As Brazil confronts the coronavirus pandemic, it is hard to imagine how things could get any worse. At least 8,500 people have died as new infections continue to climb. Meanwhile, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro refuses to take the crisis seriously and is battling his own administration. He has opposed plans to shut down the economy, fired his health minister, and endangered citizens by encouraging public meetings. The explosive resignation of his justice minister, Sergio Moro, led to calls for his impeachment. Now, the Supreme Court has approved an investigation into Bolsonaro on multiple violations, including obstruction of justice.

In the middle of a global health crisis, a handful of companies in the U.S. and Europe will decide whether we should live or die.

In all this chaos, it is reasonable to hope that the crisis will ease when coronavirus treatments emerge. Unfortunately, the crisis may only get worse for Brazil when we finally have medicine and vaccines for the coronavirus — unless the National Congress acts immediately.

A majority of the potential treatments for Covid-19 and all the vaccines under development will be brought to market by big pharmaceutical corporations who hold monopoly power over them through patents, which are temporary monopolies granted by national law. This power will result in an outrageous situation: In the middle of a global health crisis, a handful of companies in the U.S. and Europe will decide whether we should live or die.

This problem is not Brazil’s alone. In the last three decades, millions of people from poor countries have died because they could not afford the medicines they needed to live. But, as a “middle-income” country in a long recession, Brazil faces a unique and immediate threat: the inability of the public health system  — Sistema Único de Saúde, or SUS — to do its job and keep people alive.

In 2016, Brazil’s Constitutional Amendment 95 froze federal budgets for 20 years, including for public health. In this environment of austerity, with no wiggle room and SUS straining to accommodate growing health demands, the absurd cost of monopoly medicine has the potential to break the system.

While the threat is supercharged in the current coronavirus pandemic, monopoly medicines have been threatening the viability of SUS over the last three decades. Two cases stand out.

In 1996, Brazil made history by providing universal treatment for HIV/AIDS, becoming the first developing country in the world to do so. Less known is that this victory was almost undermined by monopoly medicine prices. Of the cocktail of medicine required to treat HIV/AIDS, some were being manufactured in Brazil, including by Farmanguinhos, the government-owned medicine producer located at Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro. But other medicines were available only under monopoly from big pharmaceutical corporations — and their price made the HIV/AIDS treatment program unviable. Brazil threatened to issue compulsory licenses, which would have suspended the patents and allowed cheaper, local production. The corporations responded by caving and lowered their prices. In 2007, the HIV/AIDS treatment program was again threatened by Merck’s monopoly price on efavirenz, a key medicine in the program. When Merck refused to lower prices, then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva issued a compulsory license on the advice of his health minister, José Gomes Temporão. As a result, over the next five years, SUS saved nearly $500 million reals in expenses by buying generic versions of efavirenz for use in the country.

In contrast, Brazil’s experience with sofosbuvir, the first effective treatment for hepatitis C, is tragic. When the medicine first came to market in 2013, it promised to be a lifeline for the more than a million Brazilians suffering from a debilitating and fatal disease with no cure. There was just one problem: The full course of sofosbuvir cost $84,000 in the U.S. and the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences owned the monopoly on the medicine. Gilead offered a discount to SUS, but at $6,000 per course, the price was still 60 times more than the cheapest generic version of the medicine. After a long tussle over the validity of Gilead’s patents — they were challenged multiple times — the corporation eventually won and immediately increased the price of the medicine by 1,421 percent — no, that’s not a mistake. As a result, in the last six years, SUS could only afford to treat a minuscule number of people who have the disease, even as several thousands of others died from it.

Our only access to the one existing treatment for Covid-19 will be entirely dependent on the compassion of a giant multinational pharmaceutical corporation that has shown no sign it has any.

How is this relevant? Consider the antiviral medicine remdesivir, also brought to market by Gilead and originally targeted at Ebola. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just certified remdesivir for use against Covid-19; it is the first treatment to have been approved. Gilead has multiple patents over remdesivir in 70 countries around the world, including Brazil. These patent monopolies last until the year 2038. Apart from one vague statement, Gilead has not committed to making this medicine affordable or available in sufficient quantity. Instead, early in March, Gilead sought “orphan drug” incentives in the U.S. for the use of remdesivir against Covid-19, which would have given them additional monopolies and tax benefits of $40 million. The word “orphan” in the designation refers to rare diseases that affect less than 200,000 people. Over 3 million people have been infected with the coronavirus. When this was pointed out, Gilead backtracked.

To recap: As things stand, for the next 18 years, our only access to the one existing treatment for Covid-19 will be entirely dependent on the compassion of a giant multinational pharmaceutical corporation that has shown no sign it has any.

We have two ways out of the monopoly trap. The first is a multilateral solution, which depends on a proposal by the World Health Organization coming to fruition. Prompted by Costa Rica, WHO is exploring the creation of a Covid-19 technology “patent pool”: a mechanism by which monopoly producers of protective equipment, tests, medicines, and vaccines could voluntarily suspend their monopolies for global public use. The proposal is gaining steam. However, Brazil’s middle-income status — a senseless category that confuses the needs of a poor majority with the wealth of a rich minority — has meant that it is excluded from a similar arrangement offered by the Medicines Patent Pool, whose benefits only extend to poor countries, regardless of where the disease they are trying to solve is prevalent. A new global patent-pooling solution will only work if it explicitly includes middle-income countries like Brazil.

The second way is a national solution. In this moment, an assertion of sovereignty is the only solution that is guaranteed to work. Countries as diverse as Canada, Germany, Israel, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador have taken swift action in the last few weeks, either suspending key patents or enacting legislation to suspend all monopolies on technologies related to the coronavirus pandemic. Brazil must join them.

Last month, a multiparty group of 11 members of Brazil’s Congress introduced a bill to amend the Industrial Property Law. The proposal builds on existing provisions in Brazilian patent law to respond to the crisis. It would create  a fast, simple, and legal process by which the government can deal with the coronavirus pandemic (as well as any other health emergency) by suspending monopolies that affect the lives of its citizens, whether on equipment and tests or medicines and vaccines. The National Health Council — Conselho Nacional de Saúde, or CNS — immediately came out in favor of the bill. Strong international support followed. However, despite a request made in Congress to debate the bill with urgency, hearings have not yet begun.

Pedro Villardi, speaking for Grupo de Trabalho sobre Propriedade Intelectual, one of the civil society organizations that advocated for the bill, explained its purpose: “The point is to increase the government purchase options, with the agility for distribution that a health emergency requires.” Noting the delay, he added, “The approval of this bill is urgent. We need to ensure maximum responsiveness to save lives. Any delay or high prices during times like these is inconceivable.”

This is a time for solidarity, a time for cooperation and care. In order to survive the coronavirus pandemic, Brazil must take decisive steps to protect SUS. We can secure our future by learning from the past. When we have confronted medicine monopolies, we have saved lives, saved money, and improved the human and financial health of the country. And when we have succumbed to pharmaceutical corporations, we have lost lives and damaged the fabric of society. In the long term, there is much more we can do to save our SUS. In the short term, we have a pandemic and a path that leads us out of it. We must take it.

The post With Patents on Coronavirus Medicines, International Drug Companies Will Decide Whether Brazilians Live or Die appeared first on The Intercept.

In Fox News studios in both New York and Washington, producers, reporters and on-air talent paid rapt attention to this story, in large part because Bolsonaro and his entourage — including a close aide who had already manifested symptoms and tested positive — had met days earlier at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, key Trump aides (including Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump), and Fox News’ prime-time anchor Tucker Carlson.

But Fox was unwilling to report something as significant as a positive coronavirus test for the Brazilian president without further confirmation. As a result, according to employees inside Fox News with first-hand knowledge of the episode but who are unauthorized to speak publicly about the matter, they decided they needed first-hand confirmation from either Bolsonaro or one of his three politician-sons. To obtain it, they quickly reached out to Alex Phares, the son of Trump confidant and Fox News analyst Walid Phares.

The younger Phares has become well-known in conservative circles for arranging media and other appearances for Bolsonaro’s youngest political son, the São Paulo Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, including booking him on three separate panels at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held the week prior to the Trump/Bolsonaro Mar-a-Lago meeting. CPAC itself was the site for several now-confirmed coronavirus cases, including the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox Party Santiago Abascal, whom Eduardo boasted of meeting there (meeting and shaking hands with Abascal is what led Texas Senator Ted Cruz to self-isolate for the second time):

Durante o @CPAC conheci pessoalmente o líder do partido espanhol de direita VOX @vox_es , Santiago Abascal @Santi_ABASCAL , e outros parlamentares do partido.

Vamos aprendendo uns com as experiências dos outros no combate ao socialismo. Estamos juntos!https://t.co/cl3mxcRnqM

— Eduardo Bolsonaro?? (@BolsonaroSP) March 2, 2020

At roughly 10:00 a.m. EST on Friday morning — roughly 40 minutes after the O Dia column appeared — Phares, first by text and then by voice, confirmed to Fox News that Eduardo, that morning, had told him that his father’s first test had indeed returned positive. But Fox was still unwilling to report this without speaking to one of the Bolsonaros directly. They asked Phraes if he could arrange both a telephone and on-air interview with Eduardo.

Roughly thirty minutes later, Fox spoke directly to Eduardo, who, Fox sources insist, stated unequivocally that his father had received the results of his first coronavirus test and it was positive; the president’s son said that they were awaiting the results of a second test. Eduardo and Fox agreed that he would be interviewed about the coronavirus test on-air via Skype at 11:30 a.m. EST.

Shortly before the interview, Eduardo again confirmed that his father’s first test was positive for the presence of coronavirus. Hearing two separate, definitive confirmations from Eduardo, as well as from Phares, Fox had the confidence it needed to have its White House correspondent, John Roberts, announce on Twitter that President Bolsonaro had tested positive for the coronavirus, and Fox shortly thereafter published a print article online and a broadcast report with the same news. All of that reporting made clear that their source was Eduardo.

The Brazilian media had exercised the same caution as Fox, unwilling to report something so momentous based solely on an anonymously-sourced report in O Dia. But once Fox News had reported the news based on Eduardo’s confirmation, they naturally began noting Fox’s report. News of the president’s positive coronavirus test spread quickly online.

As soon as that happened, Eduardo went on the offensive with a standard Bolsonaro family tactic: accusing the Brazilian media of maliciously fabricating “Fake News” against his father, a particularly inflammatory accusation where it involved reports of his father’s positive coronavirus test. But when Brazilian media outlets united to make clear that the report was not theirs but Fox News’ — a network beloved by the Bolsonaros and their movement — and that the named source for the story was Eduardo himself, Eduardo had two choices: he could either admit that Fox was telling the truth and that he had confirmed the positive test to them, or he could start accusing Fox News of lying. He chose the latter.

In a series of increasingly unhinged tweets that extended into Saturday morning, Eduardo insisted that he had never told any reporter — including one at Fox — that his father had tested positive for the coronavirus. Sitting in front of photos of a machine gun and a Revolutionary American flag, Eduardo then recorded videos in both Portuguese and English (see below) in which he insisted (caps in original) “THIS IS ALL A LIE”:

Hoax of the day: media lies that @jairbolsonaro has Corona Virus and that I confirmed it to Fox News.

THIS IS ALL A LIE, DETAILS IN THE VIDEO BELOW.

(unlike most of the media, Fox News has credibility and my respect, but today they were wrong, I didn't tell any information) pic.twitter.com/W0Ti16D85K

— Eduardo Bolsonaro?? (@BolsonaroSP) March 13, 2020

Then, in a bizarre on-air mid-Friday interview on Fox News — by which point President Bolsonaro himself had claimed that his test result, which he has still yet to show the public, was negative — Eduardo told the visibly baffled and frustrated Fox anchor Sandra Smith that he was not aware of the results of any first coronavirus test for his father, and continually tried to shift the interview back to his father’s claim that the ultimate test was negative.

In response to Eduardo’s false accusations that Fox had fabricated their conversations with him, Fox News issued an avalanche of clear and emphatic denunciations. Fox sources told the Intercept that they were shocked and indignant — and still are — as they watched Eduardo repeatedly lie and brazenly deny that he told the network that his father’s test was positive, even though he had done exactly that twice. And they hardly disguised their anger.

Their public responses included an article — headlined: “Brazil President Bolsonaro’s son claims father tested negative for coronavirus despite earlier reports” — that made clear at the beginning that Eduardo was lying:

Reports out of Brazil had initially indicated Bolsonaro had tested positive, and his son appeared to confirm this to Fox News earlier Friday, adding that further testing was being done to confirm the diagnosis and the second set of testing was expected later in the day.

However, in a subsequent appearance on “America’s Newsroom,” Eduardo denied his father had ever tested positive.

Fox then released the text messages between its journalists and Phares to Globo’s flagship news program, Jornal Nacional, in which Phares confirmed to Fox that he had just spoken to Eduardo about the president’s positive test.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, Fox’s John Roberts explicitly stated — as Eduardo was denying it — that the president’s son “had told Fox that his father had a preliminary POSITIVE test for coronavirus.”

After telling @FoxNews that his father had a preliminary POSITIVE test for coronavirus, Eduardo Bolsonaro now tells @FoxNews the test was NEGATIVE. Bolsonaro says has been in touch with the White House.

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) March 13, 2020

Roberts then went on the air on Fox and, standing in front of the White House, emphasized that Eduardo was lying in his denials:

Fox News chamando o @BolsonaroSP de mentiroso. Que momento delicioso pra quem deve ter imaginado que os caras eram a versão americana do Terça Presa pic.twitter.com/PasfIfcalJ

— Samuel Pancher (@SamPancher) March 13, 2020

Another Fox reporter, Chris Irvine, similarly made clear that Eduardo was lying, tweeting on Friday: “Earlier today, Eduardo Bolsonaro confirmed reports that his father had tested positive for coronavirus to FOX News and said they were waiting for further testing. He later appeared on FOX News and claimed his father had tested negative for coronavirus.”

From the start, the Bolsonaros’ behavior has been extremely strange regarding the question of whether the Brazilian President does or not have the coronavirus. Indeed, when a widely respected reporter from Brazil’s largest newspaper, Monica Bergamo of Folha, reported that Bolsonaro’s Communications chief Fabio Wajngarten had returned from the U.S. with classic COVID-19 symptoms and was being tested, Wajngarten attacked her on Twitter and implied she had made it up — only for his positive test to be confirmed the next day.

Now that nine members of Bolsonaro’s entourage have tested positive, the mystery has less clarity than ever. Almost immediately after claiming that his test was negative — just hours after his son told Fox that it was positive — Bolsonaro refused to release the results of the test itself or have any doctor vouch for them, and then, without explanation, the president’s office announced that Bolsonaro would remain in isolation for fourteen more days and would undergo another test.

But then yesterday, during nationwide anti-democracy protests originally encouraged by Bolsonaro aimed at the Congress and Supreme Court, but which Bolsonaro ultimately discouraged on the grounds that it would be dangerous in a pandemic, the Brazilian President shocked everyone by leaving the palace — and the medical isolation he was supposed to be in — to join a crowd of supporters. He proceeded to touch at least 272 of them, including shaking hands, fist bumping and taking their telephones to snap selfies before handing them back. Prior to that on Twitter, Bolsonaro had implicitly encouraged his supporters to attend the mass street gatherings — in direct contradiction of the urgings of his own Health Minister — by posting photos of the protests in various cities.

Bolsonaro teve contato direto com ao menos 272 pessoas durante ato, mostra vídeo -via @EstadaoPolitica https://t.co/stqpCdv9RG

— Estadão ?? (@Estadao) March 16, 2020

That President Bolsonaro — who has mocked the pandemic from the start as a “fantasy” and a media exaggeration and whose key evangelical allies are now calling it a hoax — would leave his medical isolation and risk the health of his own supporters by physically interacting with them outraged much of the country, particularly as it appeared to send exactly the opposite message about social distancing that healths officials in Brazil, where huge numbers of poor people live in extreme density in favelas and where the health system is already utterly dysfunctional, are desperate to convey.

But the question of Bolsonaro’s health remains shrouded in mystery. And that mystery is now fueled by his son inadvertently starting a war with a news outlet they trained their followers to worship: Fox News. Eduardo Bolsonaro essentially forced Fox News to prove that the Bolsonaros are liars by accusing the network of fabricating conversations they had with him in which he clearly confirmed his father’s positive test.

Update, March 16, 2020, 7:58 p.m.

The number of people in Bolsonaro’s entourage with him in the U.S. and now confirmed as positive for the coronavirus is 14.

The post How Jair Bolsonaro’s Son, Eduardo, Confirmed His Father’s Positive Coronavirus Test to Fox News, Then Lied About It appeared first on The Intercept.

“The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and national. It will be endowed with a great capacity for emotional involvement and will be equally imperative, since it is deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing” — Roberto Alvin, Brazil’s culture minister, January 15, 2020.

“The German art of the next decade will be heroic, romantic, objective, and free of sentimentality, national with great pathos and equally imperative and binding, or nothing” — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi culture minister, October 8, 1933.

The Nazi content, style, and aesthetics of the six-minute speech, set to the score of a Wagnerian opera, are impossible to overstate or even adequately describe in words. It has to be seen to be believed. For that reason, The Intercept has translated the speech into English and is publishing a video of it because it should be seen by everyone:

Brazil’s O Globo newspaper featured this surreal headline on its front page: “Bolsonaro fires Culture Minister after he copies Nazi speech.” The German paper Deutsche Welle featured the photo of the 1933 speech of Goebbels that Alvim copied next to the one delivered by the Brazilian culture minister to juxtapose how similar it was on all levels, beyond just the words.

The content of Thursday’s speech was nothing new for Alvim, once a respected theater director who reinvented himself as a far-right religious fanatic. In his short stint as Bolsonaro’s culture minister and in the months leading up to his appointment by the Brazilian president, he has issued a series of similarly shocking comments — just not quite as shocking as blatantly and deliberately mimicking the speech, style, and mannerisms of Hitler’s most notorious propagandist. 

On social media, he has declared himself fighting a “cultural war” in favor of “conservative artists”; denounced one of Brazil’s most beloved actresses, the 90-year-old Fernanda Montenegro, as a “dirty liar” for whom he harbors “contempt”; and attacked the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, whose documentary “Edge of Democracy” was just nominated for an Academy Award, as a leftist propagandist disseminating lies.

Notably, Alvim was fired only after the embassies of Germany and — far more importantly to Bolsonaro — Israel issued condemnations containing harsh language rare for diplomatic communications. The Israeli Confederation of Brazil said, “Such a person cannot command the culture of our country and must be removed from office immediately.” The German Embassy in Brazil said, “The period of National Socialism is the darkest chapter in German history, bringing infinite suffering to humanity. …We oppose any attempt to trivialize or even glorify the era of National Socialism.” The center-right presidents of the Brazilian Senate and House also demanded Alvim’s firing, leaving Bolsonaro with little choice. When announcing the firing, Bolsonaro called the speech “an unfortunate pronouncement.”

But it is difficult to believe that absent those reactions, Bolsonaro would have fired his culture minister, whom he has repeatedly defended and praised, including in a Facebook Live chat immediately prior to the instantly notorious Nazi speech, hailing him as representative of “the real culture.” Sitting with Alvim prior to his speech, the Brazilian president said, “Beside me, here, Roberto Alvim, our culture secretary. Now we do have a real culture secretary that serves the interest of the majority of the Brazilian population, conservative and Christian population.”

Whatever else is true, Alvim’s speech, though more stylistically extreme and indelicate in how crassly it copied pure Nazism, is consistent in content with the posture of the Bolsonaro government toward artistic expression and cultural norms generally. Bolsonaro — though currently on his third wife while still claiming to be devoutly Catholic — has also adopted a form of evangelic fanaticism, a rapidly growing political force in the country, as part of his public identity and ideology (his current wife is evangelical).

Bolsonaro, somewhat ironically in light of the current controversy, has also made unyielding devotion to Israel critical to his political and religious identity (he has traveled to Israel repeatedly, offered unstinting support for the Netanyahu government against Palestinians, and was baptized in 2016 in the Jordan River while the Brazilian Senate voted to impeach the center-left President Dilma Rousseff). 

While all of this has caused many of Brazil’s small Jewish communities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to support him, it has little to do with affection for Jews. Like many evangelicals, Bolsonaro appears to believe in some form of the Rapture (which, in its crudest form, holds that Israel must be united in order for Jesus to return and send all nonbelievers — including Jews — to hell), and like many authoritarians, adores Israel’s capacity of military and intelligence superiority and its animus toward Muslims, and wants as much of its surveillance technology as he can get for domestic purposes. As is true of many far-right leaders, Bolsonaro worships Israel but not necessarily Jews.

Aggressive and harsh public morality is a central prong of Bolsonaro’s political appeal. He featured as part of his 2018 campaign cultural themes similar to Alvim’s speech — including a false but highly effective warning that elementary school teachers were using something he calls “gay kits” to convert young children in order to allow homosexuals to recruit them as sex partners — and generally has waged a war on any art or artists who diverge from Bolsonaro’s vision of what pure nationalist art is. One of Alvim’s predecessors as culture minister resigned after the Bolsonaro government cut funding specifically to LGBT-themed art. 

Earlier this week, Academy Award nominations were unveiled and one of the five contenders for Best Documentary was a Netflix film by the Brazilian director Petra Costa called “Edge of Democracy,” which warns of the dangers faced by Brazilian democracy. Though the film principally focuses not on Bolsonaro but on the impeachment of Dilma and imprisonment and election-barring of Lula, it has become a target of contempt by the Brazilian Right. After it received its Oscar nod, both Alvim and Bolsonaro publicly denounced the film as leftist agitprop “fiction” (though Bolsonaro, when asked, acknowledged he never saw it).

A far graver assault on artistic expression occurred on Christmas Eve when a member of the right-wing party to which Bolsonaro belonged until recently threw a Molotov cocktail at the building that houses Porta das Fundos, the production company responsible for a Netflix film that features a gay Jesus with a boyfriend. Bolsonaro’s Congressman-son had inveighed against the film as “trash.” Last week, a Bolsonaro-linked right-wing judge stunned the country, and Netflix, by issuing a censorship order forcing Netflix to remove the film from its streaming platform, a ruling overturned by a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Nazi-style nationalism and crude public assaults have been repeatedly featured by Bolsonaro in his remarks to journalists. On Thursady, addressing a new book critical of his government by a Brazilian reporter of Japanese descent, Thaís Oyama, Bolsonaro said he does not know what she is doing in Brazil, adding: “This journalist … In Japan she was going to starve to death.”

Last month, in response to a reporter’s question about the still-unfolding scandal involving his Senator-son’s corruption and the family’s links to violent paramilitary militias, the president said “you have a terribly gay face,” and told another reporter to “ask your mother about your father.” When questioned earlier this week about a scandal involving his Communications Minister who has private contracts with the same television outlets whose public budget he is responsible for determining, the president responded: “are you talking about your mother?”

A report issued earlier this week by a press freedom group documented that Bolsonaro is directly responsible for the majority of the attacks on journalists and media outlets. It cited, among other things, Bolsonaro’s repeated public incitements against journalists as well as his public threats that I might be imprisoned for the series of exposés published this year by the Intercept about his Justice Minister and his accusations that my marriage to a Brazilian Congressman and adoption of Brazilian children was a fraud.

Earlier this month, Bolsonaro pronounced that books in schools have too much content and need to be made “softer” and warned that “beginning in 2021, all the books will be ours,” proclaiming that they will have the Brazilian flag and national anthem on their cover. He added that “they will be made for us. The country will vibrate…. There will be the Brazilian flag on the cover, there will be the national anthem there.” He claimed that the “idiots” who have been in charge of Brazilian education have been propagandizing children with the “gender of ideology” that “encourages boys to wear skirts” and “other things that I don’t want to talk about here.” On Thursday, he said leftists “do not deserve to be treated like normal people.”

In sum, Bolsonaro has spent years spouting classically fascist ideology. The manifestation of undisguised Nazism by his Culture Minister was just a slightly more crass and naked expression of his ideology and mentality. Many Brazilian elites who supported Bolsonaro largely because of their admiration for his Chicago-trained, austerity-loving Economics Minister Paulo Gedes and his corrupt law-and-order Justice Minister Sergio Moro (the subject of the 2019 Intercept’s exposés) are now feigning shock and outrage. But Alvim’s speech simply shined a light on the true face of the Bolsonaro movement — one which all to many political and media elites decided to ignore, or pretend was just a game, because they were eager for the parts of Bolsonaro’s ideology that served their interests.

The post Bolsonaro, Under Fire, Dismisses His Culture Minister for Giving a Nazi Speech, but It Is Still Representative of Brazil’s Governing Ethos appeared first on The Intercept.

Doti, as she was known, had been receiving death threats since the early 2000s. The 73-year-old Catholic nun, born in Dayton, Ohio, arrived in Brazil in 1966. At the time of her death, she was fighting for a program that set aside land for poor families, giving them a guaranteed income so long as they preserved the forest. The settlements, known as Sustainable Development Projects (or PDS, their Portuguese acronym), resisted for a decade after Stang’s murder. But now, the program runs the risk of collapsing, with the forest and settlers under threat and undefended by the Brazilian government. The situation has worsened under President Jair Bolsonaro, who, since taking office this January, has set about dismantling Brazil’s forest protection programs as part of an all-out assault on the environment.

Bolsonaro’s hostility to environmental efforts has quickly become his signature. In its first eight months, his government suspended agrarian reform efforts, paralyzed IBAMA — the agency in charge of enforcing laws against deforestation — and canceled an international preparatory meeting for COP25, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. His minister of foreign affairs is a climate change denier, and his minister of agriculture is notorious for loosening regulations on dangerous pesticides. This summer, the world watched, appalled, as fires — some of them started by ranchers and loggers who support Bolsonaro — laid waste to swaths of the Amazon.

