Way Beyond Fachin

04/17/2017 - 12h13

With a greater impact than the mother of all bombs that the United States dropped in Afghanistan, the list of inquiries for Car Wash investigations approved by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) was published on Thursday, the 13th, and devastated the Brazilian political system.

Both the depth and the wide extension of the investigations are without parallel. The challenge for Journalists is immense; the difficulties are myriad.

The files supporting the 76 inquiries opened by order of the STF take up 400 gigabytes - enough space to hold the complete works of Dostoiévski and Shakespeare, to cite two authors celebrated for pursuing themes of crime, punishment, villainy and power.

Eight ministers, 24 senators, 39 federal congressmen, three governors, two mayors and a justice from the TCU (Federal Accounts Tribunal) will be investigated. Dozens of other cases are being remanded to lower courts that cite nine more governors, five former presidents and other politicians not currently in office. The detonation has spread to 16 different political parties in 20 states and the Federal District.

The lifting of the seal of secrecy surrounding the plea-bargain testimonies, ordered by minister Edson Fachin, reinforces my own conviction that the selective leaking of requests for inquiries from the Federal General Prosecutor, in which only 16 names were initially mentioned, hadn't made any sense.

The "O Estado de S. Paulo" (State of S. Paulo) newspaper was able to get complete copies of the documents before its competitors did. It started putting up on its online site, starting at 4 PM last Tuesday, a series of articles outlining the "informants of the end of the world".

All the other newspapers were forced to scramble to catch up. If in the digital edition on April 11 it was impossible to catch up, by the 12th and through the 13th and 14th, Folha managed to publish good material.

Digesting so much information in such a short period of time required a redoubling of efforts. The danger is in the details.

One reader, a lawyer, considered that the name adopted by the press, the Fachin (Justice of the STF) list, to be a major error, since the list actually was from Janot (Federal General Prosecutor). After all, the Federal Prosecutor drew up the list of those to be investigated, while the STF Justice authorized those inquiries in which he agreed that there was evidence of crimes that needed to be investigated.

With the lifting of secrecy, the spurious relationships between politicians and business figures emerges. Companies divide money from illegal origins with politicians.

In exchange, they are guaranteed wins in public bids & tenders, massive overbilling on projects and favoritism, through the means of laws and provisional legislation. Government Officials, Public Servants and Parliamentarians receive bribes and illegal donations, inside and outside of Brazil, money that enriches them, re-elects them and destroys the system of representative politics.

The patriarch of the largest construction company, Emílio Oedbrecht, is the public face, which he freely admits, of the business elite which has been corrupting the country for decades, and which he made a point of emphasizing. In his testimony, he accused the press of previous disinterested silence which has now become demagogy with feigned surprise.

"All of the press has known all along that what is effectively going on is this. Why is it now doing all of this? Why didn't it do this 10, 15, 20 years ago? Because all of this has been going on for 30 years."

There is a certain trace of smugness in this phrase from Emílio. Odebrecht was the company that invested the most in creating a technological apparatus that oiled the underground corruption machine.

As much as the existence of non-republican relationships was suspected, their true dimension and professional organization were unimaginable.

The cases in which the press investigated and proved irregularities in public works and projects number in the thousands. Just look at the files.

The management of Folha believes that, in the past three decades, it has published everything that it could prove regarding improper relationships between politicians, businesspeople and public works projects.

"There is the allegation of fraud in the North-South Railway tender published in the newspaper by columnist Janio de Freitas in 1987, therefore 30 years ago, involving the primary construction companies in Brazil, among them one called Norberto Odebrecht at the time.

In another, the paper revealed that journalist Ricardo Feltrin was given prior access to the names of companies that were to be chosen in bids for the São Paulo Metro in 2010. Once again, Odebrecht was part of the winning consortium", the *Folha*'s Executive Editor, Sérgio Dávila, cited as examples.

He also declared that he considers it "to be irresponsible to publish as a fact that 'it is implicitly or explicitly' known by all, as Emílio Odebrecht declared, without evidence to back it up".

The sophistication of the corruption mechanisms that have been revealed shows just how difficult it is to detect them. I can't envision efficient, wide-ranging and legal mechanisms that would allow the press to get to the bottom of it.

With the film now exposed, it is up to journalists to qualify the follow-up on provisional legislation and bills, review the aforementioned bids and tenders, and investigate the accumulation of wealth of those involved.

The challenge will be to broaden the scope. It is naïve to imagine that these schemes were restricted only to construction companies.

If there is any mea culpa to be offered, it is in recognizing that the corruption apparatus is way beyond the capacity of the tools of the press to investigate it.

Translated by LLOYD HARDER

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