President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil will this Friday launch the third edition of the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), a package of public investments in infrastructure that left behind an extensive history of corruption, inflation, and massive unfinished projects in its previous iterations.
Lula launched the first PAC in January 2007, shortly after being re-elected for a second term, with the stated goals of accelerating economic growth, increasing employment, and boosting private and public investment in infrastructure. A second edition, PAC 2, was launched in March 2010 as part of Lula’s successful effort to elect his then-chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, as his successor — he famously dubbed her “the mother of the PAC” in a reference to her work managing the program.
The PACs left a trail of unfinished projects, the largest of which is the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (Comperj). Led by government-controlled oil company Petrobras, the construction had the stated objective of reaching a refining capacity of 330,000 barrels per day. Works cost more than USD 10 billion, but the project was abandoned about 80 percent of the way through. Unforeseen costs and engineering errors also hindered its completion.
Comperj was a major target of the Operation Car Wash anti-corruption investigation. Sérgio Cabral, a former governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, was convicted in 2017 for taking bribes related to its construction. At one point...
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