Jair Bolsonaro would hardly have been president of Brazil if it weren’t for Operation Lava Jato. Supposedly aimed at fighting corruption, the operation, fraught with procedural irregularities, chose a target rather than simply following clues and due process of law.
Treating politics as a crime and the Workers’ Party (PT) as a gang were central elements to create the “climate” for the 2016 coup, via an impeachment process without the necessary legal conditions. The judgement bias of former president Lula led him to prison, without evidence, elevating Bolsonaro to the status of favorite in the 2018 presidential election.
The shadows of Operation Lava Jato
The main actors of Operation Lava Jato, which implied a partial and partisan action of Justice, were the then judge Sérgio Moro and the prosecutors of the Public Ministry in Curitiba, with emphasis on the coordinator of the operation, Deltan Dallagnol. Judge and prosecutors combined strategies, selectively ignored information, expressed in conversations the desire that the PT would not win the presidential election and abused the instrument of winning denunciations.
All this was exposed in the series of reports performed by Intercept Brazil, known as Vaza Jato, from conversations between these characters in the Telegram application. Then, new dialogues surfaced from the Federal Police’s Operation Spoofing. The winning denunciations, which were supposed to be an incentive for some criminals to help derail the big schemes, were deliberately used to construct a narrative that would lead to Lula’s conviction.
In order to say what the Public Ministry wanted to hear, whether it was true or not, whistleblowers sometimes obtained advantages totally foreign to their effective commitment to fighting corruption, and sometimes they suffered psychological torture, in an evident abuse of human rights. Alberto Youssef, a leading money laundering operator, whose total sentences would exceed 122 years of imprisonment, managed to stay in prison for just three, with the preservation of several properties reportedly arising from his own crimes.
On the other hand, whistleblowers less central to the corruption scheme were pre-emptively arrested and threatened with being transferred to dangerous prisons if they did not “cooperate spontaneously”. In a conversation held in 2017, Dallagnol scoffed at the “efficiency” of pre-trial detention as an instrument to pressure the investigated to accept awards of whistleblowing.
Former Petrobras executive Pedro Barusco, who was one of the first whistleblowers at the Lava Jato, back in 2014, had denounced a settlement of bribes between company employees, politicians and representatives of contractors. Deltan Dallagnol and his fellow prosecutor Athayde Ribeiro Costa, however, were dissatisfied with the fact that that denunciation allowed the Progressive Party to be included among those involved, but not the Workers’ Party. They agreed, then, to make a new agreement, leaving Barusco without any really serious penalty, so that he could make a new declaration, which would contain excerpts written by the prosecutors themselves.
Moro, Dallagnol and political prospects for the 2022 elections
Moro resigned as a federal judge in 2018 for become Bolsonaro’s own minister of justice, with whom he broke up two years later due to power struggles. Dallagnol has resigned from the Federal Public Ministry now, in November 2021. Your goal, like Sergio Moro’s, should be to stay in politics, but this time through electoral means, and not through the manipulation of Justice.
The ex-judge of the carwash inquisition has been presenting himself as a likely candidate for the Presidency of the Republic in the 2022 election. Dallagnol’s political ambition is not yet known.
You only know that you like money: Intercept Brazil article showed that Dallagnol and his prosecutor partner Roberson Pozzobon were planning in 2018 a business plan to profit from events and lectures paid for based on the fame and contacts made through the Lava Jato operation. They would use relatives as owners of the company, to avoid legal challenges, and thought of creating a “non-profit” institute to pay fees for themselves.
In 2019, the Federal Public Ministry of Paraná tried to reach an agreement with Petrobras and the United States government so that the state company, which was the object of the Lava Jato investigation, would pay RS 2.5 billion to a private fund that would be managed by Deltan Dallagnol himself and his colleagues. Now that he has given up his high salary as a prosecutor, it is not known whether he will try to be a deputy or whether he will dare to seek a seat in the Senate or the position of governor of the state of Paraná.
Sérgio Moro has been worked on as a possible name for the “third way” against Lula and Bolsonaro, by sectors of the press that always published complimentary and uncritical news about Lava Jato. Today, you can’t see protesters on the streets wearing yellow t-shirts with their faces and calling him a hero, or even montages of him wearing Superman clothes. But, with Lula’s favoritism and the certainty that there will be polarization, it is the space of enemy of the PT and of defender of punitivism that will be in dispute. Moro has some potential to re-attract part of the reactionary base disillusioned with Bolsonaro and take that place.
Moro and Dallagnol’s political platform in an electoral campaign is predictable: a lot of alarmism against corruption, defense of more prisons and tougher sentences, criticism of an “excessive” bureaucracy in Brazilian penal legislation that would lead to impunity and spread of the idea that the political class is all corrupt and it is necessary to replace it with non-politicians.
The 2016 democratic break gave power to conspiratorial and authoritarian figures. First, then Vice President Michel Temer, widely called a “vampire,” became a president without a vote. Afterwards, Jair Bolsonaro had a secure political dispute for the presidency, without Lula in the way.
Bolsonaro is often called “Bozo”, but the level of destruction he has caused brings him closer to more terrifying clowns like Pennywise or other make-up killers who populate the cinema. In February, the Lava Jato operation was dissolved, already in disrepute due to all the arbitrariness and partiality revealed. But, in this horror film that has lived Brazil since 2016, Lava Jato’s death may not be definitive. She may return as a zombie, with nominations from Sergio Moro and Deltan Dallagnol shown on prime-time television.
Professor at Unirio School of Political Science, Doctor in Political Science at IESP-UERJ, coordinator of the Center for Analysis of Institutions, Policies and Reflections in America, Africa and Asia (CAIPORA) and union leader.
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