The “car wash” scandal that shook up Brazil’s politics led to the imprisonment of the beloved president Lula, followed swiftly by his neoliberal/looter successor Michael Temer, creating the political chaos that paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a violent, homophobic, racist autocrat who advocates for torture/murder of his political opponents.
Despite all this, the car wash task-force was widely praised in Brazil and abroad for its apolitical devotion to rooting out corruption (and indeed, the task-force’s prosecutions also jailed some of the country’s richest, most powerful oligarchs).
But a new trove of leaked Telegram group-chats between federal prosecutors and judges (including the judge who put Lula in jail and went on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister) reveal that the prosecutions were political, and were designed to keep Lula out of office and deliver political victories to far-right parties that had promised wealth-friendly policies of the sort that Bolsonaro has gone on to deliver.
Through the leaks, we learn that during Lula’s trials, the judge (now justice minister Sergio Moro) engaged in grossly improper secret conversations with the prosecutors, giving them advice on how to improve their chances of securing a guilty verdict. Subsequent to Lula’s conviction – after he was put into a secretive prison and held incommunicado – prosecutors conspired to undermine a court order granting an interview with Lula, seeking to either delay the interview until after elections (to help deliver a victory to Bolsonaro) or to add so many other reporters to the interview that nothing of substance could emerge.
It’s an incredibly important political scandal in one of the world’s largest countries, where a dictator is making ready to torch the planet by cutting down the Amazon to make way for his friends in agribusiness.
