A recent Supreme Court decision added another layer to the longstanding campaign by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his allies to whitewash history and reduce Operation Car Wash — a years-long corruption task force investigation that exposed deep-rooted corruption schemes — to a criminal, politically motivated “farce.”
In a September 6 decision, Justice Dias Toffoli (who was nominated by Lula himself in 2009, during his first presidential term) wrote that Car Wash “agents” — a reference to prosecutors, police officers, and former judge Sergio Moro — “disrespected due process, subverted evidence, acted with bias and outside their competence.”
The judge added that the 2018 arrest of Lula following a court order supported by Operation Car Wash was “one of the greatest judicial mistakes in the country’s history.”
Such is the language used in a decision that annulled all evidence obtained by police and prosecutors in two computer systems owned by Odebrecht, once Brazil’s largest construction company. The company has since fallen from grace, joined a bankruptcy protection program, and changed its name to Novonor.
For decades, corruption was an integral part of corporate culture at Odebrecht. So much so that Brazil’s construction giant had an entire department exclusively dedicated to paying bribes to public officials. The system used by Odebrecht to manage bribes became well-known to Brazilians.
Famous politicians were listed under colorful codenames, and it was usually not too hard to guess who was who. Former Congresswoman Manuela D’Ávila was codenamed “airplane,” an old-fashioned slang for a beautiful woman. Senator Humberto Costa, who years earlier had been the target of a Federal Police investigation called Operation Vampire, was referred to as “Dracula.” Former Senator Aécio Neves had the alias “Mineirinho” after his birth state of Minas Gerais, and so on.
A similar list was featured in The Mechanism, a Netflix series that gave a fictionalized account of the initial Car Wash years.
The decision by Justice Dias Toffoli has thrown all of that evidence down the drain. He accepted a complaint filed in 2020 by Lula’s lawyers — including the wife of Justice Cristiano Zanin (recently nominated by Lula) — that the evidence obtained by the Car Wash task force was “contaminated” as former Judge Moro was in cahoots with prosecutors, as shown in leaked messages exchanged by members of the task force, and that investigators did not preserve the chain of custody when dealing with the evidence.
Those conversations — that came to light in news stories published by Intercept Brasil...
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