Yet long before Bolsonaro’s rise, Stang’s philosophy clashed with the local culture in the Brazilian Amazon, where powerful ranchers view deforestation as the only path to economic prosperity. They see trees as valuable lumber and soil as space for cattle and soybeans. Stang wanted to counter the false dilemma presented by agribusiness, by offering an alternative economic model for the forest. But today, clear-cutting, land-hungry ranchers occupy the PDS settlements she founded and are pushing to terminate the entire project.

The ranchers have found ways to invade the lots set aside as PDS settlements, circumventing monitoring mechanisms and packing government agencies with political allies. “Land-grabbers,” or grileiros (a term that comes from an old practice of storing fake deeds in a box with a cricket, or grilo, whose feces would stain the papers yellow and make them look authentically aged), threatened Stang before her death and continue to menace those who are trying to uphold her legacy. Last year, Stang’s successor, Father José Amaro Lopes, was jailed for three months on charges that his supporters say were aimed at silencing him and his work on land rights and forest protection.

On February 11, 2005, the day before Stang’s encounter with the gunmen, she had a meeting with settlers at PDS Esperança (“hope” in Portuguese), one of the projects she helped create. The site is next to a highway and known for its abundant cocoa production. She should have been accompanied by police or officials from the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or INCRA, the Brazilian agency responsible for managing areas dedicated to land reform. At the last minute, however, INCRA didn’t send anyone with her. Stang decided to attend the meeting anyway.

Long before Bolsonaro’s rise, Stang’s philosophy clashed with powerful ranchers in the Amazon, who view deforestation as the only path to economic prosperity.

She climbed onto the back of a motorcycle and rode more than 25 miles through the quagmire typical of the rainy Amazonian winter to offer her support to settlers frightened by the constant threats from ranchers and land-grabbers. She crossed huge areas devastated by livestock until she reached a lush stretch of forest preserved within PDS Esperança.

It was a tense moment. Two months prior, the government had decided that anyone working a piece of land larger than 247 acres would need to prove ownership of it. The move sparked a revolt, as many ranchers and farmers had fake deeds or otherwise couldn’t show that the land was theirs. The new policy would result in the foreclosure of hundreds of title deeds — the lands, according to the federal government, were public.

Around 7:30 a.m. the next day, Rayfran das Neves Sales and Clodoaldo Batista drew close to Stang on the roadside and asked if she was armed. Sensing danger, she held up her Bible. She began reciting passages from the Gospel, witnesses later said. Sales heard, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” before he shot the missionary six times. One bullet struck her in the head; the other five pierced her thin body.

It was the first death of Sister Dorothy Stang. In it, she became a symbol in the struggle for agrarian reform and the protection of the Amazon.

The Missionary’s Dream

Stang was a pioneer in popularizing the concept of sustainability in the far reaches of the Amazon. Since the 1980s, she had united female rural leaders, encouraged the organization of settlers into collectives, and taught sustainable forest management to workers with no formal education. She wasn’t content to let people starve while the federal government was the largest landowner in the country, and enormous areas were unused or barely occupied. The PDSs, for her, were a way to guarantee sustenance for impoverished families and protect the environment at the same time.

Such was Stang’s dedication to helping the poor that she often sheltered families in the blue-green house where she lived, right beside the church in Anapu, a city in the state of Pará. While she was working on establishing the PDSs, Stang sometimes slept in the corridors of INCRA’s offices to pressure them, INCRA employees say. Despite her advanced age, she would take a bus to meetings in Belém, a distant 372 miles from Anapu, and go by motorcycle to access remote corners of the forest. Noemi Miyasaka, a professor at the Federal University of Pará who had followed Stang’s efforts since 1999, told me, “She was tireless and never gave up.”

The missionary’s work was urgent — and remains so — because Pará, a state bigger than Texas and California put together, is the deforestation capital of the world’s largest tropical forest. The missionary chose Pará for two settlements, Esperança and Virola-Jatobá, comprising 260 square miles.

Pará, a state bigger than Texas and California put together, is the deforestation capital of the world’s largest tropical forest.

Locals describe Esperança and Virola-Jatobá as a green oasis amid the ravages that advance upon the Amazon. A local journalist, who wished to remain anonymous fearing threats to his life, said that “they are like a kind of gateway which acts as protection. If they are permanently invaded, the entire forest will come down.”

After international outcry over Stang’s assassination, the Brazilian government — then led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — took a series of measures to consolidate her legacy. Her murder was the catalyst for finally dealing with the longtime problem of land-grabbers, a group which, at that time, controlled 116,000 square miles in Pará alone.

The first measure was the formalization of the PDS system, which gave hundreds of families the right to use a parcel of land in the Amazon. In a PDS, each settler family is entitled to 50 acres where they can cultivate grains and vegetables for subsistence. The rest of the area is a forest preserve. Within this preserve, permanent preservation sites must be conserved. The remaining area can be channeled for collective use through a sustainable forest management plan, implemented following strict environmental rules. The money from the logging returns to the families as income.

The settlers can earn access to federal resources to help them farm and manage the forest sustainably, through projects channeled from INCRA and Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. Potential sources include the Amazon Fund (a vehicle for international donations to conservation projects).

In the years following Stang’s death, 111 PDSs were created in the Amazon, encompassing 13,000 square miles. The area where Stang was killed became part of PDS Esperança. Beyond the settlements, Lula’s Environment Minister Marina Silva demarcated five new conservation areas, created satellite deforestation warning systems, and developed a project for public forest management that would ensure that protections endured as governments changed. In the 13 years following the missionary’s assassination, deforestation rates fell 72 percent in the Amazon, according to 2018 data from the environment ministry.

Stang’s killers were brought to justice: Sales and Batista were convicted of murder. A court later found that Vitalmiro “Bida” Bastos de Moura, who claimed ownership of the land where it happened, had ordered the killing, and sentenced him to 30 years.

For 12 years, the PDSs held firm against the land-grabbers’ advances. But on November 15, 2017, a band of 200 low-level land-grabbers affiliated with ranching interests took hold of PDS Virola-Jatobá.

That is where Dorothy Stang’s second death began.

Invade and Destroy

Despite the government’s efforts, land-grabbers and invaders had never ceased to haunt the Amazon in the north of Pará. A few years after the missionary’s death, illegal logging started up in the area, often under the cover of illegitimate settlements.

An investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office initiated in 2007 halted 106 PDS projects, which they baptized as “ghost settlements.” The investigation determined that several of the settlements lacked necessary environmental permits, were located in conservation areas, or benefited loggers in contradiction to the PDS mission. In many cases, the settlements were created with nothing more than a three-page letter, disregarding the legal procedures and studies required to establish them.

Little by little, as accusations of fraud and mismanagement in the PDSs piled up alongside the economic, fiscal, and political crises of the 2010s in Brazil, the government of Dilma Rousseff (who succeeded Lula) lost interest in guaranteeing assistance and security to settlers. But the abandonment was more explicit under Michel Temer, Rousseff’s vice president, who assumed the presidency after she was impeached in 2016. It was under Temer that the invasion of Virola-Jatobá occurred. 

Today, almost two years since the invasion, land-grabbers and loggers in Virola-Jatobá continue to threaten settlers and ship out truckloads of lumber in the middle of the night, including valuable species such as acapu, cumaru and angelim-vermelho. Twice, following court orders, Federal Police have removed the invaders, but each time they have returned, prolonging a drama that relies on the complacency of INCRA, IBAMA, the Federal Police, and state security forces, as well as the sluggishness of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the judiciary.

Land-grabbers and loggers continue to threaten settlers and ship out truckloads of lumber in the middle of the night.

It’s an exemplary case of government incompetence and neglect. INCRA is the official owner of the PDS lands and the agency that granted the settlers the right to use the land. However, when the gang invaded Virola-Jatobá in November 2017, the agency didn’t send anyone to the settlement. Faced with INCRA’s inaction, the settlers decided to press charges with the Anapu police. But the police refused to file a report, claiming that the area was federal and therefore outside its jurisdiction.

The Virola-Jatobá settlers had to appeal to the Pará Public Defender’s Office, which filed a repossession suit, arguing that the settlers had the right to demand the return of the land without waiting for INCRA to act.

Prosecutor Patricia Xavier, who worked on the case until last November, told me that “INCRA is becoming increasingly inert.” There was no justification, she added, for “the way it deals with one of the most conspicuously confrontational and violent municipalities in the country.”

It took INCRA five months to get on board, but at the end of March 2018, the agency jointly filed a lawsuit with the settlers. On May 28, 2018, Brazil’s Federal Court issued its first repossession order, which was followed by four months of meetings and misunderstandings between the police, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, INCRA, and Embrapa.

On September 21, 2018, when federal and civil police, firefighters, members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and INCRA finally entered the PDS to carry out the repossession order and remove the invaders, officials celebrated the operation with an exchange of WhatsApp messages. But their happiness was short-lived: They found a bleak panorama when they arrived. Photos taken on site showed extensive cleared areas and felled trees.

The court had ordered the police to remain on location for a month to prevent the gang’s return. But they didn’t, and less than 10 days later, the invaders came back. They set fire to the headquarters of the forest-management project of the Viroa-Jatobá Association near the entrance to the PDS’s forest reserve, and part of the stockpiled wood used to fund the settlement burned in the flames.

With pressure from Embrapa researcher Roberto Porro, UFPA and Public Prosecutor’s Office, in January of this year, the court issued a new repossession order, again calling for a month of police protection. That order took five months to carry out, and this time, police spent 30 days in the area performing daily patrols. But it wasn’t enough.

“We are pretending to maintain possession and the loggers are pretending that they respect us,” an INCRA employee stated in a memo sent to IBAMA and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in June. “The Military Police rounds are made during the day. At that time, the loggers are sleeping! When we leave the PDS, in the late afternoon, they are informed and, from that moment on, start removing the wood.”

The court then stepped in again, ordering the police forces to tighten supervision of Virola-Jatobá. It’s a difficult task: The Amazon’s enormous dimensions and isolated, hard-to-reach areas make it easy to get away with illegal activity. Police operations depend upon coordinated action between various security agencies, which, in the case of Virola-Jatobá, took a year and a half to occur.

Ironically, it was Bolsonaro’s decision to fire the heads of INCRA in every state — fulfilling one of his campaign promises — that finally allowed employees to take back Virola-Jatobá. Since January, the state offices have been leaderless. With no one in charge, the agency’s permanent employees in Pará could prioritize the Virola-Jatobá reintegration, according to a source within INCRA who asked to remain anonymous. After two more months of back-and-forth, police launched a new operation on August 22. It worked. They seized huge logs, trucks, and tractors. The invaders fled. But settlers say it’s still insufficient.

Elvenício Anunciação dos Santos, a farmer since 2002 and chief of the Virola-Jatobá Association, said the logging raids continue. Loggers come in just to clear the forest, without installing themselves permanently, making it hard to catch them. “There is still land-grabbing,” he said. “There are still hidden invaders. It paused because of the [August] operation, but it continues.”

Santos laments the lack of institutional support for the PDS. He knew Dorothy Stang and misses the missionary’s aid. “She helped us a lot to reach the government,” he said.

“There is still land-grabbing. There are still hidden invaders.”

Activists and researchers involved with the settlements blame INCRA’s politicization for the ongoing invasions. In the region, INCRA postings come with control of vast amounts of federal land — and therefore, political power. During the Temer government, the Pará branch of INCRA was commanded by cohorts of Federal Deputy Wladimir Costa. Costa, known as “Wlad,” tattooed Temer’s name on his arm on the eve of Rousseff’s impeachment; when she was voted out, he threw confetti in the House chamber. Now, he’s aligned with Bolsonaro’s policies.

In June 2018, Wlad and his brother Mário Sérgio da Silva Costa were caught distributing individual land concessions within PDS lots, which is illegal (the government owns the land in a PDS; it issues use permits, but not land grants, to settlers). Wlad named Mário Sérgio the superintendent of INCRA’s Santarém office, and his friend Alderley da Silva and party colleague Andrei Viana de Castro in the same function in Altamira, overseeing the PDSs in Pará. “INCRA became an electoral platform for promoting Congressman Wladimir,” the Public Prosecutor’s Office later concluded. (Wlad lost his reelection race in 2018, and earlier this month, both brothers were convicted of administrative misconduct related to the illegal concessions, as well as for using INCRA for political gain. They did not respond to requests for comment.)

As INCRA’s Altamira representatives, Silva and Castro attended meetings about the Virola-Jatobá invasion, but they didn’t forward the internal orders necessary for the agency to head up the repossession effort. Porro, the Embrapa researcher, told me, “They acted like it wasn’t the institution interest to deal with.”

Defenders Under Threat

An INCRA report I obtained describes the land-grabbers’ movements in Virola-Jatobá. They entered at the end of 2017 through the main entrance of the PDS. Other invaders used access roads in a settlement boundary that had already been violated by farmers João and Renato Cintra Cruz. The father and son pair are named in the Pará public defender’s repossession case; according to the complaint, they reportedly sold land to farmers coming from southern Pará. Despite being aware of this history, INCRA took no action against them. (I tried to contact the Cruz family for this article, but couldn’t locate them.)

Once they gained access to the PDS, the gang hired surveyors to mark off more than 200 lots and began clearing the forest for pasture, felling trees by chainsaw to simply burn them and sow pasture. They created an entity called the People’s Freedom Association to give themselves a veneer of legitimacy and started making deals with loggers and land-grabbers interested in the Virola-Jatobá forest. (Attempts to contact the organization’s president were unsuccessful.)

In December 2018, I spoke with Ewerton Giovanni dos Santos, then the director for development at INCRA, stationed in the capital, Brasília. I asked him about the agency’s politicization in Pará, and he changed the subject. He recognized INCRA’s responsibility for the situation in Virola-Jatobá, but believed that the necessary solution went beyond the institution’s authority. “It’s a case of public safety,” he said. “INCRA employees are also threatened.” INCRA did not respond to numerous other requests for comment about their handling of the Virola-Jatobá invasion.

I also contacted the Pará Public Security Bureau, in charge of the state police who were supposed to patrol Virola-Jatobá. The press office notified me that the bureau was not involved because the repossession wasn’t mandated by court order, but rather by a request from the Public Prosecutor’s Office. This was incorrect: There was indeed a court order. I disputed the statement but obtained no further response. After a new court order was issued, the press office said it was awaiting a declaration from INCRA.

“The actual situation is a complete lack of coordination between the agencies, which seems deliberate.”

The Federal Police, who are in charge of the investigation into the invasion of Virola-Jatobá, still hasn’t finished its inquiry, nearly two years after the fact. “It’s a complex job,” said Agent Carlos Castelo, and the Federal Police station in the region handles an area of 89,962 square miles with just three agents. Without the police inquiry, the Public Prosecutor’s Office can’t indict the gang for an environmental crime or ask for them to be detained.

“The actual situation is a complete lack of coordination between the agencies, which seems deliberate,” said Embrapa’s Porro.

More than 13 years after the establishment of PDS Virola-Jatobá, just 55 of the 160 settler families living there have official paperwork from INCRA. Formalizing the settlers’ status “is one of INCRA’s basic obligations, but one it hasn’t fulfilled, instead offering ever-changing excuses,” Porro said. Without a formal concession, the settlers have become easy targets for land-grabbers. (Dos Santos, of INCRA, said that formalizing settlers’ status is difficult and dependent on available budgets and police support.)

The settlers and those who defend their interests are under constant threat, both legally and physically. A recent Human Rights Watch report tallied 28 murders and 44 attempted murders or death threats against people fighting illegal deforestation in Brazil, most of them since 2015. The majority of these cases never made it to court.

Nuns and priests from the Pastoral Land Commission (or CPT, its Portuguese acronym), an organ of the Brazilian Catholic Church focused on the rural poor, are tasked with facilitating dialogue between settlers and the government offices in charge of the PDSs. Carrying out her role as an intermediary for the CPT, Stang was threatened dozens of times. Testifying before a 2004 parliamentary commission investigation, she said, “I receive death threats, publicly, from ranchers and land-grabbers on public land. They dare to threaten me and request my expulsion from Anapu. All this because I cry for justice.”

José Batista Afonso, a lawyer with the CPT, says that accusing activists of crimes is the land-grabbers’ new method of silencing opposition. The strategy has been successful.

On March 27, 2018, as settlers tried to draw INCRA’s attention to the invasion of Virola-Jatobá, police arrested Stang’s successor, Father José Amaro Lopes. The religious leader and activist was accused of seven crimes, among them the wrongful possession of property. The investigation stemmed from a complaint filed by rancher Silvério Albano Fernandes, then president of the Anapu Rural Producers Union, in March 2018. Fernandes accused Amaro of leading a criminal organization behind the occupation of a farm in Anapu. Fernandes claimed ownership of the 7,600-acre lot, but a court has ruled that the lands be returned to the government to promote family settlements. Amaro served as an intermediary between the settlers, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and INCRA.

CPT lawyers had to appeal to higher courts to secure Amaro’s release. He is now free, but he is prohibited from speaking with the settlers and attending the meetings that made up his day-to-day activities as an activist. Afonso, who defends another 20 activists currently being prosecuted by ranchers, told me in a phone interview that the local justice system in Pará “criminalized social movements.” A local judge had opposed Amaro’s release “on the grounds that he posed a risk to public order by leading a criminal organization. The ones who pose a risk to public order are his accusers,” Afonso said. During a December 2018 event in which he was awarded a prize for human rights, Amaro said, “If I did something wrong, it was putting land into workers’ hands so they could make a living.”

Fernandes disagrees. He told me that “Father Amaro is largely responsible for the numerous invasions that occur in Anapu. Since he was arrested and prohibited from [attending] assemblies, there haven’t been any more invasions.”

Stang had once denounced Fernandes for threatening her. In a statement given to the federal police on December 28, 2002, the missionary said that Fernandes had once given her a ride. Along the way, he told Stang that anyone who tried to take his land would be “up to their shins in blood.” As reported by sources requesting anonymity, Stang had once pointed out Fernandes and his two brothers “as the PDSs’ principal adversaries.” (Fernandes did not respond to questions about Stang’s statement.)

I spoke with Fernandes over a video call as fires in the Amazon made headlines around the world in late August. He made a point of showing me that there was no fire around him, positioning the camera to reveal a bright green field, without a single tree visible on the horizon. His discussion of the fires echoed Bolsonaro: What was happening in the Amazon was a “project of NGOs that want to colonize it only with Indians,” “the NGOs are the villains,” and “everything that you see in the media is a big lie.”

A Government Against the Amazon

Settlements make up about 7 percent of the area that Brazil legally defines as the Amazon. They total 139,000 square miles — an area larger than Germany under constant pressure from interests eager to use the land for cattle and mining and cut down the trees necessary to save the planet from climate catastrophe. An INCRA employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, told me, “INCRA created the projects but didn’t invest in enforcement policies, infrastructure, or development.”

Take the PDS Terra Nossa, situated in Novo Progresso, in southern Pará. An INCRA report determined that 80 percent of its area had been occupied by land-grabbers. A mining company, Chapleau Exploração Mineral, prospected for gold in the section that had been granted to settlers. A spokesperson for the company’s current owner, Serabi Gold, said that it has no operational activity in the PDS area, but admits that there is “a staff of 25 professionals responsible for the conservation of the project area” at the location and that the company has “opened dialogue with INCRA to obtain definitive authorization to operate in the region.”

Notably, the mining company received permission from the state government and the National Department of Mineral Production without presenting an environmental impact study, as required by law. The Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a civil action seeking to revoke Chapleau’s license, but federal courts denied it. During that process, the mining company admitted to operating in the area since 2007 with INCRA’s knowledge, but said that the agency never contacted them. (INCRA did not respond to questions about Chapleau.)

Another investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office this year revealed that INCRA’s office in Santarem, Pará, illegally issued dozens of individual land grants inside a PDS in the western part of the state. On just one day in January 2018, INCRA issued 238 concessions in the PDS Eixo Forte. Several concessions were assigned to the same person, and some of the people listed as beneficiaries were deceased. According to an action by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, “the issuance of individual titles for the collective settlement modalities poses a serious threat to residents, by creating a point of entry for land-grabbers to buy the [concessions] and then threaten the local communities.” In other words, land ownership chaos feeds deforestation and violence.

Poor farmers lose out in the process of privatization.

Since the end of Rousseff’s presidency, the federal government has abandoned agrarian reform. From 2015 to 2019, the budget destined for land purchases related to reform fell 95 percent. Instead, Brasília has settled on a new form of occupation of the Amazon: handing out ownership titles. Issuance of these documents grew 502 percent from 2015 to 2016, and pro-agribusiness leaders in the Amazon are pressuring INCRA to resume “land normalization” in Pará, which, in practice, means giving land titles to land-grabbers.

Poor farmers lose out in the process of privatization. When a farmer gains ownership of the land they are using, they no longer receive INCRA assistance and need to seek their own line of credit. The resulting cycle of debt leads many of them to sell their land and go back to unemployment lines in the cities. In the settlement model, the settler doesn’t earn a title to the land, just the right of use. In exchange, they receive state assistance — a better deal for many farmers.

The settlement model came under further threat in July 2017 when Temer signed a law that changed the rules for occupying federal lands. Environmentalists see the legislation as a green light for land-grabbing; under the new law, the total area that can be privatized per lot has increased from 3,700 acres to 6,100 acres. In addition, people who had occupied land illegally before 2008 could still benefit (whereas before, the limit was 2004. In effect, this rewards more recent land-grabs). The law also permits the purchase of large, occupied areas for 50 percent of the minimum values established by INCRA. “This ends up stimulating new occupations, because they become profitable,” said Brenda Brito, an analyst from Imazon, a research institute specializing in landownership issues in the Amazon. “The government is one of the Amazon’s biggest enemies,” she said.

Things got much worse after Bolsonaro’s election. As the former military man took the lead in the polls, researchers and activists noticed a growing animosity in the field. A group of farmers who oppose the PDS modality in the settlement where Stang was murdered prevented INCRA technicians from doing an inspection, arguing that “it would no longer be a PDS after Jair Bolsonaro’s victory.” Well-known ranchers in the region posted billboards supporting Bolsonaro with his trademark gun-pointing gesture, and people were intimidated. Nuns Katia Webster and Jane Dwyer, two of Stang’s partners in defense of the PDS system, no longer give phone interviews. “People opposed to the PDS’s sustainable model have gained strength,” said Porro.

Bolsonaro’s appointments to government posts tend to oppose the values of the institutions they’re put in charge of. As secretary of land affairs, for example, the president nominated Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, president of the Rural Democratic Union, traditionally a pro-agribusiness entity. At his inauguration, Nabhan Garcia called the Landless Workers Movement, or MST — which organizes the rural poor to occupy unused land — a “criminal organization,” and said he doesn’t negotiate with the landless. Earlier this year, The Intercept Brazil reported that Garcia was involved in hiring militias to threaten MST activists in the early 2000s. Now, Garcia is pushing to allow land to be privatized based on self-declarations of occupancy — and says that the government will verify the claims via satellite imagery. Scholars say that the rule change will give land-grabbers the chance to gain permanent ownership.

Bolsonaro had plans to make the Ministry of the Environment and INCRA subordinate to the Ministry of Agriculture, whose boss, Tereza Cristina, is a prominent advocate for agribusiness and has been labeled the “muse of poison” for her opposition to restrictions on noxious chemicals (to date, the new government has green-lit 410 pesticides). Bolsonaro later backed off the reorganization plan, but as for IBAMA (which is under the environment ministry), officials say they have no duties assigned to them, despite a sudden increase in deforestation and burning.

Since the start of the year, the Amazon has burned at an alarmingly increased rate.

The Ministry of the Environment is working, but backward. Its chief, Ricardo Salles, caused a diplomatic conflict when he ordered an inspection of projects financed by the Amazon Fund, bringing them to a standstill; 350 million reals are frozen, including resources that should be invested in PDSs and other initiatives that combine development and environmental protection. The German and Norwegian governments have suspended donations to the fund in response. Salles has also said that he doesn’t know who Chico Mendes is. Mendes, of course, was Brazil’s most famous environmentalist, murdered in 1988. (Stang was sometimes called “Chico Mendes in a dress.”)

In June, the United Nations classified Bolsonaro as the world’s worst leader when it comes to reducing the impact of climate change on the poor. The government’s contempt has already had a practical effect. Since the start of the year, the Amazon has burned at an alarmingly increased rate: On November 18, official data revealed that deforestation this year increased almost 30 percent, the highest percentage in a decade.

When fires detected by the monitoring radars of the National Institute for Space Research grabbed international attention, Bolsonaro fired the institute’s president, the renowned scientist Ricardo Galvão, and appointed a military man in his place. Bolsonaro attacked world leaders who expressed alarm and refused international help, accusing NGOs of starting the fires (without presenting any proof) and claiming that foreign countries want to take possession of the Amazon.

Bolsonaro’s assault on the Amazon is an acceleration of patterns that have been in place for decades. In 1999, Stang confided to Miyasaka her indignation at the Amazon settlement model as promoted by the government and private industry. “She said that the colonization scheme was doomed to re-concentrate land ownership and degrade the environment, and that they would have to implement a new proposal for environmentally friendly land reform,” Miyasaka recalled. And that was what she did, managing to win over reticent settlers who had never heard of making a living without cutting down the forest.

Dorothy Stang created a model for sustainable, socially conscious development for the Amazon. A model she defended with her own life. A model that is about to collapse.

This story was financed by the Brazil Human Rights Fund.

