Former president of Brazil is arrested in bribery probe
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian law enforcement officials on Thursday arrested former President Michel Temer as part of a bribery investigation, opening a significant new chapter in the yearslong corruption scandal that has roiled the country’s politics.
The term of Temer, 78, expired in January. The end of his presidency left him exposed to numerous criminal investigations that he had kept at bay by availing himself of the legal protections afforded to elected officials in Brazil while they are in office.
Televised images of heavily armed police officers taking Temer into custody riveted Brazilians on Thursday, nearly a year after the nation was gripped by the imprisonment of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption and money laundering.
Temer, a veteran lawmaker who became a major power broker in Brasília, the capital, has been a target of at least 10 corruption investigations in recent years.
A federal judge, Marcelo Bretas, who is based in Rio de Janeiro, ordered Temer’s arrest as a precautionary measure in a case involving alleged kickbacks to secure a contract to build a nuclear power plant in Rio de Janeiro state.
In a statement, prosecutors characterized Temer as the head of a “criminal organization” that sought to skim hundreds of millions of dollars of public money.
The statement said that people involved in the scheme “continue receiving and moving” illicit funds and have taken steps to shield stolen assets abroad.
Brian Alves Prado, a lawyer representing Temer, called the arrest “an affront to a democratic state guided by the rule of law.” He questioned the legality of the detention order, noting the alleged offenses had occurred years ago.
Temer, a center-right politician, became president in August 2016 after he helped build support for the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, a leftist.
Temer had been elected twice as Rousseff ’s vice president, in 2010 and again in 2014, but he withdrew his support when the economy was ravaged by a recession, which gutted Rousseff ’s popularity.
Temer spent much of his limited political capital as president fending off criminal investigations, which helped make him the country’s most unpopular leader in recent history.
In June 2017, Brazil’s attorney general charged Temer with corruption, accusing him of accepting a $152,000 bribe from executives of a giant food conglomerate.
Months later, Temer was hit with a second set of charges, including corruption and obstruction of justice, in connection with the same case.
Temer spent much of that year negotiating with lawmakers, who used their prerogative to block the cases from reaching the Supreme Court, which oversees criminal matters involving elected officials. He made major concessions to congressional coalitions and steered hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to projects favored by lawmakers in an effort to secure enough support.
The torrent of corruption accusations that dominated headlines in Brazil during the Temer era turbocharged the candidacy of his successor, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who vowed to disrupt the old habits of a political elite that many Brazilians came to see as brazen thieves.
Bretas argued that ordering Temer be taken into custody was a precautionary measure, warranted by the gravity of the allegations. The measure is more commonly taken in connection with violent crimes.
“Cases involving corruption by public officials have the potential to affect in a severe way an exponentially larger number of people,” the judge wrote in an order for the arrest warrant. “Just consider the public resources diverted by corrupt practices that would otherwise go toward essential public services such as health care and public safety.”
Law enforcement officials also took into custody one of Temer’s closest political allies, Moreira Franco, who served in his Cabinet. Officials also detained, João Baptista Lima Filho, a close friend of Temer, who has been accused of being a middleman in bribery negotiations.
Bretas wrote in his order that allowing the suspects to remain free “in the modern era we live in” posed a risk because “a simple phone call or a text message sent online is all it takes to hide large sums of money.”
Federal agents also served search warrants at several addresses associated with the suspects.
Temer’s arrest comes about a year after da Silva, who served as president from 2003 to 2010, began serving a 12-year sentence for corruption and money laundering.
The detention of Temer is a milestone in the broad Brazilian corruption scandal known as Lava Jato, or Carwash, which began in 2014 and has roiled the political and business elite.
It comes days after prosecutors suffered a setback in a case before the Supreme Court, which ruled that corruption cases involving violations of electoral law should be handled by electoral courts rather than criminal ones.