In the early months of the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration, Justice Minister Flávio Dino became one of the most visible members of the new cabinet. He was summoned or invited to appear before congressional committees dozens of times, often delivering barbs against the right-wing opposition and producing powerful sound bites that boosted his online reputation.
Mr. Dino is now facing the downside of such exposure.
The revelation that the wife of a leading drug trafficker visited top Justice Ministry officials has dominated headlines in Brazil since Monday. It has renewed opposition calls for Mr. Dino’s dismissal, and may have affected his chances of being nominated to the Supreme Court.
Newspaper Estadão showed that Luciane Barbosa Farias visited the Justice Ministry twice earlier this year. Her husband, Clemilson dos Santos Farias, is currently behind bars, being suspected of being the regional leader of the Red Command crime gang in the northern state of Amazonas.
The Red Command is Brazil’s oldest surviving organized criminal group and traces its roots back to a Rio de Janeiro prison in the 1970s, when an alliance between common criminals and leftist militants was formed after the two groups were thrown together in jail during the military dictatorship (1964-1985).
The Red Command, best known in Brazil by the acronym CV, has been described as a “sizable national and transnational threat” by InSight Crime, a think tank that conducts research on criminal organizations. The group was behind the murder of three doctors in Rio in early October and has influence in other Brazilian states.
Mr. Farias goes by the nickname Tio Patinhas, the Portuguese translation of Disney’s character Scrooge McDuck. In 2022, an Amazonas appeals court judge called him one of the Red Command’s “main leaders” and wrote that he owned luxury cars, real estate in several Brazilian states, and had BRL 2.2 million (USD 452,000) in a bank account now frozen by authorities.
Mrs. Farias — the wife of “Scrooge McDuck” — presides over...
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