The post Emboldened by Bolsonaro, Land-Hungry Ranchers Are Destroying a Pioneering Project to Help the Poor and Save the Amazon appeared first on The Intercept.

Last month, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, traveled to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil to work with our newsroom on our next set of stories, speak to the Brazilian press about the rationale behind our reporting, and meet with our lawyers and advisers about the still-escalating Bolsonaro-era risks and threats provoked by these revelations.

I sat down with Reed during her trip to speak about the importance of this journalism, the massive changes it has produced in Brazilian politics, and how these exposés are a fulfillment of The Intercept’s core editorial mission. Since her trip — as is often the case for Brazil — many new critical developments have taken place in a short time, including the freeing of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the physical assault on me by a pro-Bolsonaro loyalist-pundit while we were on live TV.

In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday by Lula, the newly freed former president wrote about the improprieties and corruption on the part of Moro, Bolsonaro’s current justice minister, that were responsible for his imprisonment and that of numerous other politicians; Lula also explained how our months of reporting is what enabled the truth to finally be known:

It was only in June, with the publication of an investigation that showed collusion between the prosecution and judges by the Intercept Brazil, that the truth finally began to emerge. These revelations have rocked Brazilians and the world because they showed that a once acclaimed anti-corruption effort had been politicized, tainted and illegal.

To discuss those subsequent developments and set the context for my discussion with Reed, Jeremy Scahill recorded a five-minute introduction. The video of both Scahill’s overview, and mine and Reed’s discussion, can be seen below:

The post Watch: Betsy Reed Talks to Glenn Greenwald About Our Brazil Exposés — With an Overview From Jeremy Scahill appeared first on The Intercept.

The same Brazilian prosecutors who for years exhibited a single-minded fixation on jailing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are now seeking his release from prison, requesting that a court allow him to serve the remainder of his 11-year sentence for corruption at home. But Lula — who believes the request is motivated by fear that prosecutorial and judicial improprieties in his case, which were revealed by The Intercept, will lead to the nullification of his conviction — is opposing these efforts, insisting that he will not leave prison until he receives full exoneration.

In seeking his release, Lula’s prosecutors are almost certainly not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Quite the contrary: Those prosecutors have often displayed a near-pathological hatred for the two-term former president. Last month, The Intercept, jointly with its reporting partner UOL, published previously secret Telegram messages in which the Operation Car Wash prosecutors responsible for prosecuting Lula cruelly mocked the tragic death of his 7-year-old grandson from meningitis earlier this year, as well as the 2017 death of his wife of 43 years from a stroke at the age of 66. One of the prosecutors who participated publicly apologized, but none of the others have.

Far more likely is that the prosecutors are motivated by desperation to salvage their legacy after a series of defeats suffered by their once-untouchable, widely revered Car Wash investigation, ever since The Intercept, on June 9, began publishing reports based on a massive archive of secret chats between the prosecutors and Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw most of the convictions, including Lula’s, and who now serves as President Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and Public Security.

The prosecutors’ cynical gambit, it appears, is that the country’s Supreme Court — which two weeks ago nullified one of Moro’s anti-corruption convictions for the first time on the ground that he violated core rights of defendants — will feel less pressure to nullify Moro’s guilty verdict in Lula’s case if the ex-president is comfortably at home in São Paulo (albeit under house arrest) rather than lingering in a Curitiba prison.

But this strategy ran into a massive roadblock when Lula demanded that he not be released from prison unless and until he is fully exonerated. He wants to ensure that nobody — least of all Supreme Court judges who will rule on his appeal — feel relieved of their obligation to decide correctly by telling themselves that there is no need to take such a drastic step as nullifying Lula’s conviction given that he is no longer in jail but at home.

“I won’t trade my dignity for my freedom,” the former president proclaimed in a hand-written letter “to the Brazilian People,” explaining why he would resist efforts to swap his home for his cage as his prison. “I’ve already proven that the accusations against me are false. It is [the Car Wash prosecutors and Sergio Moro], not me, who are now prisoners of the lies they told Brazil and the world.”

In response, Deltan Dallagnol, the task force’s nominal chief and a prime subject of The Intercept’s reporting, insisted that Lula has no say in that matter: that if he is ordered to leave prison, he has no power to resist or reject the terms. So weakened is the Car Wash prosecution that, in a surreal spectacle, the prosecutors who worked for years and broke numerous rules to ensure Lula’s imprisonment are now demanding that he leave prison (albeit on their terms), while Lula categorically refuses to do so absent full acquittal of the crimes of which they accused him.

The Car Wash prosecutors have good reason to worry that Moro’s and their gross misconduct could lead to a nullification of Lula’s conviction. Beyond the alarming-to-them Supreme Court ruling from two weeks ago, numerous developments reflect a newfound hostility to their work.

On Friday morning, Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, reported that the Supreme Court is moving to judicially authenticate The Intercept’s archive so that its contents can be used in judicial proceedings to review the legitimacy of the anti-corruption probe’s convictions. Meanwhile, President of the Court Dias Toffoli announced this week that the court will shortly decide several looming questions about Car Wash that could, by themselves, lead to an annulment of Lula’s conviction.

Beyond the Supreme Court, Moro’s “anti-crime” package — which is principally designed to fulfill Bolsonaro’s dream of immunizing the police and military when they kill poor, innocent favela residents — has suffered multiple defeats in Congress. Bolsonaro’s choice for chief prosecutor, Augusto Aras, was confirmed by the Senate in September only after he publicly condemned the “excesses” of the Car Wash prosecutors, claiming that the prosecutors’ youth and lack of adult supervision made them believe they could cross all ethical lines.

Longtime defenders of the Car Wash probe — including one of the center-right leaders in the Senate of the 2016 impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, as well as the former chief prosecutor in his new book — have expressed remorse about the unethical components of the prosecutors’ actions as revealed by The Intercept’s last several months of reporting. One Supreme Court minister, Gilmar Mendes, this week read from The Intercept’s published Telegram chats to accuse Moro and the prosecutors of engaging in “organized criminality” and being “torturers” (for using the tactic of “preventative imprisonment” as a means of forcing defendants to accuse others as a condition for being released).

A new bill to punish prosecutors and judges for abusing their power — aimed at least in part at the abuses of Moro and the prosecutors — easily passed both houses of Congress last month, and most of Bolsonaro’s vetoes of parts of the bill were swiftly overridden. Numerous disciplinary proceedings are pending against Dallagnol and at least several harsh punishments are expected. A clear anti-Car Wash momentum is now driving many of Brazil’s key institutions.

The erosion of Moro and Car Wash’s credibility is now global: Last month, 17 leading anti-corruption scholars from around the world — including one, Yale Law School’s Susan Rose-Ackerman, repeatedly heralded by Dallagnol as the “world leading anti-corruption expert” — signed a letter that, citing The Intercept’s reporting, condemned Moro’s “illegal and immoral practices” and demanded Lula’s immediate release; on Thursday, the Paris City Council, citing The Intercept’s reporting, voted to make Lula an honorary citizen of Paris; last month, members of the Democratic House of Representatives caucus wrote a letter to the Justice Department which, referencing The Intercept’s reporting, proclaimed that “these reports appear to confirm that the actions of both Judge Moro and the Lava Jato prosecutors have been motivated by a political agenda that seeks to undermine the electoral prospects of Brazil’s Worker’s Party.”

To be sure, there will be significant pressure applied to, and even not-so-subtle threats against, the Supreme Court to avoid anything that would exonerate Lula. Each time Lula’s case has made its way to the highest court, members of the military, both active and retired, have warned the court in quite explicit terms that they were being watched, and expected the court to keep Lula where he was. Shortly prior to his father’s successful election victory, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo (who the president is currently attempting to nominate as his ambassador to the U.S.) warned that any adverse Supreme Court decisions could be addressed by “sending a solider and a corporal” to the doors of the court.

Notwithstanding those pressures and threats, Moro and the legitimacy of the Car Wash probe are far weaker and more vulnerable than they were four months ago. The prosecutors clearly fear that the crowning jewel of their work — Lula’s head on a stake — is in jeopardy. Much of their legitimacy has already been eroded, but any reversal of what they regard as their most cherished accomplishment would be a fatal blow.

Trying to get Lula out of his jail cell and into a more palatable prison — his home — is a desperate attempt to avert that catastrophe. And Lula knows it, which is why — remarkably — he is so insistent on remaining in prison until he receives the full acquittal he believes he is due and which, with the truth about Moro and the prosecutors’ actions finally known, he believes is imminent.

As more revelations continue to be published by The Intercept and its reporting partners about the misconduct of Moro and the prosecutors, the likelihood of a full reckoning for the once-revered prosecutors and the judge who led them increases. Lula’s calculation that he should remain in prison until he is fully cleared may prove to be erroneous, but there is certainly a solid basis in fact for his conclusion.

The post Fearful of Lula’s Exoneration, His Once-Fanatical Prosecutors Request His Release From Prison. But Lula Refuses. appeared first on The Intercept.

Take the dictatorship’s push. Known as Operation Amazon, the colonization plan hatched during the military government envisioned integrating the territory into Brazil through building roads and developing agricultural and corporate enterprises — all accomplished by settling people from the south, southeast, and northeast of the country and the coasts in the forest.

As for the aim, the dictatorship’s motto for the project spoke volumes: “Occupy to avoid surrender.” The military government argued that a thinly populated Amazon might create avenues for foreign powers to invade Brazilian territory. “One aspect of the doctrine said that Brazil could not leave any empty space, because it could threaten national security,” said João Roberto Martins Filho, a professor at the Federal University of São Carlos who has spent decades researching the dictatorship. “The idea was that it was necessary to channel activity into regions with smaller population density, and this became a state policy.”

Like all the other so-called development pushes into the Amazon, the results were catastrophic — for the forest itself, but especially for the communities who already lived amid it. One highway, for instance, was designed to travel from the city of Manaus, on the Amazon River, to nearly the northern edge of the basin. “The highway is irreversible, for the integration of the Amazon into the country,” the army’s Col. João Tarcísio Cartaxo Arruda, who led the construction battalion, said in 1975, according to a document made available by the National Truth Commission. “This road is important and must be constructed, whatever the cost. We will not change its layout, and the only burden for our battalions will be to pacify the Indians.”

That pacification came through so-called demonstrations of force — using machine guns, grenades, and dynamite — against the Waimiri-Atroari tribe. In these moves and others like it, thousands of Indigenous people were massacred. In 1972, the Waimiri-Atroari had a population of 3,000; by 1983, their number was reduced to 350. The National Truth Commission estimates that at least 8,350 Indigenous people were killed by the military government.

Operation Amazon came at a tremendous environmental cost. Nearly 10,000 miles of roads were built in seven years. Extractive and agricultural industrialists moved into the region, polluting and depleting resources. Over the nearly two decades of dictatorship, deforestation rates in the Amazon tripled.

Eventually, in the mid-2000s, the deforestation rate was reduced. But it’s already back on the rise. And a new military industrial push into the forest could prove to be a death blow to the Amazon.

Reviving an Old Military Dream

Today, the Amazon is on fire, the result of moves attributed to Bolsonaro’s allies among the agribusiness interests trying to open up the forest for their economic gain. And the army, empowered by Bolsonaro’s presidency, is simultaneously beginning another push of its own: the largest-scale plan to occupy and settle the Amazon since the dictatorship.

Previously unpublished documents obtained exclusively by The Intercept flesh out the military’s plan for a push into the interior of the Amazon. Known as the Baron of Rio Branco Project, the plan envisions large-scale development projects, eventually raising the Amazon region’s contribution to the Brazilian economy. Amid today’s conflagration in the Amazon, Bolsonaro went on television to pledge to protect the delicate — and globally vital — ecosystem. Yet the Rio Branco Project would exploit resources; build large-scale bridges, dams, and highways; and attract non-Indigenous citizens to settle the northern region, the sparsely populated Brazilian hinterlands. Each project would inevitably create ripple waves of secondary deforestation and disrupt local communities.

The project takes up the old military dream to colonize the Amazon, under the stated goal of developing the region and protecting Brazil’s northern border. The document obtained by The Intercept shows that the government envisions sources of “riches” in potential mining, a hydroelectric dam, and farming projects in the Guiana Shield — a geographic region that covers the Brazilian states of Amapá, Roraima, and the northern segments of Pará and Amazonas, as well as the nations of French Guiana, Suriname, and Guyana, much of Venezuela, and a sliver of Colombia. “It’s all virtually unexplored,” the slides say of these portions of Brazil. “It’s right there alongside the riches of the North.”

The plan outlines three large-scale construction projects in the state of Pará: a hydroelectric dam, a bridge extending over the Amazon River, and an extension of the BR-163 highway all the way to the border with Suriname. The overall objective is to integrate the remote northern region of the state of Pará with the state’s more industrialized southern reaches and, from there, with the rest of Brazil. The impoverished and sparsely populated area is crisscrossed by rivers and difficult to access. It is also the most well-preserved area of tropical forest in Pará, a state that is otherwise a national leader in deforestation.

While the purported economic benefits are offered as justifications for the Rio Branco Project, what is not mentioned — but referenced in the materials obtained by The Intercept — is another reason for the Amazon push: a revived version of the military dictatorship’s paranoid fears of an invasion of Brazil through the sparsely populated northern border.

The Rio Branco Project plan was first put forth this February by the Special Secretariat for Strategic Affairs, an entity overseen by the secretary-general of the presidency and charged with focusing on Brazil’s long-term social and economic growth. The special secretariat is led by retired Gen. Maynard Marques de Santa Rosa, and the plan is being coordinated by retired Col. Raimundo César Calderaro.

The project began enmeshed in the sort of chaos that typically reigns over politics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In February, the then-Secretary-General Gustavo Bebbiano was on his way to Tiriós, in the state of Pará, with two ministers, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles and Human Rights Minister Damares Alves, as part of a committee to meet with local notables. Bolsonaro, however, was unaware of the plan and vetoed the trip as soon as he found out. That decision helped trigger the crisis that eventually culminated in Bebbiano’s resignation later that month. The same plan was then presented by the Special Secretariat without fanfare later in closed meetings with local leaders and businesspeople in Pará.

The U.K.-based political website Open Democracy published parts of the presentation late last month. The Intercept has since obtained exclusive access to audio recordings and a full slide presentation from one of the meetings, in late April, which details the project and the private justifications given by officials for carrying it out. The meeting was organized by the Special Secretariat and was held at the headquarters of Federação da Agricultura e Pecuária do Pará, an agroindustry association in the state of Pará.

Whether or not the Rio Branco Project is successful in accomplishing its aims of bringing economic growth and national security to the northern region, the attempt to develop, industrialize, and securitize the region are likely to have a similar effect as previous Brazilian governments’ forays into the Amazon: catastrophic environmental degradation and calamity for the communities who have long since called the Amazon home.

“We’re quite concerned about the way things are being done,” said Caetano Scannavino, who runs the NGO Saúde e Alegria, or Health and Happiness, and lives in Santarém, Pará. “It’s not a question of being against infrastructure. It’s important to look at how it has been implemented, with no regard for the proper procedures or consultations.”

The “Globalist” Threat

The presentations in Tiriós framed the plan as a response to a dark threat: an unnamed foreign invasion. In an audio recording taken during the meeting and sent to The Intercept by a source who requested anonymity, Marques de Santa Rosa, the secretary of strategic affairs, claims that Brazil must act to guarantee its sovereignty at the borders with Suriname. The impetus is Chinese investment in and immigration to Suriname, on Brazil’s northern border. The speaker cites China’s purported record abroad: “On the eastern border of Siberia today, there are more Chinese than Cossacks,” the voice says on the recording. “Russia is now facing a very serious national security problem. We need to wake up before the same problem happens here.”

Suriname, a small country with a population of half a million, has indeed seen a wave of Chinese immigration accompanying investments from the Eastern superpower, but there is no Chinese policy of mass emigration to Suriname, said Mauricio Santoro, a professor of international relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

“The military tends to view the presence of foreigners in the Amazon, above all those from countries outside of South America, as a problem and a national security threat,” Santoro said. “But this says more about the world vision of the Brazilian armed forces than it does about the goals of other nations in the region.”

The purported Chinese threat is only one aspect of what government presenters called a “globalist campaign” to undermine Brazil’s sovereignty. The presenters identified NGOs, environmentalists, and, ironically, local populations — both quilombos, the sometimes centuries-old Amazon communities descended from escaped slaves, as well as Indigenous people — as the main agents of the globalist plot. According to the presentations, this diverse group is working to restrict the government’s “freedom of action” in the region.

Echoing Bolsonaro’s campaign slogan, the presentation slides proclaim, “Brazil above all else” — implying that Indigenous, quilombo, and environmental movements are not part of Brazil. Instead, the presenters framed them as hindrances of the past — obstacles that, today, are on the cusp of being overcome.

In the past, these groups had indeed presented obstacles. One of the new projects outlined in the presentations obtained by The Intercept is the Oriximiná hydroelectric dam, on the Trombetas River, a large tributary of the Amazon, in the state of Pará. Past projects along the same river have been canceled because of the socio-environmental impact on Indigenous and quilombo communities. Among the area’s inhabitants are uncontacted tribes.

The government’s new initiative would steamroll through the region by shutting Indigenous, quilombo, and environmental movements out of the process.

The government’s new initiative would steamroll through the region by shutting Indigenous, quilombo, and environmental movements out of the process. Indigenous organizations only learned of the Rio Branco Project through media reports. And yet the project will impact 27 Indigenous territories and protected areas within the northern region — including the Wajpi territory in the state of Amapá, where an indigenous leader was reportedly murdered by mining prospectors last July.

In an official statement, four Indigenous organizations said that the project “will have destructive and irreversible impacts for us, as Indigenous peoples, and our ways of life, based on the sustainable use of natural resources, which has in fact helped us to preserve one of the largest areas of environmental protection on the planet.” The statement, published in May, says that the plan will “tear in half” the Indigenous territories currently recognized by the Brazilian state — and thereby infringe on the tribes’ constitutional protections.

The Conspiracy Theory

Just as the purported threat of Chinese invasion harkens back to the fears of the bygone dictatorship, so too does the modern Brazilian right’s fears of environmental activism — another potential source of foreign meddling in Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon.

With the end of the Cold War, and the geopolitical situation changed, the military dictatorship’s main concern became the U.S. The 1980s had seen dramatic growth in environmental concern over the Amazon and in certain corners of the international community, a discussion began over whether Brazil was failing to protect the forest. The military, at one point, actually feared that the U.S. might invade the rainforest under the pretense that it was necessary to protect the environment for the benefit of the whole planet. In the wake of the dictatorship, these fears waned as the Brazilian government took forest stewardship more seriously. In 1989, it created the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, known as IBAMA, which operates as the nation’s principal enforcement arm for environmental protections.

The post-military presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva saw fears over an international push into the Amazon recede further, but amid an economic downturn, the military began to oppose the presidency of Dilma Rousseff and talk of national sovereignty in the region bubbled up again.

Today, these sentiments are rapidly on the rise, with two army generals claiming in August that there was a “great indirect plot” to nullify the Brazilian state in the Amazon. This conspiracy theory posits that the dissolution of the Brazilian state in the region would progress as international aid bolstered the rise of Indigenous states. There is a longstanding fear, for example, that the Yanomami tribes on the Brazilian side of the border will unite with those on the Venezuelan side to create an independent Yanomami nation.

For the army and its right-wing allies in government, the conspiracy theory extends all the way to the Catholic Church. In particular, the military establishment is worried about the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, a conference scheduled to take place in October. Organized by the Vatican, 250 leading bishops of the Catholic Church will meet for 21 days to discuss the topic “Amazonia: new paths for the Church and for an integral ecology.” Brazilian Gen. Eduardo Villas Bôas claimed that the confab is tainted by “political bias.” In a presentation in August, Villas Bôas and Gen. Alberto Cardoso said that the synod, the media, foreign governments, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and the Council of Missionaries to the Indigenous are all agents of the “grand indirect plot.”

Bolsonaro’s Playbook

The same fears of a “grand indirect plot” can be seen in Bolsonaro and his allies’ response to the recent fires in the Amazon. While wildfires are common at this time of year, data provided by the National Institute for Space Research indicate that this year, fires increased 84 percent compared to the period between January and August 2018. Moreover, there is evidence that many of them were lit on purpose by loggers and land-grabbers in response to Bolsonaro’s policies, which have loosened environmental monitoring and enforcement.

Bolsonaro, though, initially responded to the crisis by accusing NGOs of having started the wildfires to “attract attention.” Then, in a meeting with the governors of the nine states in the Amazon basin, he claimed that Indigenous reservations “impair the nation” and that the policies and laws that protect them are effectively using Indigenous people as “pawns in a maneuver” to block the riches of the region from being used “for the common good.” He also stated that NGOs form part of a plot to leave the Amazon intact for “future exploitation by other countries.”

“The military’s objective, thinking strategically, is this: to get in close again with the government.”

Martins Filho, the professor who has extensively studied the dictatorship, said he sees the army’s influence in many of Bolsonaro’s policies and reactions. “The military’s objective, thinking strategically, is this: to get in close again with the government,” he said.

Indeed, current and former top military officials echo the president’s belligerent tone. After French President Emmanuel Macron called the Amazon fires an “international crisis,” Villas Bôas said that Macron’s statements were “direct attacks on Brazilian sovereignty.” Augusto Heleno, a retired general and top Bolsonaro security adviser, said that those advocating for international action on the fires “just want to put the brakes on our inevitable economic growth.” And Vice President Hamilton Mourão, another retired general, said those who are referring to the fires as a crisis were “dishonest, as if they don’t know that the lungs of the planet are the oceans, and not the Amazon.”

Bolsonaro, meanwhile, has ramped up deregulation ever since taking office. Salles, the environment minister, has been spearheading the effort to dismantle IBAMA, the environmental protection agency, and other monitoring agencies. During his campaign, Bolsonaro warned that he would not demarcate “even a centimeter” of new land for Indigenous territories, and when he assumed power, he appointed Nabhan Garcia — a member of the agribusiness lobby known for wielding rifles to warn off supposed trespassers on his land — in charge of agrarian reform and land demarcations.

For the Amazon, the results have already been disastrous. Research indicates that the rate of deforestation in 2019 is 50 percent greater than in the previous year — an estimate which may be conservative, given that figures calculated at the end of the year tend to be much higher. According to the latest statistics, July was the worst month yet, with an increase of 278 percent in deforestation compared to July 2018.

The Fate of the Rio Branco Project

For Amazon defenders, the crises of wildfires and deforestation will only worsen if the Baron of Rio Branco Project is fully implemented, with the rainforest further opened up to the destruction wrought by Bolsonaro’s allies in agribusiness.

Because of secrecy and obfuscation, the project’s fate is unclear. In January, the government wanted to pass a resolution that would mandate a 100-day implementation deadline for the project, although that did not come to pass. The plan, nonetheless, was discussed in closed meetings coordinated by Calderaro, who went to Santarém in February to discuss the project with the mayor, Nélio Aguiar, and to Rio de Janeiro to meet with the staff of the Institute of Military Engineers to get strategic maps of the region. In March, Calderaro discussed the Baron of Rio Branco plan with Marques de Santa Rosa, who was previously removed from a high-ranking military post in 2010 for criticizing the National Truth Commission that investigated crimes committed by the military dictatorship.

In April, agribusiness leaders were appraised of the Rio Branco Project at a meeting at the headquarters of the Federation of Agriculture and Livestock in Pará. And, in the capital Brasília, numerous meetings were held to discuss the plan. The most recent, on June 19, featured the participation of Marques de Santa Rosa, the Strategic Planning Secretary Wilson Trezza, and Director of International Strategic Affairs Paulo Érico Santos de Oliveira. In the official records, there is no mention of the participation of the authorities of the Ministry of the Environment in these discussions.

The Rio Branco Project “is still in the discussion and consideration phases,” said a spokesperson for the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs in a statement. “We are planning to form a group integrating various ministries, through an official resolution, to refine the Rio Branco Project. However, there is no set date for its launch.” The spokesperson added that Bolsonaro would soon issue an order to form the working group, and the government expected the project to benefit local communities who live in poverty.

In response to an inquiry, the army said that the military has nothing to say on the subject.

If the project is fully implemented, it’s unlikely to ever accomplish the goals laid out in the presentations obtained by The Intercept. “We must raise income and the contribution of the Amazon to the Brazilian GDP, which at present is no more than 5.4 percent in such a rich area,” the presenter says on the recording. “We must reach a value of at least 50 percent to achieve equality with the rest of the country.”

In fact, the gross domestic product yielded by legal activity in the Amazon corresponds to 8.6 percent of the Brazilian total — a proportion that has grown in recent years. To reach 50 percent of the country’s GDP would be a herculean task: The Amazon region would have to generate twice as much income as São Paulo, the richest state in Brazil, which currently accounts for 31 percent of the GDP.

Reported in collaboration with Manuella Libardi of Open Democracy

Translation: Andrew Nevins

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets that aims to strengthen coverage of the climate crisis.

The post Brazil’s Army Wanted to “Occupy” the Amazon Before. Leaked Audio Reveals Their Plan to Try Again. appeared first on The Intercept.

In fact, in the months preceding his false claim, Dallagnol was a participant in secret chats exclusively obtained by The Intercept, in which prosecutors plotted to leak information to the media with the goal of manipulating suspects by making them believe that their indictment was imminent even when it was not, in order to intimidate them into signing confessions that implicated other targets of the investigation.

Critics of the so-called Car Wash investigation — which imprisoned dozens of Brazilian elites including, most significantly, the center-left ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was leading all polls to win the 2018 presidential election (ultimately won by Jair Bolsonaro after Lula was barred) — long suspected that the prosecutorial team was responsible for numerous media reports that revealed sensitive details about suspects targeted by the investigations.

