The sad, quiet death of Brazil’s anti-corruption task-force

FOR YEARS it made the powerful tremble. The revelations by the task-force of prosecutors in Curitiba who led the anti-corruption probe known as Lava Jato (Car Wash) brought millions of Brazilians onto the streets in outrage. Those protests contributed to the impeachment of a president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. The prosecutors secured jail sentences for her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Marcelo Odebrecht, Brazil’s ninth-richest man. On February 3rd the task-force was wound up, in near-silence. Its demise marks the symbolic end of an unprecedented push to reduce graft across Latin America. Sadly, there is little reason to think that it has made a lasting difference. The pandemic and the economic slump have displaced, probably temporarily, worries about crooks in suits.

Lava Jato started with a money-launderer who used a money-transfer service at a petrol station in Brasília (thus its name). Prosecutors uncovered a web of bribes for padded contracts issued by Petrobras, the state-controlled oil giant, over more than a decade in which Lula’s Workers’ Party was in power (see article). The task-force used new tools, including plea-bargaining and the exchange of financial information with Swiss and other authorities. They found that Odebrecht, a construction firm, had set up a bribes unit that paid $800m in a dozen countries. The malfeasance extended to other big Brazilian firms.