Human Rights Workshop: Fabio de Sa e Silva on Brazil’s Corruption Scandals

At the November 21st Human Rights Workshop Fabio de Sa e Silva spoke about the implications of Brazil’s recent political upheavals. De Sa e Silva, who is an Assistant Professor of International Studies and Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma, detailed the difficulty of developing mechanisms for accountability in the face of fascism.

De Sa e Silva began by discussing recent revelations of extensive corruption plaguing Brazil’s economy and political system. He explained that Operation Car Wash, an ongoing criminal investigation by the Federal Police of Brazil, began in 2014 as an investigation on money laundering, but quickly uncovered a deeper scandal. The investigation revealed “systemic corruption within and beyond the national oil company Petrobras” in the form of “contract frauds and bribes paid to Petrobras officials and politicians.” While the form and existence of corruption was conventional, de Sa e Silva said, the scale at which it was conducted was significant. Rio de Janeiro’s former governor, for instance, had monthly expenses of more than 1.2 million Brazilian reals, according to de Sa e Silva. A governor’s salary could not have sustained this lifestyle, de Sa e Silva noted, suggesting that the governor was accepting bribes.

One of the structural reasons that encouraged the corruption scheme revealed by Operation Car Wash, de Sa e Silva said, was Brazil’s multi-party system. Under this system, the President’s party doesn’t necessarily have a majority in Congress, he explained. For example, in 2014, de Sa e Silva cited, there were 28 political parties represented in Congress. As a result, in order to pass legislation in Brazil’s Congress, de Sa e Silva said that one must “negotiate and attract a few other [parties]” –– which often occurs through bribery.

Another tool that the executive branch developed in order to further its policy goals, according to de Sa e Silva, was allocating cabinet positions to different parties. While this tactic allows leaders to “advance good public policies in the expectation they’ve been recognized to do so by the electorate,” de Sa e Silva said, it also enables them to “participate in a number of corruption schemes to generate funds for the next election.”

In some ways, de Sa e Silva suggested, Operation Car Wash represents “liberal democracy at its best.” The investigation has relied on “a strong and independent legal profession with a judge who can bring those who have power to account, “an active and vigilant civil society,” and “mechanisms for accountability and implementing rule of law.”

Operation Car Wash, de Sa e Silva said, played a role in former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s impeachment in 2016. He argued that recorded phone conversations released by Judge Sérgio Moro, who was overseeing the case, “accelerated the impeachment process” by providing evidence that Lula had accepted bribes from Petrobras that helped his political party and presidential campaign. While the public initially lauded the exposure of corruption, the impeachment process became highly controversial after it led to Lula’s imprisonment and exclusion from the 2018 presidential race, de Sa e Silva said.

With Lula out of the race, far-right Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil. In November 2018, Bolsonaro appointed Judge Moro as Justice minister in his cabinet. This decision, de Sa e Silva explained, was highly controversial given that Moro had convicted Lula, Bolsonaro's primary political rival in the election.

In July, The Intercept Brazil revealed communications between Judge Moro and Operation Car Wash prosecutors that confirmed suspicions, de Sa e Silva said, of their illegal conspiracy to bring the Workers’ Party under Lula to a halt. De Sa e Silva cited this scandal as having solidified the press and public’s concern over the methods used to eliminate corruption. “[Operation Car Wash] is more complicated [than people first realized]. It is not a triumph of rule of law,” de Sa e Silva explained.

In his current work, de Sa e Silva said, he is analyzing the course of events from an “empirical angle” by “listening to people’s discourse about corruption, rule of law, and justice in Brazil.” He highlighted that part of the strategy of Operation Car Wash was to garner “extensive publicity” in order to increase “public support” for the case. The federal prosecutor went as far as to make a website for the case “so people can see with their own eyes the evidence and charges.”

De Sa e Silva argued that the increased publicity for the Operation Car Wash case created a public conversation about corruption on social media that elevated people’s “legal consciousness.” In his research, de Sa e Silva wanted “to analyze how this [case] resonated in the public eye.” Over the last two years, he has compiled more than 220,000 Facebook posts about the Car Wash case into a spreadsheet. Analyzing these comments, he observed “how a conversation about corruption can be turned into a platform on which extremist ideas on the right can form.” He cited various Facebook posts that referred to Judge Moro as a “hero saving us from criminals” or as a religious figure.

De Sa e Silva said there are key “take-aways for human rights conversations.” He said one such takeaway is “the power and the limits of legalistic processes.” Presenting images of Judge Moro giving a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, de Sa e Silva said that legal idealism has historically been lauded in the West. According to de Sa e Silva, there is also a “long history of the U.S. exporting the rule of law to other countries.”

He questioned whether Brazilians truly share as great of a concern with “injustice and rule of law” or whether there is a “level of authoritarianism that can easily get entangled with [legalistic] processes and change their course in a way that is unintended or undesirable.” A campaign, he noted, is often started “to punish a person who has violated human rights”; he expressed skepticism that a “vibrant democracy” will always flourish afterward.