Dallagnol and his team always publicly, even angrily, denied this. Yet the Secret Brazil Archive obtained by The Intercept, which we began reporting on June 9, contains numerous instances of the prosecutorial team planting exactly the sorts of leaks they repeatedly denied involvement in — often with motives that rendered the outcome legally questionably, if not outright illegal.

One illustrative example came relatively early in the investigation. On June 21, 2015, in a Telegram group for task force members, the Car Wash prosecutor Orlando Martello Júnior asked one of his colleagues, Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima: “what is the strategy for revealing the next steps in the cases of Electrobras, etc.?” Santos Lima replied that while he did not know what specifically his colleague was referring to, “my leaks are always designed to cause them to think that investigations are inevitable and thus incentivize them to collaborate.”

According to Brazilian law of criminal prosecutions (which provides rules governing confessions as part of plea bargains), a plea bargain can be accepted only if it has been offered “voluntarily.” But the prosecutor admitted to his colleagues that he used media leaks to forge an intimidating environment and, with that, could obtain confessions through manipulative means. These actions are squarely at odds with what are required to be the voluntary nature of confessions and plea bargains.

June 21, 2015 – Chat Group: FT MPF Curitiba 2

Orlando Martello – 09:03:04 – CF(leaks) what is the strategy for revealing the next steps of Electrobras, etc?

Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – 09:10:08 –http://m.politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,na-mira-do-chefe-,1710379

Santos Lima – 09:12:21 – I don’t know what you’re talking about, but my leaks are always designed to cause them to think that investigations are inevitable and thus incentive them to collaborate.

Santos Lima – 09:15:37 – I read the news of Flores on the other list. It’s just reheated news.

Santos Lima – 09:18:16 – Incidentally, Moro told me that he will have to use this week’s Avancini term on Angra

Martello – 09:25:33 – CFleaks, we don’t know want to do BA on Angra e Eletrobrás? Why alert them to this fact in the press conference?

Martello – 09:26:00 – In order not to lose our habit?

In the chat, Santos Lima boasted, without any embarrassment, that he “leaked” information to the press. In addition, his comment implied that this was a customary practice, since it referred to the plural: “my leaks.” And the prosecutor stated with apparent pride that he did so with well-defined objectives: to use fear of indictments in order to induce suspects to act in the prosecutors’ own interests by “collaborating.”

Notably, the prosecutor’s boast of these types of leaks did not elicit any objections from the other Car Wash prosecutors. Throughout the conversations, the rest of the group remained silent, suggesting that leaks of this type were far from unusual.

On the same day, the task force’s chief prosecutor, Dallagnol, along with Martello, announced in the chat that — in order to pressure the suspect — they had leaked information to a reporter with the right-wing newspaper Estadão that the U.S. government would help investigate Freiburghaus. They were expecting that this media leak would advance their investigation by pressuring Freiburghaus. It was Dallagnol who was personally responsible for the leak, as shown in his secret conversation with the newspaper reporter (The Intercept has translated the Portuguese conversations into English).

June 21, 2015 – Private chat

Deltan Dallagnol – 11:43:49 – The operator of Odebrecht was Bernardo, who is in Switzerland. The U.S. will act on our request, because the transactions passed through the U.S. We have already made a request for US cooperation regarding deposits received by PRC. This is something new. Are you interested in publishing this today or tomorrow, REDACTED, keeping my name off? You can say “source in the MPF.” At the press conference, Igor said there is a red notice to arrest him, and there is. He can be arrested anywhere in the world. Now with the US in action, which is new, let’s see if we can do what was done in the FIFA case to Bernardo, which is what inspired us.

REDACTED – 11:45:44 – Whoa awesome! !!!! I will publish today!!!!!!!

As the conversation progressed, the reporter advised that the story about U.S. aid in the Odebrecht case (which was not formalized at the time) would be the Estadão headline the next day.

Back in the prosecutor’s Telegram chat group, a conversation between June 21 and 22 detailed the task force’s intentions toward Freiburghaus:

June 21, 2015 – Chat Group: FT MPF Curitiba 2

Deltan Dallagnol – 20:33:52 – Tomorrow the cooperation with the US regarding Bernando is the headline in Estadão.

Dallagnol – 20:34:00 – Confirmed

Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – 20:55:16 – I tried to read, but I couldn’t. Tomorrow I’ll look. Let’s closely control the media. I have space at FSP [Folha], who knows how we can use them if we need.

The information leaked by the Car Wash prosecutorial task force was indeed the newspaper headline, and the methods of pressure imposed on the investigative source were resumed shortly thereafter in the same chat:

June 22, 2015 – Chat Group: FT MPF Curitiba 2

Deltan Dallagnol – 01:56:40 – I think we need to request a freeze of his assets in Switzerland

Dallagnol – 01:56:48 – Bank account, real estate and others

Dallagnol – 01:57:00 – Go and tell him he’ll lose everything

Dallagnol – 01:57:20 – Have him on his knees and then offer redemption. There’s no way he won’t take it

Cover of the newspaper Estadão de S. Paulo on June 22, 2015, the headline of which reads: “Americans will help to investigate Odebrecht.”

At the end of the day, the strategy failed, as Freiburghaus never provided any plea bargain or cooperation.

Beyond the use of media leaks to intimidate and manipulate confessions, what makes all of this particularly incriminating is that Dallagnol has publicly, and vehemently, denied that Car Wash prosecutors have ever used any leaks, claiming that all the leaks about Car Wash came instead from defense attorneys and their clients. In the interview with BBC Brasil following a speech he gave at Harvard Law School in April 2017, Dallagnol said that “public officials do not leak information — the loophole is inevitable access to secret data by defendants and their clients.” When asked directly if the task force had leaked, the chief prosecutor replied, “In cases where only public officials had access to the data, the information did not leak.”

Responding to inquiries from The Intercept about this story, the press spokesperson for the Car Wash task force denied that the prosecutors had ever leaked information to Estadão, insisting that it “never leaked sensitive information to the press, contrary to what the questioning suggests.” To justify this denial, the task force argues that information passed to the press must violate the law or a court order to be characterized as a “leak.” Using this newly created definition of “leak,” the task force argues that the material sent by Dallagnol to Estadão did not, in its view, violate either the law or any court order and therefore, cannot be accurately described as a “leak.”

“Is there any chance to release the news to GOL?”

But The Intercept’s reporting here does not claim or suggest that Dallagnol or Santos Lima committed a crime or violated court orders by leaking information that was not known to the public. The point of the reporting is that the prosecutors did exactly what Dallagnol told the BBC they never did: namely, leaked inside information about investigations of which the public and the media were unaware in order to advance their investigative goals.

To defend Dallagnol from this clear evidence that he lied, the task force is trying to invent a new definition of “leak,” a meaning that only considers an act to be a “leak” if it entails a violation of the law or a court order. But that, to put it generously, is not a commonly recognized understanding of what leaking means. Indeed, in his interview with the BBC, Dallagnol did not deny that the task force illegally leaked. He denied that the task force used leaks of any kind — “public officials do not leak information,” he said, adding: “In cases where only public agents had access to the data, the information did not leak.”

The task force’s insistence that it never used leaks is especially bizarre given that Santos Lima himself boasted that he did just that, using the word “leak” to describe his own actions: “my leaks are always designed to cause them to think that investigations are inevitable and thus incentive them to collaborate,” he wrote, demonstrating that even the prosecutors themselves do not understand leaks to have the definition they are now trying to impose on it. Moreover, in his conversation with the Estadão reporter, Dallagnol himself described the information he was sending about the proposed collaboration with the U.S. as “new” and for this reason, insisted that the information he sent could only be published if they keep “my name off” the record.” If the information published was already public, as the Car Wash task force is now claiming through its spokesperson, why would Dallagnol insist on anonymity?

Thus, the task force’s denial that prosecutors did exactly what Dallagnol falsely insisted they never did — leaking information that was not known to the public — is contradicted by the prosecutors’ own words, as posted in the chat above, in which they themselves describe their actions as “leaks.” It is also negated by Dallagnol’s insistence to the Estadão reporter that information passed to the paper should not be attributed to him. It is further refuted by other repeated episodes in which prosecutors admit to leaking information about investigations to the media, often using specifically the word “leaks” that they now seek to redefine.

Selective Leak

These leaks were not isolated cases. In 2016, Car Wash prosecutors spoke explicitly about their use of “selective leaking” to the media intended to influence and manipulate a rumored petition for habeas corpus from former Speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha, to be filed in the Supreme Court:

December 12, 2016 – Chat Group: Filhos do Januario 1

Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – 18:45:31 – I received from the Russian: off the record I received news, I don’t know if it’s true, that there would be an order from the Supreme Court that would release Cunha tomorrow

Roberson Pozzobon – 18:51:49 – This info is circulating here at the federal prosecutor’s office also

Paulo Roberto Galvão – 18:57:24 – The Supreme Court would be drained. I don’t believe it.

Athayde Ribeiro Costa – 18:57:40 –toffi, lewa and gm. I don’t doubt it.

Santos Lima – 18:58:37 – It’s necessary to see who goes to the hearing.

Jerusa Viecili – 18:58:39 – Pqp

Santos Lima –19:00:58 – Is there any chance to release the news to GOL?

Costa – 19:01:35 – selective leak …

These dialogues prove that Dallagnol lied to the BBC when he denied the use of leaks. That denial came after Dallagnol participated in several conversations in which his task force colleagues explicitly discussed doing what he publicly denied: namely, promoting leaks and using the media for their own interests. Ironically, Dallagnol himself pointed out to the BBC how complex the task of proving leaks was because, according to him, those involved always deny it.

“It is very difficult to identify the point (source of the leak), because if you listen to these people, they will deny it,” he said. Indeed they do. That’s precisely what Dallagnol and his colleagues spent years doing falsely — until the truth was finally revealed through the publication of their own words.

João Felipe Linhares has contributed research to this article.

The post Brazil’s Chief Prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, Lied When He Denied Leaking to the Press, Secret Chats Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

Mendes, in a sweeping decision, wrote that any attempt to investigate journalists for their reporting would “constitute an unambiguous act of censorship” and would violate Brazil’s constitution.

Over the past two months, Greenwald and The Intercept Brasil have published a series of damning articles on Moro’s role as a judge in Operation Car Wash, a string of supposedly anti-corruption prosecutions of Brazil’s political elite. The stories were based on Telegram chats given to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source.

The stories, which have dominated the political conversation in Brazil for weeks, showed Moro closely coordinating with prosecutors over their strategy in an apparent attempt to steer the cases and help convict defendants — all while Moro publicly portrayed himself as an unbiased and independent judge.

Most critically, Moro presided over the trial of leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and barred him from running for reelection in 2018 — just as polls showed he was the heavy favorite to win. Hard right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro ended up winning the presidency and immediately appointed Moro as his Justice Minister.

But rather than addressing the questions of Moro’s conduct head on, President Bolsonaro has instead attacked Greenwald. Bolsonaro has publicly stated multiple times in recent weeks that Greenwald has “committed crimes” and that he “may do jail time.” In July, a right-wing publication, which regularly publishes anonymously sourced leaks and rumors that benefit members of Bolsonaro’s party, reported that Greenwald’s finances were under investigation by prosecutors controlled by Justice Minister Moro in relation to The Intercept Brasil’s publications.

After Mendes’s opinion, however, any investigations by the government into Greenwald should halt. The petition to the Brazilian Supreme Court was originally filed on July 11 by the center-left environment-focused political party Rede Sustentabilidade, which translates to the Sustainability Network. The leadership of Rede Sustenabilidade was a strong supporter of Justice Minister Moro, until the revelations by The Intercept Brasil and their concerns about the effects any investigation of the journalists involved would have on press freedom in Brazil.

In a win for all Brazilian journalists, Mendes’s stirring opinion went far beyond the case at hand and invoked a powerful and broad defense of journalists’ rights. “The immediate right of free speech is the right to obtain, produce and disseminate facts and news by any means,” Mendes wrote. “The constitutional secrecy of the journalistic source makes it impossible for the State to use coercive measures to constrain professional performance and to impede the form of reception and transmission of what is brought to public knowledge.”

Mendes and the Car Wash task force have long been at odds. The minister has repeatedly publicly criticized the operation and granted habeas corpus to many suspects that the prosecutors argued should be kept behind bars. This Tuesday, El País published Telegram conversations in partnership with The Intercept that showed Car Wash coordinator Deltan Dallagnol and his colleagues attempted to gather evidence in Switzerland that could possibly provoke Mendes’s impeachment from the court. Such an investigation is illegal since, under Brazilian law, the Supreme Court must approve any investigation into its own members, and no such request was ever filed by the Car Wash task force. Another article from the online news site UOL, published in partnership with The Intercept, showed that the Car Wash prosecutors clandestinely used a third party to contest a ruling by Mendes, in an runaround of their own institutional hierarchy.

In a statement to The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation, Greenwald said: “A free press is a pillar of any democracy because it is one of the few tools for shining a light on the corrupt acts carried out by society’s most powerful actors in the dark. That’s precisely why those same powerful actors so frequently want to punish journalists for doing our jobs, as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and his Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro have been explicitly threatening to do in response to our exposés.”

Greenwald added: “The Brazilian Constitution robustly and expressly protects exactly the work we’re doing, and I’m grateful that the Brazilian Supreme Court has applied those guarantees against the repressive, retaliatory acts threatened by the Bolsonaro government against us. This crucial precedent ensures that not only we, but all Brazilian journalists, can do our jobs even in the Bolsonaro era without fear of official retaliation from the state.”

Rede Sustentabilidade was able to petition the Supreme Court directly instead of first going to a lower court because the issue touched on core constitutional rights protected under the Brazilian Constitution. Rede Sustentabilidade also asked for an “urgent” ruling, given the timely nature of the potential press freedom implications. In Brazil, a single minister in the Supreme Court can rule on such urgent requests in advance of a full panel of judges hearing the case.

Minister Mendes’s ruling is only preliminary, but the full court may take months or years to take on the case, so Mendes’s ruling may stand for a significant length of time. It is a powerful rebuke of those in the Bolsonaro government who have indicated they would like to sweep aside important press freedom rights for all journalists.

The post Brazil Supreme Court Minister Rules to Protect Press Freedom for Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept appeared first on The Intercept.

The answer, in one word: None.

The public interest in reporting this material has been obvious from the start. These documents revealed serious, systematic, and sustained improprieties and possible illegality by Brazil’s current Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro while he was a judge, as well as by the chief prosecutor of the Car Wash investigation, Deltan Dallagnol, and other members of that investigative task force. It was the Car Wash task force, which Moro presided over as a judge, that was responsible for prosecuting ex-President Lula da Silva and removing him from the 2018 election, paving the way for the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to become president. The corruption exposed by our reporting was so serious, and so consequential, that even many of Moro’s most loyal supporters abandoned him and called for his resignation within a week of the publication of our initial stories.

As the revelations of corruption by Moro and Dallagnol grew — reported both by us and our journalistic partners in Brazil — those officials resorted to the tactics used by government officials everywhere when their improprieties are revealed in the press: They tried to distract attention away from their own misconduct by fixating on the actions of the source as well as the journalists who revealed their wrongdoing.

That is what Sergio Moro, exploiting his position as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice and public security, has been attempting to do for weeks. He and his defenders in Bolsonaro’s party constantly speak about the alleged crimes committed by our source and imply that the reporters and editors at The Intercept and other media outlets working with us are criminals and “accomplices” for the role we have played in exposing their corruption. Moro consistently refers to The Intercept’s reporters as “the allies of the hackers.”

And on July 27, Bolsonaro directly weighed in, with the scurrilous charge that Glenn Greenwald got married and adopted children in order to avoid deportation (his marriage occurred 14 years ago), and threatened Greenwald with imprisonment with the line, “He may take a cane here in Brazil.”

But despite their aggressive efforts, Moro and his defenders have been unable to obtain any evidence to support their insinuations that The Intercept did anything in this matter other than exercise our right to practice journalism, which is guaranteed and protected by the Brazilian Constitution.

At the end of last week, after Brazil’s Federal Police had announced the arrests, they released what they called the “confession” of the person they claim is the principal hacker who provided us with this material, Walter Delgatti Neto. After being interrogated for hours and allegedly “confessing” to the hacking, Delgatti Neto said in his official police statement that:

• he never spoke to any Intercept reporter until he had already completed his hacking;
• he never requested or received any payment from The Intercept (or any other party) for providing the documents;
• he only spoke to The Intercept anonymously;
• he never altered any of the chats he provided to us and does not believe that it would be technically possible to have altered the chats given how he downloaded them from Telegram; and
• his claimed motive for obtaining and leaking these documents was inspired by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: to improve his country by exposing hidden corruption that the public had the right to know.

Because we have not only the right but the duty — under both the Constitution in Brazil and the code of ethics that governs our profession — to protect our sources, we have not and will not comment on the individuals accused by the Federal Police of having hacked into Telegram accounts and then providing information to our journalists.

But what we can confirm is that, as we have said emphatically from the beginning, the work we have done is classic public interest journalism: receiving authentic information that reveals serious wrongdoing by the country’s most powerful officials and then carefully and responsibly reporting it. Even the Federal Police’s account of what their suspect says aligns with what we have said from the start about our role.

When we published our first series of exposes on June 9, we included an editorial explaining the journalistic principles that guided our reporting of the archive and what our role was in obtaining it. We wrote:

Until now, the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable: For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening. …

The Intercept’s only role in obtaining these materials was to receive them from our source, who contacted us many weeks ago (long before the recently alleged hacking of Moro’s telephone) and informed us that they had already obtained the full set of materials and was eager to provide them to journalists.

When we received the archive, we asked ourselves two questions, the same two key questions journalists around the world ask when embarking on a story: 1) Can we determine that this material is authentic? and 2) Is it in the public interest to report it?

If the answer to those two questions is “yes” — as it was in this case — then we have not only the right but the duty to inform the public about it. That is what we have been doing since June 9 and will continue to do until all of the material in the public interest is reported. This is also why we opened our newsroom and archive to Brazilian journalistic partners, including the major newspaper Folha, the news magazine Veja, and others. 

We were able to authenticate this material using the same methods that at least six other journalistic outlets used to authenticate it, many of which were the same methods used to authenticate the Snowden archive before reporting on it. They include comparing the contents to nonpublic material to determine that it was genuine; consulting with sources whose nonpublic knowledge aligned with its contents; and confirming with legal specialists that the highly intricate, nonpublic legal material could have been created only by someone with in-depth, inside knowledge of the Car Wash investigations. We were also able to see in the chats the prosecutors’ past conversations with our own reporters, and we found that they were authentic. The other journalists who had access to the material did the same check and came to the same conclusion: The chats are real.

If history is any indication, the attempt by Moro and his defenders to encourage the public to fixate on the actions of the alleged source rather than the content of our journalistic revelations about his misconduct will fail spectacularly. Much of the most important journalism of the last several decades was made possible by sources who illegally obtained vital information and furnished it to journalists. What history remembers is what the reporting revealed, not the actions of the sources who helped reveal it.

In 1971, a former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg stole tens of thousands of pages of top-secret documents proving that the U.S. government was lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He gave those stolen documents to the New York Times and then to the Washington Post, both of which reported them. What people remember are the lies revealed by those stolen documents. To the extent Ellsberg is discussed, he is widely regarded as a hero for enabling this official deceit to be exposed by journalists.

Throughout the war on terror waged by the U.S. and its allies since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the largest media outlets in the West — the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, BBC, the Guardian — repeatedly received vital information from sources who risked prosecution to expose grave wrongdoing, such as torture, CIA black sites, and illegal domestic NSA spying. While a few authoritarian voices called for the imprisonment of the journalists who revealed those secrets, most regarded the reporting as vital and necessary, and all of those exposes received the top prizes of journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize.

The same was true of the reporting in 2013 and 2014 about the secret mass spying on the internet and entire populations around the world by the U.S. government and its allies — reporting that was enabled by documents unlawfully disseminated by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Dozens of media outlets around the world, including Globo in Brazil, were eager to use those illegally obtained documents to report on the secret spying by government officials because journalists understand that what matters is not the acts or motives of the source but the content of what the journalism reveals to the public.

And, of course, what history remembers most about that reporting are not the moral judgments by the U.S. government and its defenders about Edward Snowden’s actions. What matters — what history has recorded — is what the reporting revealed about the mass and indiscriminate invasions of privacy carried out in secret by security state agencies.

We have no doubt that Moro, Dallagnol, and their allies will continue to use the same tactics pioneered by Richard Nixon and his top aides against Daniel Ellsberg and other sources during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals: namely, to focus public attention on the acts of those who revealed their corruption rather than on the corruption they themselves committed.

But we also have no doubt that these tactics will be no more successful in this case than they were in all these prior cases of crucial journalism over the last several decades. What matters to the public is what their most powerful leaders have done in secret. And that’s why a free press is so vital, so indispensable, to a healthy democracy: because only journalism that is independent of the government and unconstrained by corrupt officials can ensure that the public remains informed and aware of what their leaders are doing and that those officials are prevented from carrying out corrupt acts in secret.

Those are the principles on which The Intercept was founded in 2013. Those are the principles that have driven the reporting we have done from the inception of our news organization. And those are the principles that — with your help and support — will continue to drive our ongoing reporting of the Secret Brazil Archive.

The post The Bolsonaro Government’s Aggressive Response Shows Why Our Reporting on the Secret Brazil Archive Is So Vital appeared first on The Intercept.

In March 2018, Dallagnol received more than $10,000 to give a speech to Neoway Tecnologia Integrada Assessoria e Negócios S.A., a big-data firm that was under investigation by Car Wash for potentially corrupt contracts with a state-controlled oil company.

Three months later, Dallagnol was the featured speaker at a secret, off-the-record event with the most influential banks and investors in Brazil, organized by investment firm XP Investimentos. It’s not clear if he was paid for the event, but his speaking agent, who works on commission, negotiated the agreement with XP. Invitees to the talk included at least three banks that had been investigated by Car Wash: Itaú, Santander, and Deutsche Bank. The investment firm engaged Dallagnol for two other speaking events — both were public and well paid.

In an apparent bid to convince Dallagnol to take on the off-the-record speaking gig, the XP representative told the prosecutor in the chats that Supreme Court Minister Luiz Fux had already participated in a similar off-the-record event “and nothing came out in the press,” adding that two other Supreme Court ministers had also been invited to give private talks. Fux did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment and the other two ministers, Alexandre de Moraes and Luís Roberto Barroso, denied participation in such events.

“Nothing came out in the press.”

The topic of the series of XP talks that Dallagnol and Fux participated in was the Car Wash investigation and the national elections that were scheduled to take place later that year. Invited guests included representatives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Natixis, Société Générale, Standard Chartered, State Street, Macquarie Capital, TD Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Itaú, Bradesco, Santander, Verde Asset Management, and Nomura Holdings.

Dallagnol also brought with him Guilherme Donega, a Brazil-based consultant for the anti-corruption advocacy organization Transparency International. The group has close ties with the Car Wash task force and partnered with Dallagnol and colleagues on their New Measures Against Corruption initiative, a proposal for anti-corruption reforms.

In a statement, Transparency International said that Donega spoke about the New Measures initiative and was not paid for his participation. Responding to a question about the ethics of paid speaking engagements by prosecutors, the organization said that “activities of any kind — even private ones — that may compromise the integrity, fairness and impartiality necessary for the function they perform should be avoided.” The group added that, in uncertain situations, the relevant authorities should be consulted in advance.

Earlier this month, The Intercept revealed plans by Dallagnol and a colleague to open an agency to organize speaking events and courses. “Let’s organize congresses and events and make a profit, okay? It’s a good way to take advantage of our networking and visibility,” Dallagnol wrote in a chat to his wife last December.

To get around rules that restrict prosecutors from managing businesses, the prosecutors decided to bring in their wives to administer the agency. There is no evidence that the project ever got off the ground, but that did not stop the prosecutor from taking in a considerable profit: In a private chat, Dallagnol told his wife that he expected to make around $106,000 that year in after-tax revenue from speaking fees and book royalties.

Dallagnol has previously said that most of the profits would be donated to a fund to help “civil servants working on anti-corruption operations such as Operation Car Wash,” but did not provide any details about how the fund would be administered. He would not confirm to The Intercept if that arrangement is still in effect.

The information about the Car Wash prosecutors’ speeches comes from an archive of documents and Telegram chat logs provided exclusively to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source. The Intercept released an editorial statement about the archive. Previous reporting from the archive has revealed a laundry list of unethical and likely illegal actions by the Car Wash prosecutors and Justice Minister Sergio Moro, who was previously the presiding judge in the case.

Dallagnol was investigated by the Public Ministry’s inspector general in 2017 for his paid speaking engagements, but was cleared of any wrongdoing. Private chats show that the National Association of Federal Prosecutors — which asked him to edit its public statement in his defense — spoke to the inspector general on Dallagnol’s behalf. The inspector general, in turn, guaranteed that he’d close the case. The inspector general’s office has opened a new investigation into Dallagnol’s activities in response to The Intercept’s reporting.

In Brazil, prosecutors are prohibited from operating a business, but the inspector general’s office found that the paid speeches constituted educational activities, which are permitted, mirroring a similar decision in 2016 that applied to judges.

The U.S. Justice Department and International Criminal Court, among other such entities, expressly prohibit payment from third parties for outside speaking or writing gigs related to one’s work in order to avoid conflicts of interest or the perception thereof.

