Multiple crises promise a stormy 2017 for Brazil
Apower struggle coupled with the most far-reaching corruption probe Brazil has ever seen means the country’s democracy is in for a stormy 2017. One side of the increasingly complex crisis in Latin America’s biggest economy pits the corruption-riddled political class in Brasilia against aggressive prosecutors running the so-called Carwash probe of embezzlement at state oil company Petrobras. Another sees the Supreme Court fighting with members of Congress who are trying to hobble what they view as a threatening judiciary.
The mostly under-the-carpet struggle has started to erupt into the open.
This month, one Supreme Court justice tried to force the scandal-tainted Senate president, Renan Calheiros, to step down, only to be rebuffed by Calheiros and eventually overruled by the rest of the court.
Congress, meanwhile, is trying to push through laws that would target prosecutors and judges for “abuse of authority” and even to grant themselves immunity for past crimes of corruption.
Ivar Hartmann, a law professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, calls this “pure revenge.”
Underlying the crisis is the Carwash probe, which has uncovered extensive, high-level involvement in a scheme that saw politicians take bribes to help contractors win inflated contracts from Petrobras.
Big names have already fallen, including the once-powerful speaker of the Lower House of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, who is in jail awaiting trial for allegedly taking millions of dollars in bribes. And there is no end in sight. “Carwash has a life of its own. No one can control it,” said Marcos Cepik, a Foreign Affairs Specialist at the University of Rio Grande do Sul.
Plea bargains by 77 executives at Odebrecht, the huge construction company at the heart of the Petrobras embezzlement scheme, have been completed and leaks from the testimony indicate that scores more politicians will be accused of corruption.
President Michel Temer, who took over this year after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, has reportedly been named as having received suspicious donations. So have several of his closest allies and advisers. But powerful voices are arrayed against the Carwash prosecutors. Romero Juca, a Temer confidant who represents the government in Congress and is also a suspect in the Carwash probe, lashed out at media leaks of the sealed testimony in the plea bargains.
“These leaks will weaken the country’s stability. In this atmosphere of unrest, of the lynch mob, of a French Revolution, we’ll never attract investors,” he said in the newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo.