Political blowback from a period of intense anti-corruption campaigns is to blame
José Dias Toffoli, a judge on Brazil’s Supreme Court, suspended the payment of a $2.6bn fine by Novonor, a construction firm better known by its former name, Odebrecht. The previous month he had suspended another fine imposed on. The companies had agreed to the fines as part of leniency agreements in which their executives admitted to bribing Brazilian officials.
Mexico’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is trying to scrap the state body which looks into impropriety. Ruling politicians in Guatemala fought bitterly to stop Bernardo Arévalo, a former anti-corruption campaigner, from being inaugurated as president in January. Then came the fall. Errors and hubristic behaviour by zealous prosecutors cast doubt on the investigation’s impartiality. The most prominent Lava Jato judge, Sergio Moro, publicised a plea bargain which implicated Lula one week before the 2018 election. Lula’s favoured candidate lost to Jair Bolsonaro, a hard-right populist whose campaign had been boosted by anti-establishment sentiment generated by Lava Jato. Mr Moro then left the judiciary to become Mr Bolsonaro’s justice minister.
In 2017 Ms Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer, who was imprisoned for graft himself and repeatedly dismissed the accusations as lies, pardoned non-violent offenders jailed for corruption who had served one-fifth of their sentence. His decree claimed that this could curb the “exponential growth of the prison population”. In 2019 the Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision and ruled that defendants be allowed to exhaust all avenues for appeal before being jailed.
Few people in Brazil want to talk about corruption anymore, except to express disdain for Lava Jato. Gilmar Mendes, a Supreme Court judge, dismisses it as the product of foreign interference, “propaganda” by the media, and “anti-corruption fighters like money a lot”.The blowback on Lava Jato is bipartisan. Mr Moro, now a senator, faces two trials which could bar him from office. One, concerning alleged campaign-finance abuses, was filed by Mr Bolsonaro’s party.
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