The U.S. Justice Department also stipulates that “an official is prohibited from participating in any matter in which he has a financial interest.” In his first lecture for XP on the subject of “Ethics and Car Wash,” Dallagnol openly jokes about having stock in Petrobras and BTG Pactual, two companies at the center of the corruption probe he coordinates.

The prosecutors’ association and the Public Ministry office did not respond to requests for comment.

XP responded that it is “customary for financial institutions to hold exclusive meetings with authorities and institutional investors to promote debates and discussions pertinent to the domestic scenario. Payment of an honorarium, or the lack thereof, is agreed upon between the parties by contract.”

The speaking agency that represented Dallagnol said in a statement that it could not comment on arrangements surrounding the talks because they are private matters.

The Car Wash task force members were clearly aware of ethical concerns related to accepting money from financial firms and others, but were also tempted by the easy money, as Dallagnol’s conversation with fellow Car Wash prosecutor Roberson Pozzobon suggests:

February 8, 2018 – Private chat

Deltan Dallagnol – 15:51:25 – Robito, we received the following invitation: XP Investimentos wants you again this year but wants to do a panel with you, Dr. Carlos Fernando, Diogo and Robinho. They want all 4. Someone from XP will ask questions. Isn’t it great??? You guys would do this, right? I got super excited, I think it will be the best panel EVER! We have to set a date between September 20 and 22. Tell me what you think, please? For you they offered 25,000 [$7,700]. There is an image risk, but CF and I think we can go, despite the risk.

Roberson Pozzobon – 16:28:37 – Castor also thought there’s no risk, Delta?

Dallagnol – 16:58:41 – castor replied: “I’m gonna be rich”

Dallagnol – 16:58:54 – We think there’s a risk, yes, but the risk is well paid lol.

Dallagnol – 16:59:16 – Dude, I look at all the beatings I take publicly. One more will not make a difference lol.

The perceived impropriety of large speaking fees was central to Car Wash’s own successful argument to obtain a judicial warrant for ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s financial records. In his ruling granting the warrant, Moro wrote, “The illegality of these transfers cannot be concluded, but it must be acknowledged that these are large amounts for donations and lectures, which, in the context of Petrobras’s criminal scheme, raises doubts about the generosity of the companies mentioned and at least authorizes the deepening of investigations.”

In the case of Neoway, the big-data firm, Dallagnol and his colleagues had apparently forgotten that the firm had been cited in a deposition two years earlier, judging from chats examined by The Intercept. Dallagnol accepted payment for his speech, spoke about the importance of big-data tools in a promotion video for the company, and helped set up a meeting for colleagues to solicit the company to donate its technology to an initiative they were putting together. But the corruption case was still ongoing and, months later, the prosecutors’ work on the case, which had stagnated, resumed and Neoway’s name resurfaced.

“This is a problem for me,” Dallagnol wrote in a chat group with colleagues. “I want to talk to you guys on Monday to see what to do, I think it’s a case for me to recuse myself and I don’t know how much this affects everyone’s work,” Dallagnol wrote on July 21, 2018. Official documents provided by Dallagnol show that he did, in fact, recuse himself from the case and notify the Public Ministry’s inspector general, but only in June 2019, ten and a half months later (and just days before The Intercept began publishing private chats in which he participated).

When deciding which prosecutors would officially participate in the Neoway prosecution, one colleague suggested, “It’s better to leave out whoever had contact with neoway.” In the end only seven of the office’s 13 Car Wash prosecutors’ names appear on the relevant official documents; Dallagnol was not among them. In a statement to The Intercept, Neoway denied any impropriety in its contracts and said it was unaware that it had been cited in the investigation.

In an interview with The Intercept’s reporting partner, the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, Dallagnol said:

“I do not recognize the authenticity and integrity of these messages, but what I can say, and it is a fact, is that I participated in hundreds of message groups, just as I am included in more than 1,000 Car Wash cases. This fact does not make me know the content of each of these processes. If, by chance, I participated [in the group in which Neoway appeared], I certainly was not aware. If I had known I would not have done it, and, knowing it, I removed myself.”

Dallagnol refused to be interviewed by The Intercept.

The chat logs also revealed Dallagnol’s brainstorming about his budding career as a paid speaker. In a Microsoft Word document created in December 2015, apparently written as notes to himself, Dallagnol maps out his “next steps.” Under “topics for speeches,” he wrote, “I think where I can contribute today is compliance training and eventually business ethics, but I would need to study more ethics… complicated.”

The post Brazilian Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Gave Secret Talk to Bankers and Took Money From a Company He Was Investigating appeared first on The Intercept.

The specific scandal involving Bolsonaro’s son erupted almost as soon as his father was elected president, a victory driven in large part by an anti-corruption platform. As The Intercept has extensively reported, a government agency responsible for detecting unusual movements of money on the part of politicians found more than $1.5 million reals in transfers and deposits by Flávio Bolsonaro’s longtime driver, Fabricio Queiroz, most of which ended up in Flávio’s account and at least one of which ended up in the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle. The scandal became even more serious when Queiroz’s substantial connections to the country’s most violent and dangerous paramilitary gangs were revealed, and even worse, when it was revealed that Flávio himself employed in his cabinet while he was a state representative both the mother and wife of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most wanted paramilitary leaders.

That meant that the cloud of scandal around Jair Bolsonaro’s son, a newly elected senator, was not just about allegations of “mere” stealing of public funds. They suggested something much darker: deep links between the Bolsonaro family and the organized crime rings that rule and terrorize much of Brazil (and which Sergio Moro was purportedly appointed to combat).

In the new secret chats reported by The Intercept, federal prosecutors, while talking to one another after Bolsonaro’s victory, were emphatic that these unexplained deposits by Flávio’s driver perfectly match other corruption schemes they prosecuted in which political officials hire “phantom employees” who do no work, but collect their salary and then pay back the vast bulk of that money to the political official for his own personal enrichment.

Despite how clear-cut these prosecutors believe Flávio’s corruption to be, they expressed in these newly published chats deep worry that, while the investigation of the money movements is in the hands of local investigators, the broader and more serious allegations against Flávio might not be investigated because Moro is concerned about angering Jair Bolsonaro. This is considered likely not only because the corruption case has the president’s son as its prime target, but also because it already involves his own wife and could — given his longtime close friendship with Queiroz — end up implicating the president himself.

Even more stunning in these chats is that Moro’s most loyal defender and ally over the last five years, Dallagnol, himself expressed concerns that Moro would refuse to pursue an investigation of Flávio out of fear that it would jeopardize Moro’s own chance to be named to the Supreme Court. In May, Bolsonaro surprised the nation when he admitted that he had promised Moro — who, as a judge, was responsible for removing Bolsonaro’s primary adversary, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by finding him guilty on corruption charges — not only the justice minister position, but also the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, a lifetime appointment.

To this day, consistent with Dallagnol’s predictions, there is no evidence that Moro — who at the time of these private chats had already left his position as judge and accepted Bolsonaro’s offer to take over the Ministry of Justice — has taken any measures to investigate the scheme of “phantom employees” that Flávio is accused of maintaining, nor, more importantly, Flávio’s connections with powerful militias in Rio de Janeiro.

The corruption scandal involving Flávio, which had been dominating the headlines, had virtually disappeared from media coverage in recent months due to apparent inaction. The investigation regarding the “unusual movement” of funds is now in the hands of the local Rio de Janeiro prosecutor, and appears to have entered a much slower-than-expected pace for a case of this seriousness. Moro, meanwhile, has given no indication of investigating the federal ramifications of the case, such as Queiroz’s alleged loan to first lady Michelle Bolsonaro or his ties to militias.

On the few occasions Moro answered questions from the media about the senator-son of the president, he has repeated that “there is nothing conclusive about the Queiroz case” and that the government does not intend to interfere with the work of the prosecutors. The case returned to the news only this week when, on Monday, July 15, Supreme Court President Dias Toffoli responded to Flávio Bolsonaro’s request to suspend investigations into his personal finances and those of his associates; the judge accepted the request by ruling as improper investigations initiated without judicial approval involving the use of financial information from the agency that monitors politicians’ financial transactions: the agency whose reporting of suspicious deposits from Queiroz triggered the Flávio scandal in the first place.

On December 8, 2018 — just five weeks after Bolsonaro’s victory but three weeks before he was inaugurated — Dallagnol initiated the discussion of these concerns regarding Moro with a message posted in a Telegram chat group composed of other Car Wash prosecutors. Dallagnol noted an article from the news outlet UOL that described an unexplained deposit by Flávio’s driver, Queiroz, of $24,000 reals ($6,500) into an account in the name of Michelle Bolsonaro.

As the article described, the “transaction was identified as ‘atypical’ by” the agency charged with monitoring money movements. Queiroz, Flávio’s longtime driver and a close Bolsonaro family friend, “moved R $1.2 million (US $380,000) between January, 2016 and January, 2017.” The UOL article noted that “the agency’s report does not itself prove improprieties but indicates amounts of money being moved that are incompatible with the income and economic activities of the ex-aide.”

This news caused Dallagnol to ask what his colleagues on the Car Wash anti-corruption task force thought about the case and Moro’s reaction to it as Bolsonaro’s new justice minster. One prosecutor, Jerusa Viecili, already a critic in prior chat groups of Moro’s closeness with the Bolsonaro government, responded: “I’m saying nothing . . . just watching ”.

The Intercept’s reporting revealed in June that many Car Wash prosecutors, in their secret chats, were indignant that Moro, after insisting for five years to critics that the Car Wash investigations and convictions were completely apolitical and free of ideology, had joined Bolsonaro’s far-right government as a political official, with many complaining that his doing so would forever put into doubt the legitimacy, credibility, and apolitical legacy of their anti-corruption work.

For years, critics of the Car Wash investigation accused prosecutors and Moro of being right-wing operatives abusing the power of law and the cover of an anti-corruption crusade to advance a nakedly political agenda, one designed to overwhelmingly target the left, especially the Workers’ Party that had dominated Brazilian politics for two decades, while neglecting or even ignoring serious corruption by the right.

The investigators’ insistence that they were devoid of political motives was seriously undermined, argued the prosecutors, by the appearance of Moro joining a right-wing government that was elected only once the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro rendered Bolsonaro’s primary center-left adversary ineligible to run. Their credibility has been damaged further by The Intercept’s exposés showing that prosecutors explicitly discussed having as one of their motives preventing a return of the Workers’ Party to power: exactly that which they and Moro spent years denying.

Dallagnol expressed serious concerns about how the justice minister was conducting the investigation into Flávio’s corruption allegations, suggesting that the ex-judge could end up being lenient with Flávio due to limits imposed on him by Jair Bolsonaro or by the self-interested desire of Moro to avoid putting at risk his nomination to the Supreme Court by angering Bolsonaro with a robust investigation into his son. Invoking a Brazilian poem used to expressed uncertainty about whether any consequences would follow from certain actions, Dallagnol wrote about Flávio’s actions: “It’s obvious what happened…. And now what, Jose?”

In the December 8 chat, Dallagnol continued: “In any case, the president will not split from his son. And what if all this happens before the vacancy on the Supreme Court appears?” About Jair Bolsonaro’s possible retaliation against Moro’s crown jewel — his anti-corruption bill — Dallagnol concluded, “Now, how much will he support the Moro Anti-Corruption agenda if his son ends up feeling Moro’s investigation on his skin?”

December 8, 2018 – Telegram group “Filhos do Januario 3”

 

Deltan Dallagnol – 00:56:50 –  https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2018/12/07/bolsonaro-diz-que-ex-assessor-tinha-divida-com-ele-e-pagou-a-primeira-dama.htm

Dallagnol – 00:58:15 – [image not found]

Dallagnol – 00:58:15 – [image not found]

Dallagnol – 00:58:38 – COAF [money-monitoring agency] under Moro

Dallagnol – 00:58:40 – Aiaiai

Julio Noronha – 00:59:34 –

Dallagnol – 01:04:40 – [image not found]

Januário Paludo – 07:01:20 – This reminds.

Paludo – 07:01:48 – Reminds you or anything, Deltan?

Paludo – 07:03:08 – Aiaiai

Jerusa Viecilli – 07:05:24 – I’m saying nothing… Just watching

Dallagnol – 08:47:52 – LOL

Dallagnol – 08:52:01 – It’s obvious what happened…  What now, José?

Dallagnol – 08:53:37 – Moro should wait for the investigation and see who will be implicated. The son certainly. The problem is, will the father let him? Or worse, if the father is implicated, what does this thing with the loans indicate?

Dallagnol – 08:54:21 – In any case, the president will not split from his son. And what if all this happens before the vacancy on the Supreme Court appears?

Dallagnol – 09:04:38 – During interviews, they will certainly ask about this. I don’t see any way to avoid the question, but I can go to different depths. 1) this is something that needs to be investigated; 2) everything indicates this is one of those salary kickback schemes, like the one involving Aline Correa that we prosecuted, or, even worse, phantom employees.

Dallagnol – 09:05:54 – Now, to what extent will [the president] really fight for Moro’s anti-corruption agenda if his  son is in the firing line?

Requests for comment from the Car Wash prosecutorial task force and the prosecutors cited in this article were not answered as of the time of publication. The article will be updated to include any responses.

Moro’s predicament — how to investigate a corruption case involving the son of the president who named him to his position or, even more delicate, how to investigate corruption that could involve the president himself and his wife — caused Dallagnol himself to consider avoiding all interviews about corruption debates.

On the same day that his group discussed Moro’s posture in the Queiroz and Flávio case, Dallagnol used a private chat to discuss the same topic with another Car Wash prosecutor, Roberson Pozzobon. In that conversation, Dallagnol expressed deep concerns about granting media interviews about corruption issues given the possibility that questions about Flávio Bolsonaro might be raised.

In stark contrast to his usual eagerness to speak publicly about other cases of corruption — Dellagnol had famously used the media far more aggressively than is typical for prosecutors — he suggested that he was now reluctant to issue a more severe condemnation of Flávio for fear of the political consequences of displeasing the new president — motives similar to the ones he had, just hours earlier on that day, suggested could cause Moro not to investigate Flávio.

December 8, 2018 – private chat:

 

Roberson Pozzobon – 09:12:41 – During interviews, they will certainly ask about this. I don’t see any way to avoid the question, but I can go to different depths. 1) this is something that needs to be investigated; 2) everything indicates this is one of those salary kickback schemes, like the one involving Aline Correa that we prosecuted, or, even worse, phantom employees.

Pozzobon – 09:13:05 – I was just now writing a tweet about this

Pozzobon – 09:13:11 – “Reports that an ex-aide to state deputy and senator elect by PSL, Flavio Bolsonaro, has moved over 1,2 million reais between 2016 and 2017”. Should that be investigated? Absolutely. That’s what the financial intelligence reports from COAF are for. Flag suspicious behaviour amid the half a billion transactions that occur everyday.

https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/brasil/movimentacao-atipica-de-ex-assessor-de-flavio-bolsonaro-pode-levar-a-investigacao,8bb3ff45edd7744a4cad8dab9d014e87963u9zqu.html

Dallagnol – 10:04:00 – Not sure if  level 2 is a good idea. We can’t sit quiet, but at this moment it’s like it is with RD. We will depend on him for our reforms… Not sure if it’s worth it to hit hard

Pozzobon –10:07:15 – Yeah

Pozzobon – 10:07:26 – I have the same doubts

After considering various options for how to talk about the Flávio case if he were asked in interviews, Dallagnol concluded, “This can only be read as wishy-washy and protective of the government.” Pozzobon agreed that Dallagnol should try to avoid speaking about the Flávio scandal, ending the discussion with this proclamation: “I believe silence in this case is more eloquent.”

One and a half months later, on January 21, in the same chat group of prosecutors, Dallagnol announced that he had been invited to be interviewed on Brazil’s “60-Minutes”-like, highly watched Sunday night news program on Globo, “Fantastico,” to speak about ongoing corruption debates. The prosecutor was excited to be interviewed to the extent the questions focused on the case the program’s producers had specified: namely, corruption allegations against federal Congressman Paulo Pimenta, a member of the center-left Workers’ Party, the same party as Lula’s.

Dallagnol was particularly happy to speak critically about the Workers’ Party congressman’s invocation of a special legal “privilege” that has effectively shielded many lawmakers from investigation because it stipulates that federal lawmakers can be tried on criminal charges only by the Supreme Court. The law in question was enacted upon Brazil’s re-democratization as a protection against dictatorship-era abuses in which military regime leaders would simply concoct corruption charges against dissident Congress members and remove them from office; however, the sheer number of corruption cases pending against Congress members has produced a huge backlog in the Supreme Court, thus meaning that lawmakers who invoke this right have a high likelihood that their cases will never be brought to justice, or at least not for many years. In the past, Car Wash prosecutors were never shy about forcefully denouncing the invocation of this congressional privilege when it came to other politicians charged with corruption.

But in the case of this “Fantastico” interview, Dallagnol, who has been severely critical of lawmakers who invoke this right, was suddenly reluctant to accept the invitation to speak on such an important national media stage due to his fear that he would have to talk not only about the Workers’ Party, but also about Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, who had invoked the same privilege in an attempt — ultimately unsuccessful — to shield himself from investigation. Indeed, Flávio’s invocation of this privilege — preserved for federal lawmakers — was far more dubious than the Congress members whom the Car Wash prosecutors had previously criticized, because the corrupt acts of which Flávio is accused occurred prior to his being elected a federal senator. If any case of a politician abusing this privilege merited condemnation by the anti-corruption crusaders, it would be Flávio’s.

But in this private chat about the TV offer, Dallagnol expressed his reluctance to speak about the case involving Flávio, calculating that the risks of having to discuss the case were greater than the eventual benefits of the investigation: “I don’t see that we have anything to gain because this question [of the privilege] is already settled.” His Car Wash colleagues agreed that while an interview about the Workers’ Party case would present no problem, the best option was to reject “Fantastico’s” invitation in order to avoid what they described, invoking soccer imagery, as a “divided ball” around Flávio Bolsonaro (the Globo news program declined to comment on this story).

January 21, 2019 – Telegram group: Filhos do Januario 3

 

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 – Guys, we have an interview request from fantástico about special forum. The main case is good, involving Paulo Pimenta, if true lol. The risk is that they may want to focus on Flavio Bolsonaro, and then use our quotes in this other context. One way or the other, what we have to say is the same. Additionally some of the information they want we don’t have (they are with the PGR). The question is whether or not it is convenient for us to give an interview for this report. I don’t see how we could benefit since the question with regards to special forum is already settled. Different if the report were about jailing after the first appeal.

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 –  [pasting an email he had received]: Dr., Geovani, with RBS will email you requesting an interview with Fantástico. The report is about special privilege. They have unearthed a story about Paulo Pimenta, who has a case who was been lowered from STF. And will also touch on the case of Bolsonaro’s son/Queiroz.

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 – He requested an interview before Wednesday. As soon as I get the email we’ll paste it here.

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 – [pasting the forwarded email from Fantastico requesting the interview] Dear, good afternoon Sunday we will air, in Fantástico, a report in which we will talk about a process against Paulo Pimenta in the STF alleging larceny. We will have an exclusive interview with a cousin of his, who is a laranja in a scheme involving the buying and selling of rice, with the involvement of an ex Dnit director, Hideraldo Caron. The allegations against Pimenta will be our main case in a report about the cases in which politicians lost their special privilege thanks to the new jurisprudence from the [Supreme Court] that the special privilege can only apply to crimes that were committed during the politicians term. Thus, we will also mention F. Bolsonaro’s case, that came up after we began working on the report. We will include, also, a STF survey detailing how many cases have been sent to the lower courts, the politicians who face the most cases, etc. Thus, I ask if Dr. Deltan could record and interview with us, to talk about the consequences of restricting the application of the special forum to those involved in Lava Jato, and also about the question of special forum in general. Do you have any data about how many politicians you are investigating are in this situation, that is, are defending their cases in the lower courts? Are you already able to affirm that these processes are being dealt in a speedier way? How many have sued to keep the cases in the STF? Awaiting your response Thank You

Dallagnol – 16:44:48 – What do you think?

Julio Noronha – 16:50:02 – Don’t think this it’s a good idea. In addition to the divided ball regarding Flavio Bolsonaro, it is being something already settled by the [Supreme Court], Paulo Pimenta has already filed several complaints against us.

Antonio Carlos Welter – 16:59:18 – I see no problems with regards to Pimenta. The problem is the divided ball. But not going for it could be worse. It’s selective.

Welter – 17:03:00 – If it’s discussed in theory, I don’t see a problem. But what about Raquel, won’t she complain again?

“Xiiiiiiiii”

All of these chats are drawn from the archive of messages that The Intercept began to reveal on June 9, in a series titled the “Secret Brazil Archive” (in Brazil, the scandal has become widely known by the Twitter hashtag The Intercept Brasil coined on the day of the first series of articles: #VazaJato, a play on the word “leak” in Portuguese (“vazamento”) and the name of the Car Wash investigation, Lava Jato). The statement from the editors of The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil published with the first series of reports explained the criteria used to report on this vast trove of materials; the ongoing reporting now includes partnerships with some of Brazil’s largest media outlets, including its largest center-right weekly magazine Veja (which has supported Moro and the Car Wash probe in the past), to ensure that the archive materials in the public interest are reported as quickly and responsibly as possible.

The idea that Moro was eager to protect Jair Bolsonaro’s son, or at least eager to avoid his investigation, was expressed again in the prosecutors’ chat groups in mid-January. This chat was prompted by Dallagnol’s finally making a public statement about the corruption allegations against Flávio Bolsonaro. He did so in response to pressure and questions from Intercept Brasil reporter, and now editor, Rafael Moro Martins, who pressed the task force on why it had said nothing about Flávio’s case even though it had often publicly expressed views on similar corruption cases by other politicians.

After Dallagnol posted a public statement about the Flávio case in response to The Intercept’s pressure, his press aide, in a private chat, praised him for doing so, writing to him: “This reinforces our non-partisanship.” After praising Dallagnol’s denunciation of Flávio, the press adviser then criticized Moro’s far less assertive statements whenever the justice minister was asked about Flávio’s scandal involving Queiroz: “They say his comments on Queiroz were very ‘neutral,’ that they had no firmness, you know? To many people, it seems Moro wanted to escape to the margins.” Moro, said Dallagnol’s press aide in their private chat, “stayed on top of the wall”— a common phrase in Portuguese for those who refuse to take a position or get involved in a dispute.

Those comments from Dallagnol’s aide were posted in mid-January, just a little more than a month after Dallagnol himself, in December, debated the case with his colleagues and expressed a similar concern that Moro would not pursue the allegations against Flávio with the investigative rigor they merit.

This conversation with Dallagnol’s aide occurred two months after several federal prosecutors had privately complained, as The Intercept previously reported, about the ethical conduct of Moro during the years he was a judge overseeing the Car Wash investigation. What emerges from an examination of these chats is a clear pattern of Moro’s closest allies on the Car Wash prosecutors’ task force — who praised and defended him in public — privately voicing many of the same critiques and concerns about his methods and motives as many of his harshest critics.

In the Brazilian press, Moro has now been questioned several times about his apparent apathy about the investigation into corruption allegations against Bolsonaro’s son, as well as about a major scandal involving Bolsonaro’s political party during the 2018 election. In response, Moro generally claims that he has no control over the Federal Police, even though it reports to him, because, he says, they maintain investigative autonomy. Thus, he implies, any failure on the part of the Federal Police to adequately investigate the Bolsonaros’ corruption scandals has nothing to do with him.

But Moro’s claim that he does not control the Federal Police — a claim made in response to criticisms that as justice minister he has sought to protect Bolsonaro, his family, and his party — should be viewed with substantial skepticism. After all, Moro, for years, also publicly insisted that he had no role in the management and direction of the Car Wash prosecutions that he was required to judge as a neutral arbiter: a claim that The Intercept’s reporting, with the aid of this archive, has proven to be false.

Additional reporting: Amanda Audi and João Felipe Linhares

The post In Secret Chats, Brazil’s Chief Corruption Prosecutor Worried That Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Would Protect President’s Son From Scandals appeared first on The Intercept.

Once revered across the political spectrum, Moro  — widely regarded as the linchpin of the Bolsonoro government’s credibility — is now engulfed in a deepening scandal. Two weeks ago, he defended himself for nine hours before a hostile Brazilian Senate, and on Tuesday, spent almost seven more hours in the Congress doing the same until his testimony was interrupted by a furious screaming match — prompted by a congressperson calling him a “thief judge” — that came close to physical confrontation:

After Congressman Braga laid out with unflinching clarity the corruption of Minister Moro as exposed by our reporting – see the above videos – the Congress members from Bolsonaro's party reacted with the sobriety, dignity & eloquence for which they are internationally renowned: pic.twitter.com/k6OmZohnGN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 4, 2019

An op-ed in the New York Times on Friday by Vanessa Barbara illustrates how rapidly and radically Moro’s reputation has fallen both in Brazil and internationally. The article summarizes the crux of our reporting this way: “All in all, the leaks reveal an immoral judge, who teamed up with electorally-motivated prosecutors, in order to arrest and convict individuals that they already considered guilty. Their only question was how best to do it.” The Times’s headline perfectly captures the essence of this scandal for the Bolsonaro government:

Moro’s key media supporters have abandoned him: The center-right paper Estadão, long one of his most vocal cheerleaders, called for his resignation after the first week of our reporting. Polling data shows that his approval rating, just after the first week of our reporting, began falling sharply. And the right-wing president of the Senate — installed in February based on an expectation that he would loyally support the agenda of the Bolsonaro government — said that Moro’s behavior was so unethical that he would be “imprisoned” if he were not the justice minister. The Senate has demanded that both Moro and Finance Minister Paulo Gedes appear to explain what appears to be their abuse of police power to investigate us.

