Brazil’s Epic Corruption Becomes a Netflix Series
Billions of dollars looted from the public coffers. Scores of powerful politicians and wealthy businessmen ratting on each other. A small but valiant team of prosecutors and investigators trying to bring the white- collar crooks to justice.
Brazil’s ongoing scandal, known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, is as perversely spectacular as the most extravagantly imagined crime novel or Machiavellian episode of “House of Cards.” So it was perhaps inevitable that it would be turned into a Netflix series — by the same director who made “Narcos” for the streaming service, no less.
The result is “The Mechanism,” whose eight episodes are available beginning March 23. Like most of his 200 million countrymen, the Brazilian director and screenwriter José Padilha has been transfixed as the scandal has metastasized from a simple investigation of money-laundering at a gas station in the capital of Brasília into a national crisis that threatens the foundations of the world’s fourth-largest democracy.
“The mechanism” is Mr. Padilha’s term for a sweeping corruption and kickback scheme that, he argues, seized control of democracy in Brazil almost from its return in 1985, after a 21-year military dictatorship. He and millions of other Brazilians believe that politicians, bankers, businessmen and judges have conspired to steal vast sums from the state, regardless of who is in office.
“The fact that the mechanism has no ideology is fundamental,” Mr. Padilha said. “My thesis is that the mechanism operates in all elections at all levels of government in Brazil, everywhere. Companies that are big clients of the government, usually construction companies but also big commercial banks, finance them all, either legally or through secret slush funds.”
Virtually all of the 20- odd parties with seats in the Brazilian Congress have been stained by the scandal, soon to begin its fifth year. One president has been impeached; her predecessor has been convicted of corruption and money laundering; and her successor is being investigated by the real-life equivalents of the prosecutors and police officers that Mr. Padilha portrays.
“The country has been riven, with families divided and lifelong friends quarreling, and that makes this a special challenge to write,” said Elena Soarez, who wrote the script of “The Mechanism” with Mr. Padilha. The series revolves around a money launderer and two investigators, all fictional.
Throughout his career, which began in 2002 with “Bus 174,” a documentary that used a bus hijacking to show how Brazil’s criminal justice system treats the poor, Mr. Padilha has focused on crime, justice and violence. Whether in “Elite Squad” movies about SWAT- like teams in Rio, his 2014 remake of “RoboCop,” or in “Narcos,” the police have been central to his stories.
“For the state to sustain itself, there must be some repressive force that it manages and controls,” he explained. “So the police are not a detail, they are an essential feature of any complex society. They offer a glimpse into all kinds of social systems, because they are very, very much on the edge, the fringe of soci- ety, where institutions meet.”
In “7 Days in Entebbe,” a new film now in worldwide release, Mr. Padilha offers a variation on some themes he first raised in “Bus 174,” this time with the story an Air France flight from Tel Aviv hijacked to Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1976.
The Entebbe crisis ended with Israeli commandos storming an airport terminal and rescuing more than 100 of the hostages:
“As soon as the operation succeeded,” Mr. Padilha said, “it played into the hands of people who thought that everything can be solved by violence.”
“The Mechanism” tells a much less familiar story, but Mr. Padilha and his collaborators think it will travel well.
Caroline Abras, who plays the investigator Verena Cardoni, said, “Corruption is a universal theme, and that is going to generate empathy everywhere.”