Brazil Is Engulfed by Ruling Class Corruption — and a Dangerous Subversion of Democracy
Five of the members of
the impeachment commission are themselves
being criminally investigated as part of the corruption scandal. That
includes Paulo Maluf, who faces
an Interpol warrant for his arrest and has not been able to leave
the country for years; he has been sentenced in France to three years in
prison for money laundering. Of the 65 members of House impeachment committee,
36 currently
face pending legal proceedings.
In the lower house of Congress, the leader of the impeachment movement, the evangelical extremist Eduardo Cunha, was found to have maintained multiple secret Swiss bank accounts, where he stored millions of dollars that prosecutors believe were received as bribes. He is the target of multiple active criminal investigations. Meanwhile, Senator Aécio Neves, the leader of the Brazilian opposition who Dilma narrowly defeated in the 2014 election, has himself been implicated at least five separate times in the corruption scandal.
THE MULTIPLE, REMARKABLE crises subsuming Brazil are now garnering
In the lower house of Congress, the leader of the impeachment movement, the evangelical extremist Eduardo Cunha, was found to have maintained multiple secret Swiss bank accounts, where he stored millions of dollars that prosecutors believe were received as bribes. He is the target of multiple active criminal investigations. Meanwhile, Senator Aécio Neves, the leader of the Brazilian opposition who Dilma narrowly defeated in the 2014 election, has himself been implicated at least five separate times in the corruption scandal.
THE MULTIPLE, REMARKABLE crises subsuming Brazil are now garnering
substantial
Western media attention. That’s understandable given that Brazil is
the world’s fifth most populous country and eighth-largest economy; its
second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro, is the host of this year’s Summer
Olympics. But much of this Western
media coverage mimics the propaganda coming from Brazil’s homogenized,
oligarch-owned, anti-democracy media outlets and, as such, is misleading,
inaccurate, and incomplete, particularly when coming from those with little
familiarity with the country (there are numerous Brazil-based Western reporters doing outstanding work).
It is difficult to
overstate the severity of Brazil’s multi-level distress. This short paragraph
yesterday from the New York Times’s Brazil bureau chief, Simon
Romero, conveys how
dire it is: Brazil is suffering
its worst economic crisis in decades. An enormous graft scheme has hobbled the national oil
company. The Zikaepidemic is causing despair across the northeast. And just before the world heads
to Brazil for the Summer Olympics, the government is fighting for
survival, with almost every corner of the political system under the cloud of
scandal.
Brazil’s extraordinary
political upheaval shares some similarities with the Trump-led political
chaos in the U.S.: a sui generis, out-of-control circus unleashing
instability and some rather dark forces, with a positive ending almost
impossible to imagine. The once-remote prospect of President Dilma
Rousseff’s impeachment now seems likely.
But one significant
difference with the U.S. is that Brazil’s turmoil is not confined to one
politician. The opposite is true, as Romero notes: “almost every corner of the
political system under the cloud of scandal.” That includes not only Rousseff’s
moderately left-wing Workers Party, or PT — which is rife with serious
corruption — but also the vast majority of the centrist and right-wing
political and economic factions working to destroy PT, which are drowning in at
least an equal amount of criminality. In other words, PT is indeed deeply
corrupt and awash in criminal scandal, but so is virtually every political
faction working to undermine it and vying to seize that party’s
democratically obtained power.
In reporting on
Brazil, Western media outlets have most prominently focused on the increasingly
large street protests demanding the impeachment of Rousseff. They have
typically depicted those protests in idealized, cartoon terms of adoration: as
an inspiring, mass populist uprising against a corrupt regime. Last night,
NBC News’s Chuck Todd re-tweeted the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer describing anti-Dilma
protests as “The People vs. the President” — a manufactured theme consistent
with what is being peddled by Brazil’s anti-government media outlets such as
Globo: read more
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/18/brazil-is-engulfed-by-ruling-class-corruption-and-a-dangerous-subversion-of-democracy/