This scandal has grown as our reporting has continued. To accelerate the reporting, prevent claims that we have been ideologically selective in choosing what to disclose, and obliterate Moro’s desperate attempt to cast doubt on the authenticity of the material in the archive, we have partnered with several of Brazil’s most mainstream journalistic outlets — including its largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, and a longtime right-wing journalist, Reinaldo Azevedo of the Band News radio network — to jointly report on these incriminating revelations.

But today’s events have elevated Moro’s crisis to an entirely new level. The largest weekly newsmagazine in Brazil is the center-right Veja, which has been one of Moro’s most vocal and devoted supporters for years, repeatedly putting his image on its influential covers in heroic postures. But now, Veja is also partnering with us to report on the archive, and on Friday, we co-published a devastating cover story that lays out in detail, with multiple newly released private conversations involving Moro, how pervasive, sustained, and comprehensive was his corruption.

Veja cover: “Exclusive: Justice With His Own Hands: New chats show that Sergio Moro committed irregularities, disturbing the scales of justice in favor of the prosecution in the Car Wash investigation.”

The eight-page cover story features some of the most incriminating leaked conversations yet, demonstrating that Moro’s misconduct was not sporadic or episodic but “reveals how Moro abused his judicial function as part of a cabal, commanding the actions of the prosecutors of Car Wash.” In sum: “The communications analyzed by the Veja reporting team are true and the story shows that the case is even more grave than previously known.”  

The case is even more grave than previously known.

The Guardian, in an article published Friday with the headline “Calls grow for Bolsonaro ally to quit after ‘devastating’ report on leaks,” explained that “Moro is facing renewed pressure to resign after the country’s leading conservative magazine waded into a snowballing scandal over his role in a mammoth anti-corruption investigation that helped reshape South America’s political landscape.”

Perhaps even more significantly is Veja’s extraordinary “Note to Readers,” in which the magazine explains why it concluded that its journalistic duty was to expose Moro’s corruption after years of applauding him; detail the journalistic methods used to authenticate the material; and unflinchingly describe why Moro’s conduct as a judge is a grave threat to the rule of law and the pillars of democracy.

On the front page of its widely read site, the magazine accuses Moro not merely of engaging in unethical or improper acts — the words we have used thus far to describe his behavior — but also “illegal” ones. That Brazil’s largest center-right magazine, in partnership with The Intercept, is now explicitly accusing Bolsonaro’s justice minister of “illegalities” — based on detailed accusations proven by Moro’s own words in secret — is as significant as journalism gets.

Veja website caption: “New chats reveal that Moro illegally commanded the actions of the Car Wash prosecutors.”

Perhaps most amazingly, Veja candidly acknowledges, and clearly appears to regret, its own role in helping Moro construct a public image as some sort of superhero, a high priest of ethics and propriety who was beyond reproach — a myth that, as we all now know, was deeply deceptive. At the top of its letter to readers explaining why it is exposing Moro’s conduct — headlined: “About principles and values” — Veja displays five different covers over the past several years that it published heralding Moro’s virtue, along with this caption: 

TREATED AS A HERO
The ex-judge Serio Moro was on the cover of VEJA in diverse situations, the majority favorable: while he has been fundamental in the fight against corruption, one cannot close one’s eyes in the face of the irregularities he committed.

In sum, Veja, along with The Intercept and Folha, has devoted massive editorial resources to exposing Moro’s misconduct in defense of a simple but crucial principle, as described by its letter to readers: “Ultimately, nobody is above the law.” Ironically, that motto was, for years, the rallying cry of Moro’s supporters, and it is now the principle that is finally bringing serious accountability to his own grave misconduct.

This new article demonstrates, comprehensively and with finality, that the true chief of the Car Wash prosecutions was the same person who pretended to be, and was ethically obligated to be, the neutral judge: Sergio Moro, now the most powerful official in the Bolsonaro government, overseeing vast powers of surveillance, investigation, and law enforcement previously dispersed among various agencies but now all consolidated under his control. Moro’s conduct was a serious corruption of the judicial system — not only for the defendants whose rights he violated but for all future defendants who are in jeopardy of a legal system that no longer requires the most basic obligation to ensure credibility and legitimacy: a neutral, impartial judge.

We began our reporting by explaining our rationale for why we believed that disclosure of this massive secret archive was so critical for Brazilian democracy. In doing so, we wrote: “Given the immense power wielded by these actors, and the secrecy under which they have — until now — been able to operate, transparency is crucial for Brazil and the international community to have a clear understanding of what they have really done. A free press exists to shine a light on what the most powerful figures in society do in the dark.”

That — transparency for the corrupt acts by powerful officials — continues to be our governing value and primary objective in this reporting. The threats from Moro and the Bolsonaro government — including the abuse of the Federal Police commanded by Moro to investigate our finances — will, needless to say, not deter the reporting in the slightest.

Quite the contrary: This new joint article with Veja, published 48 hours after news broke of the Federal Police retaliation against us, is a major advancement of our originally stated goal. With respect to the part of this story concerning Moro’s unethical, improper collaboration with the prosecutors, this latest article — on the cover of Brazil’s highly influential center-right weekly news magazine — reveals just how comprehensive, reckless, and sustained Moro’s misconduct was.

The post Scandal for Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Sergio Moro Grows as The Intercept Partners With Brazil’s Largest Magazine for New Exposé appeared first on The Intercept.

The new revelations, which were published in Portuguese by The Intercept Brasil on Friday, have added fuel to a weeklong political firestorm in Brazil. The country’s largest circulation newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, said the reporting suggests that officials “ignored the limits of the law,” while UOL, a news website, said jurists view the revelations as “grave.” The site quoted the head of a national criminal law association saying, “This is unthinkable in any democracy. It’s scary.”

In the newly revealed chats with a senior prosecutor — a member of the team working on the Operation Car Wash corruption case — Moro said, “Maybe, tomorrow, you should prepare a press release” to point out inconsistencies in Lula’s arguments, adding, “The defense already put on their little show.”

“You should prepare a press release explaining the contradictions between his testimony and the rest of the evidence or with his previous testimony. After all, the defense already put on their little show.”

Moro’s advice was a major deviation from their previous communications strategy, but prosecutors did as he asked — further evidence of bias and unethical collaboration between the two parties in the case that sent Lula to prison on corruption charges, making the most popular politician in Brazil ineligible to run in the 2018 presidential election.

The newly published chats come from an archive of documents, provided to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source, which includes years of private communications from the prosecutorial task force responsible for the Car Wash case, the largest anti-corruption investigation in Brazilian history.

Last weekend, The Intercept published explosive group chats between Car Wash prosecutors and conversations between task force coordinator Deltan Dallagnol and Moro, showing that the then-judge and the prosecutors were unethically and inappropriately collaborating in secret. Despite repeatedly insisting in public that they were acting ethically and impartially, the chats revealed that the judge was passing on advice, investigative leads, and inside information to the prosecutors — who were themselves plotting to prevent Lula’s Workers’ Party from winning last year’s election.

Lula, who had been the far and away favorite in election polls, was rendered ineligible by his conviction, and instead the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro handily won over Lula’s replacement. Lula has maintained that he was not granted a fair trial. Moro is now Bolsonaro’s justice minister.

In an interview on Friday with the Estado de São Paulo newspaper, Moro said, “The Brazilian legal tradition does not prevent personal contact and such conversations between judges, lawyers, detectives, and prosecutors.” This type of communication is “absolutely normal,” he added. However, the chats published by The Intercept Brasil show that the communication went far beyond “personal contact” and “conversations” to include directives as to how the prosecutors should operate inside and outside of the courtroom.

The Car Wash task force refused to comment on the contents of this story. In a statement, Moro declined to speak to the substance of this article, but said, “The Minister of Justice and Public Security will not comment on alleged messages from public authorities collected through criminal invasion by hackers and that may have been tampered with and edited, especially without prior analysis by independent authorities that can certify their integrity. In the case in question, the alleged messages were not even sent previously.”

Despite repeatedly using the phrase “alleged messages,” Moro acknowledged the authenticity of at least one of the conversations this past Friday. Questioned during a press conference about having passed on an investigative lead to prosecutors on December 7, 2015, Moro said it was an “oversight on my part.”

“The Defense Already Put on Their Little Show”

“What did you think?” It was 10:04 p.m. on May 10, 2017, and then-Judge Sergio Moro was using the Telegram messaging app to talk with Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima, a senior prosecutor in the Operation Car Wash task force. Moro had just wrapped up one of the most important days of his career and was looking for feedback.

In a modest courtroom in the city of Curitiba, Moro had deposed Lula for more than five hours, as thousands of the former president’s supporters protested outside. Later that day, video recordings of the unusual proceedings — unusual because former presidents are rarely tried on corruption charges and also because judges don’t usually interrogate the accused for hours on end — were released to the public. Less than a year later, Moro would sentence Lula to more than nine years in prison for receiving a beachfront triplex apartment as a bribe for facilitating contracts with the state-run oil company Petrobras. But, for the moment, the judge was concerned about how the public was receiving the news about his interrogation of Lula.

“I thought it went really well,” Santos Lima, the prosecutor, responded. “He started antagonizing us, which gave me some peace of mind. He contradicted himself in small details and didn’t answer a lot of things, this is not well understood by the public. You starting with the Triplex left him uneasy.” The conversation continued:

Moro – 22:11 – The communication is complicated, because the press does not pay much attention to details.

22:11 – And some of them expect something conclusive.

22:12 – Maybe, tomorrow, you should prepare a press release explaining the contradictions between his testimony and the rest of the evidence or with his previous testimony

22:13 – Since the defense already put on their little show.

Santos Lima – 22:13 – We can do this. I’ll talk to the group.

Moro – 22:13 – Think on it. I haven’t made up my mind yet.

Santos Lima – 22:16 – I won’t be here tomorrow. But the most important thing was to block the idea that he would be able to turn everything into his persecution.

Ten minutes after his last message to Moro, Santos Lima sent a request in the “clippings analysis” group chat, used by prosecutors to coordinate media strategy and monitor coverage together with two press aides:

Santos Lima – 22:26:23 – Do you think we can book an interview with someone from Globo in Recife tomorrow about today’s hearings?

Press Aide 1 – 22:28:19 – It’s possible, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it. What about all the journalists here that already asked for an interview?

Press Aide 2 – 22:28:32 – But, sir, what’s the reason?

Press Aide 2 – 22:29:13 – What’s the need, actually..

Santos Lima – 22:30:50 – Just something I need taken care of. How’s the repercussion of the lawyers’ press conference?

Press Aide 2 – 22:30:58 – Typical procedure…you never gave interviews about the hearings…it will give reason for the defense to attack…once again…

The press aide’s surprise and confusion over the request demonstrates that Moro was suggesting a dramatic shift in the Car Wash prosecutors’ typical communications strategy. Up until that point, they had not been in the habit of commenting publicly on the trial proceedings.

Santos Lima then forwarded his exchange with the judge to Car Wash coordinator Deltan Dallagnol, who responded in a group chat with other prosecutors:

Dallagnol – 22:46:46 – So, we need to take into account the following points: 1) create comfort for the judge and take the spotlight to give him more protection and to shift the focus away from him; 2) to counterbalance the defense’s show.

22:47:19 – These are the reasons we should take into account, because no one is sure.

22:47:50 – The “what” would be: to point out the contradictions of the testimony.

22:49:18 – And the format, I agree, would have to be a press release, for protection and risk reduction. JN will still explore this tomorrow. If we do this, we would have to work intensely on this during the day to release it around 4 p.m.

Minutes later, Dallagnol chimed in to reinforce Santos Lima’s request in the chat with the press aides , and the second press aide reiterated their objections more forcefully:

Press aide 2 – 23:15:30 – Those who attack us will keep attacking us. Those who don’t will notice a change in behavior and will question it. It’s part of the process. The way I see it, it’s issuing an opinion about the case before its conclusion… and creating an opening to say that you are trying to influence the judge. Their role will be to make this a political issue. The press knows this. And they already know that you don’t usually talk about the hearings. Changing your behavior will create the opportunity to raise other questions. Why did you decide to talk now? Because it was the ex-president? And bring back the narrative of persecution… it is what the defense did, does… because there is no way to refute the accusation. For the prosecution to use the same strategy might be shooting yourself in the foot.

Dallagnol also messaged Moro to congratulate him on his performance in court that day and discuss the judge’s suggestion: “Congratulations on keeping control of the hearing in such a serene and respectful way. We are pondering an eventual statement. GN [Globonews] just showed a series of contradictions and evasions. We’re keeping track.”

Moro again suggested that the prosecutors consider issuing a statement to the press. He said, “OK. I also have my doubts about the pertinence of a statement, but we should think about it due to the subtleties involved.”

Under the Brazilian judicial system, the judge and the prosecution are required to operate independently to ensure a fair trial. However, in this case, Car Wash prosecutors spent hours crafting a communications strategy at the judge’s suggestion in order to, in the words of their leader, “comfort the judge.”

Prosecutors Deliver on Moro’s Suggestion

The following afternoon, the Car Wash prosecutors put out a statement attacking Lula’s arguments and using the exact word Moro had suggested: contradictions. “As for the many verified contradictions in the questioning of ex-President Lula,” read the statement. “[T]he Federal Public Prosecutor will address this in due course, during the trial, particularly during closing arguments.”

Media coverage was dominated by the prosecutors’ allegations of contradictions. The Folha de São Paulo newspaper ran an article the next day with the headline, “Lula’s testimony had ‘several contradictions’, prosecutors say.” Exame magazine ran a piece titled, “Car Wash task force sees contradictions in Lula’s testimony.” The Estado de São Paulo ran with “Prosecutors accuse Lula’s defense of lying in triplex case.”

Santos Lima, the first prosecutor to receive Moro’s suggestion to speak out about the “contradictions” in Lula’s defense, did an interview with Estado de São Paulo’s “Broadcast Político” podcast, in which he said he did “not see any consistency” in Lula’s claims and defended Moro in response to the former president’s criticisms.

Later that night, 24 hours after Moro’s initial suggestion, Dallagnol messaged the judge to inform him that they had submitted a petition “more for strategy” that was “not essential” and that the judge “should feel free, it’s unnecessary to say, to deny” the request. He then went on to summarize their media strategy for the day. Brazil’s biggest nightly news program, “Jornal Nacional,” had just read their statement live on air:

Dallagnol – 22:16:26 – I also want to inform you that we discussed it since yesterday, over the course of the entire day, and we understand, unanimously and along with our press secretary, that the media was covering the contradictions well and that if we spoke out about it, it could make things worse. We passed along some relevant [points] to journalists. We decided to make a statement only addressing the false information, saying that we will focus on other contradictions in the closing arguments.

Moro – 23:07:15 – Cool, no worries, I’m still preparing the decision but I’m leaning towards denying it, yes

The post Exclusive: Brazilian Judge in Car Wash Corruption Case Mocked Lula’s Defense and Secretly Directed Prosecutors’ Media Strategy During Trial appeared first on The Intercept.

The archive, provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source, includes years of internal files and private conversations from the prosecutorial team behind Brazil’s sprawling Operation Car Wash, an ongoing corruption investigation that has yielded dozens of major convictions, including those of top corporate executives and powerful politicians.

In the files, conversations between lead prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and then-presiding Judge Sergio Moro reveal that Moro offered strategic advice to prosecutors and passed on tips for new avenues of investigation. With these actions, Moro grossly overstepped the ethical lines that define the role of a judge. In Brazil, as in the United States, judges are required to be impartial and neutral, and are barred from secretly collaborating with one side in a case.

Other chats in the archive raise fundamental questions about the quality of the charges that ultimately sent Lula to prison. He was accused of having received a beachfront triplex apartment from a contractor as a kickback for facilitating multimillion-dollar contracts with the state-controlled oil firm Petrobras. In group chats among members of the prosecutorial team just days before filing the indictment, Dallagnol expressed his increasing doubts over two key elements of the prosecution’s case: whether the triplex was in fact Lula’s and whether it had anything to do with Petrobras.

These two questions were critical to their ability to prosecute Lula. Without the Petrobras link, the task force running the Car Wash investigation would have no legal basis for prosecuting this case, as it would fall outside of their jurisdiction. Even more seriously, without proving that the triplex belonged to Lula, the case itself would fall apart, since Lula’s alleged receipt of the triplex was the key ingredient to prove he acted corruptly.

Operation Car Wash is one of the most consequential political forces in the history of Brazilian democracy and also one of the most controversial. It has taken down powerful actors once thought to be untouchable and revealed massive corruption schemes that sucked billions out of public coffers.

The probe, however, has also been accused of political bias, repeated violations of constitutional guarantees, and illegal leaks of information to the press. (A separate article published today by The Intercept reveals that the Car Wash prosecutors, who long insisted that they were apolitical and concerned solely with fighting corruption, were in fact internally plotting how to prevent the return to power by Lula and his Workers’ Party).

The successful prosecution of Lula rendered him ineligible to run in the 2018 presidential election at a time when all polls showed that the former president was the clear frontrunner. As a result, Operation Car Wash was scorned by Lula’s supporters, who considered it a politically motivated scheme, driven by right-wing ideologues masquerading as apolitical anti-corruption prosecutors, in order to prevent Lula from running for president and to destroy the Workers’ Party.

But on the Brazilian right, there was widespread popular support for the corruption probe, the team of prosecutors, and Moro. The yearslong corruption probe transformed Moro into a hero both in Brazil and around the world, a status that was only strengthened once he became the man who finally brought down Lula.

After the guilty verdict from Moro was quickly affirmed by an appellate court, Lula’s candidacy was barred by law. With Lula out of the running, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro shot up in the polls and then handily won the presidency by defeating Lula’s chosen replacement, former São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad.

Bolsonaro then named Moro, the judge who had presided over the case against Lula, to be his justice minister. Jurists and scholars will continue to debate the role of Car Wash for decades, but these archives offer an unprecedented window into this crucial moment in recent Brazilian history.

Sergio Moro Crosses the Line

Telegram messages between Sergio Moro and Deltan Dallagnol reveal that Moro repeatedly stepped far outside the permissible bounds of his position as a judge while working on Car Wash cases. Over the course of more than two years, Moro suggested to the prosecutor that his team change the sequence of who they would investigate; insisted on less downtime between raids; gave strategic advice and informal tips; provided the prosecutors with advance knowledge of his decisions; offered constructive criticism of prosecutorial filings; and even scolded Dallagnol as if the prosecutor worked for the judge. Such conduct is unethical for a judge, who is responsible for maintaining neutrality to guarantee a fair trial, and it violates the Judiciary’s Code of Ethics for Brazil.

In one illustrative chat, Moro, referring to new rounds of search warrants and interrogations, suggested to Dallagnol that it might be preferable to “reverse the order of the two planned [phases].”

Numerous other instances in this archive reveal Moro — then a judge, and now Bolsonaro’s justice minister — actively collaborating with the prosecutors to strengthen their case. After a month of silence from the Car Wash task force, Moro asked: “Hasn’t it been a long time without an operation?” In another instance, Moro said, “You cannot make that kind of mistake now” — a reference to what he considered to be an error by the Federal Police. “But think hard whether that’s a good idea… the facts would have to be serious,” he counseled after Dallagnol told him of a motion he planned to file. “What do you think of these crazy statements from the PT national board? Should we officially rebut?” he asked, using the plural — “we” — in response to criticisms of the Car Wash investigation by Lula’s Workers’ Party, showing that he viewed himself and the Car Wash prosecutors as united in the same cause.

As in the United States, Brazil’s criminal justice system employs the accusatory model, which requires separation between the accuser and judge. Under this model, the judge must analyze the allegations of both sides in an impartial, disinterested manner. But the chats between Moro and Dallagnol show that, when he was a judge, the current justice minister improperly interfered in the Car Wash task force’s work, acting informally as an aid and advisor to the prosecution. In secret, he was helping design and construct the very criminal case that he would then “neutrally” adjudicate.

Such coordination between the judge and the Public Prosecutor’s Office outside of official proceedings squarely contradicts the public narrative that Car Wash prosecutors, Moro, and their supporters have presented and vigorously defended over the years. Moro and Dallagnol have been accused of secret collaboration since the early days of Car Wash, but these suspicions — until now — were not backed by concrete evidence.

Another example of Moro crossing the line separating prosecutor and judge is in a conversation with Dallagnol on December 7, 2015, when he informally passed on a tip about Lula’s case to the prosecutors. “So. The following. Source informed me that the contact person is annoyed at having been asked to issue draft property transfer deeds for one of the ex-president’s children. Apparently the person would be willing to provide the information. I’m therefore passing it along. The source is serious,” wrote Moro.

“Thank you!! We’ll make contact,” Dallagnol promptly replied. Moro added, “And it would be dozens of properties.” Dallagnol later advised Moro that he called the source, but she would not talk: “I’m thinking of drafting a subpoena, based on apocryphal news,” the prosecutor said. While it is not entirely clear what this means, it appears that Dallagnol was floating the idea of inventing an anonymous complaint that could be used to compel the source to testify. Moro, rather than chastise the prosecutor or remain silent, appears to endorse the proposal: “Better to formalize then,” the judge replied.

Moro has publicly and vehemently denied on several occasions that he ever worked in partnership with the team of prosecutors. In a March 2016 speech, Moro denied these suspicions explicitly:

Let’s make something very clear. You hear a lot about Judge Moro’s investigative strategy. […] I do not have any investigative strategy at all. The people who investigate or who decide what to do and such is the Public Prosecutor and the [Federal] Police. The judge is reactive. We say that a judge should normally cultivate these passive virtues. And I even get irritated at times, I see somewhat unfounded criticism of my work, saying that I am a judge-investigator.

In his 2017 book, “The Fight Against Corruption,” Dallagnol wrote that Moro “always evaluated the Public Prosecutor’s requests in an impartial and technical manner.” Last year, in response to a complaint from Lula’s lawyers, Brazil’s prosecutor general — the presidentially-appointed chief prosecutor who runs the Car Wash investigation — wrote that Moro “remained impartial during the entire process” of Lula’s conviction.

Doubts, Misinterpretations, and a Triplex

Beyond Moro’s interjections, the documents obtained by The Intercept Brasil reveal that, while publicly boasting about the strength of the evidence against Lula, prosecutors were internally admitting major doubts. They also knew that their claimed jurisdictional entitlement to prosecute Lula was shaky at best, if not entirely baseless.

In the documents, Dallagnol, the Operation Car Wash lead prosecutor, expressed concerns regarding the two most important elements of the prosecution’s case. Their indictment accused Lula of receiving a beachfront triplex apartment from the construction firm Grupo OAS as a bribe in exchange for facilitating millions of dollars in contracts with Petrobras, but they lacked solid documentary evidence to prove that the apartment was Lula’s or that he ever facilitated any contracts. Without the apartment, there was no case, and without the Petrobras link, the case would fall out of their jurisdiction and into that of the São Paulo division of the Public Prosecutor’s office, which had argued that it, rather than Operation Car Wash prosecutors, had jurisdiction over the case against Lula.

“They will say that we are accusing based on newspaper articles and fragile evidence … so it’d be good if this item is wrapped up tight. Apart from this item, so far I am apprehensive about the connection between Petrobras and enrichment, and after they told me I am apprehensive about the apartment story,” wrote Dallagnol in a group Telegram chat with his colleagues on September 9, 2016, four days before filing their indictment against Lula. “These are points in which we have to have solid answers and on the tips of our tongues.”

None of Dallagnol’s subordinates responded to his messages in the materials examined for this article.

Prosecutors in São Paulo had publicly questioned the Petrobras connection in an official court filing, noting, “In 2009-2010 there was no talk of scandal at Petrobras. In 2005, when the presidential couple, in theory, began to pay installments on the property, there was no indication of an ‘oil scandal’.”

The Curitiba-based Car Wash team eventually prevailed over their São Paulo counterparts and were able to maintain the high-profile, politically explosive case in their jurisdiction. But private chats reveal that their argument was a bluff — they weren’t actually sure of the Petrobras link that was the key to maintaining their jurisdiction.

On Saturday night at 10:45 p.m., a day after expressing his original doubts, Dallagnol messaged the group again: “I’m so horny for this O GLOBO article from 2010. I’m going to kiss whichever one of you found this.” The article, headlined “Bancoop Case: Lula Couple’s Triplex Is Delayed,” was the first to publicly mention Lula owning an apartment in Guarujá, a coastal town in São Paulo state. The 645-word article, published years before the Car Wash investigation began, does not mention OAS or Petrobras and instead covers the bankruptcy of the construction cooperative behind the development and how it could negatively impact the delivery date of Lula’s new vacation apartment.

The article was submitted as evidence and, in his decision to convict Lula, Moro wrote that the O Globo article “is quite relevant from a probative point of view.” But Lula’s defense attorneys dispute that he was the owner of a triplex, claiming instead that he purchased a smaller, single level apartment on a lower floor, and the O Globo article presented no documentation proving otherwise.

Moreover, there is a small but telling inconsistency between the O Globo article and the claims of the prosecution regarding the triplex. The article itself puts Lula’s penthouse in Tower B, and even notes that Tower A is yet to be built at the time the article was written: “The second tower, if constructed according to the project blueprints, finalized in the early 2000s, may end part of Lula’s joy: the building will be in front of the president’s property, obstructing his ocean view at Guarujá.” But the prosecutors alleged that Lula owned the beachfront triplex in Tower A. Without noting this contradiction, Item 191 of the indictment cites the O Globo article: “This article explained that the then President LULA and [his wife] MARISA LETÍCIA would receive a triplex penthouse, with a view to the sea, in the said venture.” That is the apartment that would eventually be seized by authorities and that Lula would be convicted of receiving.

