazilian corruption scandal

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Operation Car Wash. By Jorge Pontes and

Márcio Anselmo. Translated by Anthony

Doyle. Bloomsbury; 208 pages; $27 and £20