Car Wash prosecutors used the article as evidence that the triplex belonged to the presidential family, but indicted and convicted Lula on a triplex in a different building — demonstrating that the investigation was imprecise on the central point of their case: identifying the bribe that Lula allegedly received from the contractor.

When the indictment was revealed during a press conference on September 14, the triplex and its provenance as a bribe from OAS were the key pieces of evidence on the charges of passive corruption and money laundering. In a now infamous moment, Dallagnol presented a typo-laden PowerPoint presentation that showed “Lula” written in a blue bubble surrounded by 14 other bubbles containing everything from “Lula’s reaction” and “expressiveness” to “illicit enrichment” and “bribeocracy.” All arrows pointed back to Lula, whom they characterized as the mastermind behind a sprawling criminal enterprise. The presentation was widely spoofed and criticized by critics as evidence of the weakness of the Car Wash prosecutors’ case.

O PowerPoint de Deltan Dallagnol foi corroborado no TRF-4. https://t.co/qFCU9UbWe5 pic.twitter.com/2Kd7LQKBpY

— O Antagonista (@o_antagonista) January 24, 2018

Two days later, Dallagnol messaged Moro and, in private, explained that they went to great lengths to characterize Lula as the “maximum leader” of the corruption scheme as a way to link the politician to the R$87 million (US$26.7 million, at the time) paid in bribes by OAS for contracts at two Petrobras refineries — a charge without material evidence, he admitted, but one that was essential so that the case could be tried under Moro’s jurisdiction in Curitiba.

“The indictment is based on a lot of indirect evidence of authorship, but it wouldn’t fit to say that in the indictment and in our communications we avoided that point,” Dallagnol wrote. “It was not understood that the long exposition on command of the scheme was necessary to impute corruption to the former president. A lot of people did not understand why we put him as the leader to gain 3,7MM in money laundering, when it was not for that, but to impute 87MM of corruption.”

Moro responded two days later: “Definitely, the criticisms of your presentation are disproportionate. Stand firm.” Less than a year later, the judge sentenced the former president to nine years and six months in prison. The ruling was quickly upheld unanimously by an appeals court and the sentence was extended to 12 years and one month. In an interview, the president of the appeals court characterized Moro’s decision as “just and impartial” before later admitting that he had not yet obtained access to the underlying evidence in the case. One of the three judges on the panel was an old friend and classmate of Moro’s.

Even Lula’s most vehement critics, including those who believe him to be corrupt, have expressed doubts about the strength of this particular conviction. Many have argued that it was chosen as the first case because it was simple enough to process quickly, in time to fulfill the real goal: to bar Lula from being re-elected.

Until now, most of the evidence necessary to evaluate the motives and internal beliefs of the Car Wash task force and Moro remained secret. Reporting on this archive now finally enables the public — in Brazil and internationally — to evaluate both the validity of Lula’s conviction and the propriety of those who worked so tirelessly to bring it about.

The Intercept contacted the offices of the Car Wash task force and Sergio Moro immediately upon publication and will update the stories with their comments if and when they provide them. Read the editors’ statement here.

Update: June 9, 2019, 8:13 p.m. ET

The Car Wash task force did not refute the authenticity of the information published by The Intercept. In a press release published Sunday evening, they wrote, “possibly among the illegally copied information are documents and data on ongoing strategies and investigations and on the personal and security routines of task force members and their families. There is peace of mind that any data obtained reflects activities developed with full respect for legality and in a technical and impartial manner, over more than five years of the operation.”

Update: June 9, 2019, 9:53 p.m. ET
Justice Minister Sergio Moro also published a note in response to our reporting: “About alleged messages that would involve me, posted by The Intercept website this Sunday, June 9, I lament the lack of indication of the source of the person responsible for the criminal invasion of the prosecutors’ cell phones. As well as the position of the site that did not contact me before the publication, contrary to basic rule of journalism.

As for the content of the messages they mention, there is no sign of any abnormality or providing directions as a magistrate, despite being taken out of context and the sensationalism of the articles, they ignore the gigantic corruption scheme revealed by Operation Car Wash.”

The post Exclusive: Leaked Chats Between Brazilian Judge and Prosecutor Who Imprisoned Lula Reveal Prohibited Collaboration and Doubts Over Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

Bolsonaro has difficulty staying on script in person, despite a proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth, and he loves to use Twitter to belittle and attack enemies, decry “fake news” even when the reporting is demonstrably true, and praise right-wing torturers and dictators. Sound familiar?

It is unsurprising, therefore, that Bolsonaro, who took office in January, insisted that his first visit to a foreign capital be Washington, D.C., and Trump was eager to oblige. On Tuesday, the two men are scheduled to meet at the White House and have lunch (there was not enough time to arrange a full state visit).

The far-right leaders are expected to discuss the push to oust Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro, economic and trade cooperation, Brazil’s bid to enter the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and sign a deal to allow U.S. rocket launches from a Brazilian base.

For the U.S., Venezuela is the key issue, while the Brazilians are more focused on economic accords. The trip is meant to signal strengthened ties between two ideological allies, but the practical results will likely be limited.

Bolsonaro’s team hopes to leave the meeting with multiple major signed agreements, but due to the rushed nature of the preparations, that seems unlikely. Bolsonaro confirmed in a livestream that the two countries will sign an agreement almost 20 years in the making to permit the U.S. to launch satellites and rockets into space from Brazil’s Alcântara Launch Center without sharing U.S. intellectual property. Its location near the equator would allow for rocket launches to use 30 percent less fuel. The deal had stalled over national sovereignty concerns.

The U.S. is not expected to back Brazil’s bid to join the OECD, a Brazilian priority. Nor do they plan to sign a bilateral agreement to grant expedited customs processing for select operators, Brazil’s inclusion in the Global Entry border fast-lane program, or reach an agreement to open the U.S. market to Brazilian beef exports. The Brazilians are considering the reduction of tariffs on U.S. wheat and scrapping the requirement of tourist visas for U.S. citizens.

Bolsonaro Needs Some Good News

This is Bolsonaro’s second trip abroad as president; he was widely criticized for a weak showing on his first trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Later this month, he will travel to Chile and Israel, just days before their legislative elections.

Bolsonaro is far more popular than his most recent predecessors, but his domestic approval ratings have dipped to 39 percent as internal squabbling, strategic missteps, and a series of corruption scandals have quickly usurped his campaign narrative of a disciplined, moral leader untainted by the corruption that plagues the capital.

The trip may grant him a momentary reprieve from the countless crises — many of his own making — that continue to encircle him in Brasília. At the White House, Bolsonaro will get to mug for the cameras with Trump, whom he’s already referred to as “an example” and never misses a chance to publicly flatter. But in the end, his political future hinges on dragging the economy out of years of languor, though recent economic indicators have been ticking down alongside his popularity.

His administration’s strategy on that front is to push through wildly unpopular austerity measures to roll out the red carpet for foreign investment, particularly from the United States. The visit is designed to signal positive steps in that direction, even if it is unlikely to produce any substantial breakthroughs.

Trump Wants Help With Venezuela

Trump, for his part, has made it clear that he wants to support his new ideological ally, despite some misgivings within the administrative ranks. The U.S.-Brazilian bilateral trade relationship has been rocky for years, particularly under the 13 years of Workers’ Party administrations that sought to contain U.S. influence in the hemisphere. Grudges remain.

However, Trump’s main concern in the region at the moment is Venezuela. After launching a risky regime change campaign against Maduro in January, the administration and its allies have little to show for it except a string of failures. The threat of military intervention is still officially on the table, but increasingly appears to be a bluff as allies have backed away from that rhetoric, but the U.S. has tightened economic sanctions.

“There will be an expectation on the American side that Bolsonaro can show that he is truly committed to ramping up the pressure” on Maduro, says Matias Spektor, associate professor of international relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation. “No one in Washington expects Brazil to intervene” militarily, says Spektor, “what they’re asking for is ramping up the diplomatic pressure,” including the implementation of economic sanctions of their own against Venezuela. In an interview to the Financial Times last week, Vice President Hamilton Mourão said “the political pressure is there,” but “economic pressure” from Brazil would have limited impact since Venezuelan officials who might be targeted “don’t have their assets [in Brazil].” Mourão is a former general and represents the line of thinking of the Brazilian military, which has been a moderating force on the issue, a counterbalance to Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo’s more aggressive posture.

Rifts Within the Bolsonaro Coalition

The Venezuela crisis is one of many recent episodes that have laid bare the divisions within the Bolsonaro administration, which roughly shakes out into four main groups: military, evangelicals, old guard conservative politicians, and new far-right outsiders loyal to their pseudo-intellectual, conspiracy theory-peddling guru Olavo de Carvalho.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, embodies shades of each group. When it came to cabinet posts and top advisory positions, he has favored the military faction, loading his administration with generals. But his rhetoric and the actions of his sons — a Rio city council member, a federal deputy, and a federal senator — who have significant influence over their father, tend toward the Carvalho camp. Carvalho has publicly questioned whether the Earth revolves around the sun. On Saturday, he made comments that were sharply critical of the military’s role in the administration: “If everything continues as it is, it is already bad. You do not have to change anything to be bad. Just keep it up. In six months, it’s over.”

While the military, old guard conservatives, and evangelicals tend to hew toward a more protectionist and incrementalist view of foreign policy, the new far right has a strong ideological vision that wants to radically break with tradition in ways that often put them shoulder to shoulder with Trump.

This contingent is well-represented in Bolsonaro’s delegation. They arranged for the first item on the president’s agenda to be a dinner party at the ambassador’s residence last Sunday and invited former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Carvalho as honored guests. Attendees also included Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a Wall Street Journal’s editorial board member; right-wing social commentator Roger Kimball, who endorsed both Trump and Bolsonaro and has written critically about political correctness; and Matt Schlapp, chair of the lobbying organization that hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

Bannon was once the vice president of Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company that controversially used psychological profiling to target swing voters on social media with “fake news” in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump and in favor of the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom. The company’s activities remain under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. Bolsonaro’s campaign relentlessly deployed its own “fake news” on social media and WhatsApp. The Folha de São Paulo newspaper also revealed that wealthy supporters spent millions of dollars to disseminate “fake news” on Bolsonaro’s behalf during the election in violation of campaign finance laws.

Bannon’s international far-right alliance called The Movement named Congressperson Eduardo Bolsonaro as its South American representative last month. Eduardo was also recently a guest at an event at Mar-a-Lago hosted by Toni Kramer, founder of the group “Trumpettes USA” and snapped photos with Trump’s son Eric and prominent Trump backers.

Araújo, for his part, is also a fervent disciple of the conspiracy theorist Carvalho and an admirer of Trump. The “about the author” section of his blog reads:

I want to help Brazil and the world free themselves from globalist ideology. Globalism is economic globalization that has come to be piloted by cultural Marxism. Essentially it is an anti-human and anti-Christian system. Faith in Christ means today to fight against globalism, whose ultimate goal is to break the connection between God and man, make man a slave and God irrelevant.

In a recent speech, he criticized policy positions that he believes permitted China to surpass the U.S. as Brazil’s largest trade partner, blaming the new dynamic for the country’s economic stagnation. He said Brazil “will not sell its soul” to export soy and iron. Araújo also claimed responsibility for instigating the current quagmire in Venezuela in a recent blog post, “It was not Brazil that followed the U.S.A., but rather the opposite.”

The military brass in Bolsonaro’s inner circle have, with considerable success, moderated the administration’s foreign policy. They were able to nix a plan publicly endorsed by Araújo and Bolsonaro to permit a U.S. military base on Brazilian soil, moderate the stance on Venezuela, and get Bolsonaro to walk back his plan to pull out of the Paris climate accords. They are also attempting to prevent Bolsonaro from moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Yet Araújo is very much a true believer in the cause and, by all accounts, enjoys enormous prestige in the eyes of the president — and his sons as well. None of them appear to be going away anytime soon. This trip to Washington therefore can be seen as something of a counter volley by the most extremist, far-right element of Bolsonaro’s coalition after a string of defeats to the moderates in the ongoing war to determine the course of the administration.

The post Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro Meets With Donald Trump to Consolidate Their Far-Right Alliance appeared first on The Intercept.

At the Fiat factory in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, workers, fearing repression, had been organizing in secret. The military, which had taken power in a 1964 coup d’état, sometimes violently opposed labor organizing. Yet the Brazilian and Italian Fiat executives couldn’t ignore the palpable energy on the factory floor in Betim, the city where the Fiat plant had opened only two years earlier.

Six days before work would eventually come to a halt, Airton Reis de Carvalho, the precinct chief with the local police department, sent a letter to the military. A Fiat worker had been spending hours in front of the police station, trying to locate and free a jailed colleague who was viewed as indispensable to the push for a strike. “There really were Fiat employees who were detained,” Reis explained in his letter. “All of the measures taken by our precinct in this case were in keeping with our agreement with Colonel Joffre, of the Fiat Automotive’s security department.”

Under Joffre Mario Klein’s careful watch, Fiat had been spying on Brazilian workers in collaboration with the military dictatorship.

Reis was referencing Joffre Mario Klein, an army reserve colonel who had joined Fiat’s Brazilian operation in its early days — and who would be at the center of the company’s machinations against its own workers. Under Klein’s careful watch, the Italian carmaker had been spying on Brazilian workers in collaboration with the military dictatorship. Klein’s role in keeping Brazilian workers in check for Fiat, along with a long list of repressive moves by the company, are coming to light after a yearlong investigation by The Intercept Brasil, which tracked down documents from archives in Italy and Brazil and interviewed ex-workers at Fiat, former union leaders, and prosecutors in both countries.

The repression of labor at Fiat Brazil came thanks to coordination between the security apparatuses of the Brazilian government and a massive clandestine espionage network operated within the company itself, according to documents at the Minas Gerais public archive. Headquartered in the auto plant and commanded by Klein, Fiat’s internal espionage division employed dozens of civilian and military spies who investigated the lives of workers and helped the abusive dictatorship put agitating workers behind bars.

While Fiat’s network of spies operated far beyond the factory walls, closely tracking workers’ activities, the company also invited government repression onto its premises, according to documents from the Office for General Security, a now-defunct division of the Minas Gerais state police. The Brazilian Department of Political and Social Order, a police force known by its Portuguese initials, DOPS, operated freely among Fiat workers. DOPS was infamous for frequently taking the lead in brutal government campaigns of repression against social and political activity, and had employed torture and murder among its tactics since the 1950s. These were the dark forces infiltrating union meetings with the blessing of Fiat Brazil’s own security apparatus.

Fiat’s spying operation in Brazil had a parallel back home in Italy. Fiat engaged in the same pattern of espionage in Italy during the “Years of Lead,” a time of Italian political and social turmoil in the that ran from the late 1960s through the late 1980s, according to a second batch of documents from Fiat’s official archives in Turin, Italy, as well as documents from the federal courthouse in Naples, Italy.

The Italian spying operation was exposed in the 1970s, when the prosecutor Raffaele Guariniello conducted an investigation and found that Fiat had developed a system of pervasive espionage. A former secret service agent headed up the internal spy ring, and police, judges, and ex-military men were all implicated. The spies compiled hundreds of thousands of files with information about workers’ private lives, including intimate details. The information would prove useful for Fiat in identifying union leaders and ferreting out strike plans. Years after the investigation was complete, the case finally went to court, and some public officials and Fiat executives were convicted. While many of the details have come to public light, however, the history of the Italian spy ring is likely to remain a patchwork: A substantial portion of the evidentiary files from the case have disappeared.

In April 2018, in response to an initial inquiry about this story, Fiat Brazil said, “We consulted several sources in the company, but there is really no memory of such events.” In February of this year, Fiat Brazil offered the same comment in response to a detailed inquiry and declined to make company officials available for an interview. Fiat’s Italian headquarters referred The Intercept to the Brazilians’ statement and added, “Regarding the issues concerning Italy, we have no comments to make, because they are well-known things that have been reported in newspapers on many occasions in recent decades and on which books have also been written.”

The Strikes

In Minas Gerais, the strike finally came on October, 23, 1978, when Fiat’s employees on the factory floor halted their work. It would be a clash that reverberated through decades of Brazilian history, and a test not only for the plant’s managers, but for the authorities as well. For workers across the country, Fiat — which had invested substantial resources and political capital in building out its presence in Brazil — showed the possibilities of resistance in the face of long odds. Even at a company whose bosses had a close relationship with the military, there was hope, meaning that the dictatorship was not all-powerful. New strikes inside other auto companies followed. Among the workers on those picket lines was a young man named Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, who would go on to become Brazil’s 35th president a quarter-century later.

It was not supposed to be this way. At least that’s what Brazilian politicians had promised Fiat, according to a leaflet released at the time, used by Brazil’s National Institute of Industrial Development to attract foreign investment. During the negotiations to bring the carmaker to Brazil, the local governor, Rondon Pacheco, had told the Italians that his country offered a pacified labor force — they were poorly educated, “depoliticized youths,” mostly from rural areas, without a culture of labor struggle. This rosy picture of a docile workforce led local authorities to work with Fiat to set astounding production goals: They hoped to quickly build and scale up the operation so that, in short order, 190,000 new cars would roll off the factory floor every year. Those sky-high ambitions would be Fiat’s undoing. To get things moving more quickly, Fiat rushed in metallurgists from Italy and experienced toolmakers from the Brazilian states of Santa Catarina and São Paulo. But these skilled workers came from home having already been steeped in organizing: Both states had union movements operating at full steam.

The newcomers quickly spurred the locals into action. They demanded not only higher wages but permission to set up a committee of worker representatives. Above all, the workers wanted a slowdown of the production lines. At the time, Fiat progressively accelerated the machines over the course of the work day, leading to physical exhaustion among workers. So the strike was organized and finally put into effect.

The work stoppage lasted five days, with the union signing an agreement in a meeting attended by only a few dozen people. But the company kept only some of the promises it had made, and tensions remained high. The following year, another strike broke out. The clashes between employees and the company had become too much for executives at the young Fiat Brazil. Only a few years in, the company had suffered a pair of strikes, so Fiat decided to play hardball. Executives at Fiat Brazil called on a man who would become infamous in the lore of Fiat Brazil workers: Col. Joffre Mario Klein.

The Rise of the Colonel

Klein joined Fiat in 1975, before the factory even opened in Minas Gerais. His hiring had been the result of an ominous recommendation: Officials with thee National Information Service, Brazil’s primary spy agency at the time, had suggested Klein for the post. After being hired, Klein got to work setting up an office at Fiat with the anodyne name “Security and Information.” Only later did it become apparent that Klein’s primary duty was the command of an internal apparatus of repression. The office, which was expressly created by Fiat, drew up dossiers on employees, but the factory workers themselves were unaware of its activities. No one even knew how many people worked for Klein — or who they were.

“We didn’t know who he was, but he appeared to be a high-ranking military type. He was feared by the workers, to whom he rarely uttered a word.”

Over time, Klein became a personal friend of Fiat Brazil’s first president, Adolfo Neves Martins da Costa. Executives at Fiat’s worldwide headquarters in Italy heaped praise on the army reservist, according to a former employee in the company’s human resources department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The closeness with top Fiat figures meant Klein acquired a tremendous amount of influence. “No one was ever hired without my husband’s knowledge,” Klein’s widow, Maria Antonieta, told The Intercept Brasil in a series of 2017 interviews, which took place some nine years after her husband died. Klein described her late husband as a “serious and meticulous” man.

Klein seemed to exude power. Workers didn’t know who he was, but they knew he made them apprehensive. “He was slim, with a well-trimmed mustache and gray slicked-back hair and was always impeccably dressed,” said Edmundo Vieira, who was president of the metalworkers union in the 1980s. “We didn’t know who he was, but he appeared to be a high-ranking military type. He was feared by the workers, to whom he rarely uttered a word.”

Antonieta recalled her husband taking at least one trip to Fiat’s international headquarters in the northern Italian city of Turin. The former Fiat human resources employee confirmed that the trip took place and added that Klein made several other journeys to Turin; Klein, the employee said, wanted to understand how the Italians controlled strikes. It would not take Klein long to learn.

Fiat had been spying on its employees for years in Italy, where there was a robust labor movement and Communist Party presence, leading to regular strikes. In an effort to gain an edge on workers, Fiat set up an archive that, at its peak, contained more than 350,000 personnel files on workers’ personal, labor, and political activity. The filing cabinets occupied an entire floor of Fiat’s former headquarters in the heart of Turin.

When Fiat’s security apparatus extended to Brazil, however, Italian Fiat workers reached out to their Latin American counterparts. “From September 26 to October 4, 1979, I was in Rio de Janeiro and Betim to monitor the strike movements and Fiat’s operations in Brazil,” Antonio Buzzigoli, a former representative of the Italian Federation of Metalworkers, told The Intercept Brasil in a lengthy interview in the kitchen of his apartment in Turin.

After returning to Italy, Buzzigoli, through the metalworkers’ union, published a report in which he alleged that there was an “armed in-house police force” at the factory in Betim. The report suggested that the security team was 70 agents strong, trained by “an Italian and later by a Brazilian.” Its function was to put psychological pressure on the workers. Buzzigoli noted that agents monitored everything: They would keep tabs on “the bathrooms, and the cafeterias, circulating among the various areas of the factory all day long.” He wrote of the regularity with which the military police entered the factory. Italian newspapers seized on the metalworkers’ report and Buzzigoli did a series of interviews about what he had seen in Brazil.

Espionage, Arrests, and Firings

Within Fiat’s company archives in Turin, there is a November 1980 document about the carmaker’s Brazil operation titled “Statistics, positions, and wages.” An organizational chart shows that four employees constituted a “Security and Information” division under Klein’s direct control. But the surveillance apparatus was much larger than that — bigger even than the force Buzzigoli gleaned some knowledge of during his visit to Brazil. According to the document, 141 Fiat employees answered to the head of surveillance, Mauricio Neves, Klein’s right-hand man and second in command of the company’s security operations.

The security team took advantage of everything at their disposal to gather information that could help undermine political activity and potential labor leaders. One tack was to eavesdrop on the only available public telephone at the factory, in the courtyard; security would listen in on employees’ conversations. The labor activists took notice: Adriano Sandri, an Italian who worked at Fiat in Brazil, wrote to Buzzigoli to inform him that the telephones were monitored and that the head of surveillance kept records of all union-related calls. (The former Fiat human resources employee confirmed that phone conversations were monitored; it’s unclear what became of the records.)

Another Fiat tactic was to give current employees the opportunity to recommend new hires. The notion undergirding this move was making employees partially responsible for their recommendations’ conduct and integration into the workforce — a type of shared surveillance under the pretext of making a more congenial workplace. What’s more, active Fiat employees were effectively punished for labor organizing: Union membership all but eliminated any possibility of promotion.

Retaliatory measures against workers followed a distinct pattern. The workers who were deemed dangerous by the company were arrested under any pretext authorities could find — typically accused of stealing parts and tools — and were subsequently fired with cause.

Ézio Sena Cardoso’s story was typical. When he came to work at the plant in Betim, in October 1976, Cardoso already had 14 years of experience as an electronics technician at other companies. At Fiat, he started as an electrical maintenance mechanic for specialized machinery. A political activist, Cardoso had four prior arrests on his record. The first happened when he was 17, for participating in a protest at the gates of Mannesmann, a German conglomerate that he had never even worked for. At Fiat, Cardoso was active in mobilizing employees, although, due to political differences, he never joined the union board.

“I was punished for refusing to abandon the cause.”

Cardoso was one of the employees who actually ended up in Klein’s office. The persecution, Cardoso said, intensified after he declined, in front of Klein, a proposal to enroll in a professional development program to spend a year in Germany in exchange for “forgetting about this union matter.” He said, “I was punished for refusing to abandon the cause.”

A few months later, Cardoso was again summoned to the colonel’s office. This time, he was fired. Klein’s security unit accused Cardoso of authoring anonymous handwritten flyers agitating for labor actions. His lawyer asked for a handwriting analysis to determine whether the flyers had in fact been written by Cardoso and the result was conclusive: It was not Cardoso’s handwriting. “Someone within Fiat forged the flyers by copying his handwriting from official documents he had signed,” his lawyer, Santiago Lélis, said in an interview. “We won the case.” The court ordered Fiat to pay Cardoso damages, but his job wasn’t reinstated.

Other accounts of harassment and hostile work conditions were preserved for posterity thanks to the work of Michel Le Ven, a former priest. Le Ven, whose historical work focused on labor conditions during the military dictatorship in Brazil, collected anonymous accounts of individuals who worked for Fiat. “It’s a military system, with a hierarchy and everything, commanded by a colonel and a lieutenant,”one employee told Le Ven, as part of the priest’s doctoral research. “It’s totally repressive. When leaving the factory, workers are humiliatingly searched as if they are the worst kind of scum. If you protest, you are threatened and your employee number is noted by security.”

Le Ven, who was one of three French priests infamously imprisoned by the Brazilian dictatorship in 1968, lives in Minas Gerais and is in ill health. The Intercept Brasil obtained his unpublished doctoral thesis from his family.

Another anonymous Fiat Brazil employee described an interrogation room maintained by the Italians. “Fiat had a place to detain people inside the factory,” the worker told Le Ven. “Just like on the streets, they would approach someone, stop them, and say, ‘You’re under arrest.’ They would put them in their car and take them to the surveillance warehouse. When they arrived, there was the colonel. He was the executioner.”

Double Agents and Spotless Uniforms

Intelligence on the workers’ activities made its way to the Fiat security center in two ways: from double agents and from the infiltrators working for DOPS. Klein’s outfit recruited the double agents from among those workers who were suspected of subversion. Once they had been brought to the Fiat security room, the workers were promised a promotion or professional stability — as long as they betrayed their colleagues. The recruited workers would then be sent back out to the factory floor, pretending to be allied with trade unionists, all the while spying on them for Klein.

The most feared infiltrators were said to be easy to pick out of the crowd of workers: They wore spotless overalls — not even a single grease stain. It looked as if they had never worked a day on the machines in their lives. In many cases, they hadn’t. The DOPS agents in workers’ clothing had no friends; they did not fraternize with the regular employees — and there were a lot of them.

The infiltrators circulated throughout the company, gathering information from employees and at union meetings inside and outside of the factory. In the beginning, they went unnoticed. Little by little, however, the workers began to find them out. “They walked in pairs, wearing the green uniforms of the quality control team, which allowed them access to all areas of the factory,” said Antônio Luiz Vasco, who worked at Fiat from 1978 to 1982. “But the real members of the quality control team did not know who they were. And the fact that those uniforms were always spotless was weird.”

One day, Vasco and two other colleagues decided to out a group of infiltrators who were gathered at the door of the cafeteria. “We snuck up from behind them and shouted, ‘Attention!’” Vasco recalled in a phone interview. “And they immediately saluted. After that, they never again showed their face in the factory.” He let out a hearty laugh while recalling the incident.

Later, Vasco and José Onofre de Souza, a fellow worker, were sitting in the factory courtyard when they were called to “give a statement” in the security room. “It was a normal room, an office,” said Onofre. “They photographed us and took our statements, as if it were a police station.” Shortly thereafter, agents entered the factory and took Onofre away. “They took me to Lagoinha,” he said.

“We asked our bosses where he was, and they said that he had been caught stealing and had been fired. But everyone knew that was a lie.”

Lagoinha is a neighborhood in Betim where, beginning in the 1950s, Minas Gerais’s Department of Investigations — akin to a state-level version of the U.S.’s FBI — maintained an office with a jail. During the dictatorship, detainees were routinely jailed at facilities like the Lagoinha building for days without being charged. “They didn’t interrogate me, didn’t charge me,” Onofre recalled. “Didn’t do anything. They didn’t beat me, but they didn’t treat me well, either.”

With no news about her son during his illegal detention, Onofre’s mother went to the factory to find out if anyone had heard anything. “We asked our bosses where he was, and they said that he had been caught stealing and had been fired,” said Vasco. “But everyone knew that was a lie.”

Onofre got off lightly in the end — considering the fate met by many of the political disappeared under Brazil’s dictatorship. “I was there for two or three days,” he recalled. No records of the jail — let alone Onofre’s detention — exist.

Fiat also closely monitored worker meetings. The Intercept Brasil uncovered a document on company letterhead detailing Fiat’s surveillance of union activity. The report was found among microfilm records housed in the Minas Gerais public archives, among a batch of 97 microfilm rolls from the Office for General Security, the now-defunct division of the Minas Gerais state police, which received documents from the local DOPS unit.

The document includes a report of a closed meeting of workers held at a high school in the nearby state capital, Belo Horizonte. Among the approximately 50 attendees was a former Fiat employee identified in the document as Enilton Simões. “The presence of the former Fiat employee was well received by the meeting leaders, who immediately nominated him to be a member of the committee they had formed,” the document says.

The surveillance record dated April 19, 1979, details Simões’s remarks to the group. At one point, he asked if any Fiat employees present could explain how the military police operated within the factory. The document says, “Speaking on behalf of the trade union of Betim, he said the following: ‘Is there any representative of the Fiat workers who will come forward to report on how employees are treated by police within the factory?’”

The Turin-Betim Connection

Brazil’s military dictatorship helped Fiat come to the South American country. The Minas Gerais government put up $71.4 million and Fiat invested $71.5 million. Though lacking a majority interest, the state government chose the company’s president in Betim, according to an agreement between the Minas Gerais government and Fiat. Fiat, for its part, decided who would hold the positions of vice president and superintendent.

On the day the agreement was signed, Giovanni Agnelli, the president of Fiat Worldwide, held a news conference in which he said that he had chosen Brazil for “the social and political tranquility in the country at the moment.” For Fiat, the military coup of 1964 was a “revolution.” A Fiat country assessment, dated July 25, 1974, warned that social inequality in the country might serve to tamp down the Brazilian economy, but suggested economic growth might continue if there were no violent political upheaval.

Around then, in the early 1970s, Raffaele Guariniello, the former prosecutor in Turin, discovered that Fiat had spied on its Italian employees and even on potential hires. It was Guariniello who found the filing cabinets, with 354,077 personnel records, at Fiat’s former headquarters in Turin. “The strategy of espionage, bribes, and collaboration involving police officers, judges, and former military personnel had been devised by a former military man, who Agnelli trusted, that worked for the Italian secret service,” said Guariniello, in hushed tones, during an interview at Rome’s Senate library.

Guariniello marshaled his evidence into corruption charges against five top Fiat executives. But Agnelli was never among those charged.

In an attempt to squash the case, lawyers for Fiat managed to have it transferred to Naples, in southern Italy. There, in thick mafia territory, cases could be more easily “fixed” for the rich and powerful. Yet for many Fiat officials, no easy fix came. One by one, a series of the company’s employees were prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced, though none was imprisoned, because the statute of limitations had expired.

Once the legal cases were done, the Italian archives, where the case files had been kept, requested that Fiat take back the 150,000 files — half of the total collection. The archive office in the federal courthouse in Naples said the court simply didn’t have space to store all the documents. It’s unclear where all of those files are now. The Intercept Brasil examined what is left of the case files in Naples. There, we found some files that were left behind by Fiat among the documents.

The papers hint at the extent to which Fiat spied on its own employees. Described as “informative notations,” the records showed employees’ marital status, socio-economic status, criminal records, histories of political activities, political leanings, and public reputations — including those of family members directly linked to the respondents. One of the files found was that of Salvatore B. It described him as “single, apolitical, rents a modest apartment with his sister, who is also single, a worker, and apolitical, with good moral and civic conduct.” Salvatore was considered “suitable” to work at the factory in Turin.

Carlo C., on the other hand, was deemed “subversive,” despite having no police record and exhibiting good moral and civic conduct. The research into Carlo’s life was extensive. It was his past affiliation with the Italian Communist Party that raised red flags for Fiat security officials. The company spies produced a two-page report covering Carlo’s life from his college years until he joined the Communist Party — even including his church attendance. Their report also describes his father’s participation in the Italian centrist Christian Democracy party, as well as the fact that his mother and sister were both members of the faith-based activist group Catholic Action.

The files on the workers sometimes reflected the chauvinistic Italian culture of the time. For instance, the investigators gave a harsh assessment of a woman referred to as Angela O. Spies working for Fiat collected information on every aspect of her life. They noted that she had been twice evicted from her home for nonpayment of rent and that she currently lived in a small apartment with her mother and two children, one of whom had a serious health problem. Their report went on to say that “the person in question (Angela) has been in a relationship with a bankrupt, ex-con type for over a year and leaves much to desire on the moral front, because the children are from a different father and she previously had a relationship with a German citizen sought by Interpol.”

The report detailed several key moments in Angela’s life. “She worked as a cashier and, for a period of time, was seen roaming around the streets of Milan for unknown reasons,” the Fiat spies wrote. “She has not worked for a long time and leads a dubious life, arriving home late every night.” At that point, the researchers had already drawn their conclusions: “We suspect that she is a prostitute.”

It’s unclear if the scope of Fiat’s spying on workers in Brazil ever matched that of its investigations into Italian workers. No in-depth personnel files on large numbers of employees have surfaced. If the Italian spying did have a parallel in South America, perhaps the files were burned — the fate of many documents during the process of “turning out the lights” in the waning days of the military dictatorship in Brazil. When asked for a statement, the company responded that it has no records of events during that period.

The post The Secret History of Fiat Brazil’s Internal Espionage Network and Collaboration With the Military Dictatorship appeared first on The Intercept.

Late last month, Bolsonaro was scheduled for a surgical procedure to remove the colostomy bag he’d been using since being stabbed ahead of the presidential election. Before he went under the knife, Bolsonaro told his advisers that he would not turn over the powers of the presidency to Mourão while in surgery. A few days earlier, Mourão had made the most of the four days he spent as acting president while Bolsonaro was in Davos, Switzerland, by publicly undercutting his boss on a series of key issues in interviews with the press.

Members of Bolsonaro’s cabinet were “irritated” by his decision not to bestow Mourão with presidential powers, Época magazine reported. And the unofficial word coming from Bolsonaro’s office was that he hadn’t been “properly advised on the delicacy of the surgery.” Eventually, he would reverse course and sign over executive powers for 48 hours — but not the full 17 days he would spend in the hospital.

The whole saga nicely encapsulates Bolsonaro’s young presidency: mistrust sowing internal division, a leak, the unmasking of the president’s ignorance, and then, eventually, a forced reversal.

Bolsonaro rose to power thanks to a hodgepodge far-right coalition that came together just long enough to get the 63-year-old politician elected president of Brazil. But that coalition has spent all 53 days of his tenure in office eating itself alive. The rhetoric of Bolsonaro’s campaign crashed into the reality of his government with resounding thunder. Indecisiveness; power struggles leaked to the media; revelations of a son’s links to an organized crime boss; and multiple corruption allegations have dogged the president as he walked back campaign promises and stumbled through the turbulent, sometimes nonsensical, early days of the new administration.

So much has happened over the last 7 1/2 weeks that it’s impossible to take stock of it all. But by looking through the wreckage, perhaps you can get a sense of Brazil’s political life as of late.

The Backstabber

As Bolsonaro World quickly melts into a puddle, Mourão apparently spotted an opening — the latest chapter in a roller coaster of political controversies for the vice president. In 2015, Mourão, at the time an active duty general, was relieved of his command for publicly criticizing then-President Dilma Rousseff and praising the man responsible for her brutal torture during the military dictatorship. In 2017, he suggested in a speech that it might soon be time for another military coup in Brazil. The defense minister and army chief of staff at the time felt that Mourão’s opinions were too popular among the rank and file to risk punishing him. Nonetheless, Mourão retired soon thereafter to pursue a political career.

Before the campaign, Bolsonaro and Mourão had no relationship to speak of. The general was chosen mere hours before the deadline for parties to lock in their nominees, after many other candidates were discarded or had turned down Bolsonaro’s offer. Bolsonaro seemed to have intentionally chosen someone even more brutish than himself. Mourão had the added benefit of being a general who still supported the 1964 military coup d’état; for leftists traumatized by that dark period of history, the thought of such a man assuming the presidency again effectively neuters the option of one day impeaching Bolsonaro.

In the middle of the campaign last year, Mourão said that modern Brazilian culture inherited “indolence” from Indigenous peoples and “trickery” from Africans. He spoke out against the “13th month salary,” a much-beloved, guaranteed additional payment that salaried employees receive at the end of the year — and a constitutional right.

Yet since taking office, Mourão has moderated his tone, presenting himself as a rare voice of reason. Mourão recently said that Brazil is not considering moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and that increasing access to firearms will not reduce gun violence — both contradictions of Bolsonaro’s positions. He has spoken in favor of abortion rights and been exceedingly polite and available to reporters. When the leftist member of Congress Jean Wyllys fled the country instead of taking his seat, citing threats to his life, Bolsonaro and his sons celebrated. Mourão told the press that “those who threaten parliamentarians are committing a crime against democracy.”

The Conspiracy Theorists

Mourão’s independent streak has been viewed as unabashed treachery by the true believers in Bolsonaro’s inner circle. This is especially so for the president’s three adult sons, Eduardo, Carlos, and Flávio, who all hold elected office, as well as the band of unhinged political outsiders whose support they have cultivated over the years.

Jair Bolsonaro’s sons have long since firmly set their sights on Mourão — and have made repeated attempts to silence him. When those efforts proved unsuccessful, they even enlisted the help of the unofficial “guru” of the administration, the conspiracy-peddling pseudo-intellectual Olavo de Carvalho, who has a YouTube channel and a large, influential far-right following. Carvalho has called Mourão a “despicable charlatan.” (Carvalho, it should be noted, has questioned whether the Earth revolves around the Sun and claimed that Pepsi is sweetened with the cells of aborted fetuses, among other nonsensical musings.)

And U.S. President Donald Trump’s former top adviser Steve Bannon has also gotten in on the action. Bannon, who has called Carvalho a “hero,” said Mourão is “unpleasant and steps out of line.” The vice president deftly responded, “I’m a cool guy, dude.”

Bannon, for his part, has become increasingly involved in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. As of last September, during the presidential race, Bannon was enthusiastic about the then-candidate, but couldn’t remember his name and referred to him as “Botolini.” Since then, the bonds between the American far-right ideologue and his Brazilian counterparts have strengthened. This month, Bannon named Eduardo Bolsonaro as the South American leader of “The Movement,” his international alliance to combat “globalism.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro took a trip in January to the U.S., where he met with Carvalho and Bannon. And he brought along one of his father’s favorite purveyors of fake, far-right news: Allan dos Santos, who happens to be a Carvalho sycophant. Santos is best known for his feverish, babbling rants, full of such pearls of wisdom as, “Smoking is bad. I hope you don’t masturbate. Because my smoking doesn’t kill neurons, but now you’re jerking off, you’re fucking yourself. I die smart. You die dumb.”

The bedrock of the Bolsonaro political movement is formed by men and women of similar genius, and some of their fever dreams are making it to the floor of Congress. One of the newest representatives from Jair Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party, Márcio Labre, introduced a bill on the first full day of his new job to outlaw the sale and use of contraceptives, including the pill, intrauterine devices, and the morning-after pill — all of which he considers to be “micro abortions.” After public backlash and ridicule, he pulled the proposal, but other similarly outlandish proposals remain in play.

The Band of Thieves

The Social Liberal Party was left reeling following the revelation of two schemes that stink to high heaven of corruption. The stories, in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, told of how the party allocated $182,000 in public funding to the congressional campaigns of five unknown candidates — who ended up receiving almost no votes. Much of the money, according to official receipts, was spent at companies linked to top party officials. The federal police opened an investigation last Tuesday. Jair Bolsonaro and his party campaigned first and foremost on combating corruption in politics — which they conveniently framed as a problem created by the center-left Workers’ Party and its allies — thereby making this a serious challenge to their credibility.

The episode provoked a major crisis in the government. Gustavo Bebianno was the party president during the election and was then appointed as the secretary general of the presidency, an important cabinet-level position in Bolsonaro’s administration. Bebianno quickly became a central figure of administration infighting: He is the mortal foe of Carlos Bolsonaro, one of the president’s sons. Officially a Rio de Janeiro city council member, Carlos Bolsonaro has unofficially worked behind the scenes for years as the president’s social media guru — earning his father’s trust and support. Bebianno, however, used his influence to block Carlos Bolsonaro from gaining an official role in the administration.

“I need to apologize to Brazil for making Bolsonaro’s candidacy viable. I never imagined that he would be such a weak president.”

Carlos Bolsonaro used the scandal over disbursements to irrelevant candidates to strike back. He conspired to have his father sacrifice the party leader to the outrage over the episode, going so far as to “leak” part of a conversation between his dad and the minister; he used the recording to publicly label Bebianno a “liar,” a remark his father later endorsed. After days of back-and-forth speculation and negotiations, Bebianno was finally fired on Monday, but on the following day additional recordings were leaked to the press — proving that it was Carlos and Jair Bolsonaro who had lied.

Top party officials, allies from other parties, and military figures are all concerned by this development. Some worry that the president will throw them to the wolves if the next scandal touches them; others worry that Bebianno knows too many secrets and needs to be kept in the fold. The generals, for their part, fear the unchecked influence of Jair Bolsonaro’s impulsive and power hungry sons.

Bebianno reportedly told an ally, “I need to apologize to Brazil for making Bolsonaro’s candidacy viable. I never imagined that he would be such a weak president.”

Perhaps Jair Bolsonaro would’ve been able to brush it all off as “fake news” — invented by conspiratorial foes — were it not for the fact that he and his son Flávio are at the center of a larger and more serious corruption scandal that is currently being investigated by the public prosecutor’s office. Flávio Bolsonaro attempted to quash the inquiry with a petition to the Supreme Court, but the move backfired — only serving to provoke greater public indignation.

The story goes something like this: A federal investigation into corruption in Rio de Janeiro’s extremely corrupt State Assembly found multiple representatives and staffers with large bank transfers that did not jibe with their stated incomes. Among them was Flávio Bolsonaro, now a federal senator, and his former driver, a retired police officer named Fabrício Queiroz. Queiroz, it turned out, was regularly receiving deposits from staffers in Flávio’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s offices — generally on or just after payday and generally for most or all of their after-tax pay. Through his wife, Queiroz also transferred money to Flávio and Jair Bolsonaro. Over three years, the transactions totaled more than $1.8 million.

Flávio Bolsonaro is also being investigated for a series of “lightning” real estate transactions in which he’d buy properties and quickly flip them for enormous profits. The declared values in mandatory filings rarely matched the purchase or sale prices, irregularities that raised suspicions. Authorities requested that Flávio Bolsonaro and Queiroz come in to be deposed, but both simply decided not to, instead giving squishy interviews to friendly media outlets.

The Gangsters

That’s not all. The magazine Veja and the newspaper O Globo both report that Queiroz, the ex-cop, was allegedly involved in multiple killings in the line of duty. And, according to Flávio Bolsonaro, he was responsible for hiring and supervising the mother and wife of Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega. Nóbrega is said to be the chief of a militia group known as the “Office of Crime,” which has been accused of murder, extortion, fraud, and more. A former police captain, Nóbrega is currently a fugitive and also the primary suspect in the murder of Rio de Janeiro city council member Marielle Franco and her driver.

Flávio and Jair Bolsonaro have both publicly commended Nóbrega in the past, despite his arrest on murder allegations. Since their ties to prominent militia members came to light late last month, however, the Bolsonaros have been quiet on the subject. The day after the story of those links broke, Jair Bolsonaro blew off a scheduled press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, claiming that he was “tired.”

The Killers

While Jair Bolsonaro’s connection to these particular killer ex-cops is shocking, it’s not entirely surprising. Two of his top campaign promises were giving cops “carte blanche” to kill in the line of duty and expanding access to guns for average citizens. While neither will improve public security, as he claims, both measures are advancing swiftly, a sign that perhaps Jair Bolsonaro will be able to get some things done despite all the chaos surrounding his presidency.

A bill presented by the justice minister this month would allow judges to suspend homicide convictions of cops who acted under broadly defined “excusable fear, surprise, or intense emotion.” Human Rights Watch says the measure “could be used to let police officers who kill people in unjustifiable circumstances evade punishment.” One could argue that is exactly the point, since the prosecution rate of police officers is already infinitesimally small.

Rio de Janeiro’s new governor, Wilson Witzel, is not waiting for any vote in Brasília to put the philosophy into practice — and there is a body count to prove it. Witzel supported Jair Bolsonaro during the campaign and took a similar line on police-involved killings, promising to greenlight the “slaughter” of anyone seen carrying a rifle and the use of police snipers. He even floated the possibility of policing with armed drones.

Last month, three unarmed civilians in the Manguinhos favela were shot seemingly at random, and two of them died. One of the victims, a 22-year-old bricklayer’s assistant, was hit in the back while buying a coconut for his daughter. Family members and witnesses say the bullets came from a tower in the nearby police headquarters, and initial investigations have found holes punched into the walls that could be used to fire a rifle. Witzel hasn’t uttered a word on the subject.

This month, police in another Rio de Janeiro neighborhood killed 15 young men during a raid. Ten of them had been corralled into a home and appear to have been executed. Witzel praised the operation and referred to it as a “legitimate action.” Meanwhile, police oversight mechanisms and protections for internal affairs investigators have been rolled back or undone completely. According to official statistics, which are frequently underreported, on-duty Brazilian police killed 5,144 people in 2017.

The Mess

To an American observer in 2019, all of this might sound insane and yet quite familiar. A corrupt, nepotistic, right-wing populist is elected on a platform to end corruption; his handful of policy prescriptions please the base but do nothing (or worse) to solve the problems they are supposed to fix. This leader’s own ignorance and incompetence end up forcing him to spend most of his time cleaning up the messes that he and his allies inadvertently created. All the while, he blames the press for pointing out multiple times a day that his pants — and his administration — are on fire.

In such a chaotic environment, stories that would have been major scandals in other administrations — like a foreign minister who believes that Nazism was a leftist movement and “climatism” is a manufactured, totalitarian “globalist” plot, or the revelation that intelligence agencies may be spying on the Catholic Church because they wish to “neutralize” their “leftist agenda” — have become minor footnotes.

Like the U.S., the mainstream opposition is entirely feckless and lacks vision; unlike the U.S., no insurgent, progressive rays of hope have emerged to reveal a conceivable new way forward. Like the U.S., government agencies and crucial oversight mechanisms are being gutted, and corporations and oligarchs are quickly and quietly seizing the moment to rewrite the rules even further in their favor; unlike the U.S., few effective institutional safeguards exist to slow their advances.

In Brazil, the right-wing agenda is mostly the following: Gut regulations of all kinds, particularly environmental and labor; cut social spending; make taxation even more regressive; privatize almost every government-controlled asset; expand the privatization of education and health care; increase access to firearms; ban abortions in all circumstances; promote environmentally destructive extractive industries; build more prisons and fill them by passing tougher sentencing guidelines; greenlight more aggressive policing of poor neighborhoods; increase the military’s power and prestige; reign in the press; roll back freedom of information programs; and dismantle laws and programs that support and are supported by progressives. Sound familiar?

Both countries are racked by colossal economic, social, and environmental challenges that must be addressed immediately. The fate of their populations and the whole planet literally hang in the balance. It isn’t clear if these (mostly) men have never pondered or simply don’t care about the potentially catastrophic implications of their short-term aims, but what is clear is that there is no quick fix. Even if you defeat the president, a vice president with all of the same central policy goals, but with only a fraction of the personal drama, lies waiting in the wings to swoop down and more efficiently execute the agenda.

This is what hangs, and will continue to hang, over Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro has another 1,409 days in his first term as president.

The post Jair Bolsonaro’s First 53 Days as President of Brazil Have Been a Resounding, Scandalous Failure appeared first on The Intercept.

The protection of Indigenous lands is guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution to preserve the rights and cultures of groups that have been persecuted for centuries. Brazil is home to approximately 900,000 Indigenous citizens from 305 tribes, most of whom live on reserves, but more than half of the locations claimed by Indigenous groups have not yet received government recognition. Bolsonaro, consistent with his anti-Indigenous stance throughout his career, said in a televised interview shortly after his election that if it were up to him, “there won’t be any more demarcations of Indigenous land.”

Any rollback of protections for Indigenous lands would pose a dire threat to the Amazon rainforest, which is being rapidly cut down by ranchers, farmers, and extractive industries.

Bolsonaro’s attitudes toward Brazil’s Indigenous people and their lands are similar to those of the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, during which time thousands of tribespeople were killed and thousands more were driven from their lands to make way for large infrastructure projects and farms.

In last year’s election, Bolsonaro campaigned hard on cuts to government funding for Indigenous services and freezing the expansion of federally protected reserves. He immediately moved to make good on these promises after his inauguration last month.

Meanwhile, armed bands of land grabbers, known as “grileiros,” have been staging attacks on Indigenous communities — a pattern of violence that has surged in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election, according to Indigenous leaders and allies interviewed for this article. “With Bolsonaro, the invaders are feeling more at ease,” Bitete Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, who lives on an Indigenous reserve, told The Intercept by telephone.

He referred to the invaders as “peons” sent by powerful bosses to cut down trees, burn undergrowth, and plant grass for cattle grazing — the first stage in the vastly profitable criminal enterprise of land-grabbing in the Amazon. From there, the lands are often sold several times over on the black market, meaning that poor states lose out on much-needed tax revenue.

Prosecutors have raised the alarm over four territories that have experienced, or are in grave danger of, invasion or attack, while advocacy groups say the number is at least six territories and fear that darker days are still to come. An investigation published this week by the NGO Repórter Brasil found that at least 14 fully protected Indigenous territories are currently under attack.

Under Attack

Last month, the image of a bullet-riddled metal plaque reading “National Indigenous Foundation, Protected Territory” made the rounds on WhatsApp, Brazil’s most popular messaging app. The sign marks the entrance to one of several villages in the vast Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous reserve, in a lawless region of the Amazonian state of Rondônia, near the Bolivian border.

Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leaders and local advocacy groups shared the solemn photograph with an accompanying audio message explaining that the gunshots were fresh, the latest attack in an ongoing “invasion” by groups of grileiros.

The tribe fears that a violent conflict with gun-toting outsiders is imminent. Recently, armed with bows and arrows, they managed to expel a group of grileiros from the reserve and filmed the confrontation. The trespassers promised to return.

“They want to take the land, divide it up into lots, and raise cattle,” Bitete Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau said. “They are getting very close.” The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau are not alone.

On his first day as president, Bolsonaro transferred the authority to protect Indigenous lands from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, a government entity tasked with the protection of Indigenous communities, to the Ministry of Agriculture, handing a victory to the powerful agribusiness sector that backed his campaign and has its eyes on large tracts of pristine forest. Sydney Possuelo, a veteran Indigenous observer and former FUNAI president, described the move as “the death” of FUNAI, in an interview with the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.

Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, now headed by Tereza Cristina Dias, a former member Congress from the powerful “ruralista” agricultural caucus, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether the demarcation of Indigenous lands would continue.

Days after signing the decree, Bolsonaro tweeted a video clip of another one of his ministers who argued in a cable news interview that many of the existing Indigenous reserves were established using fraudulent documents, and called the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples “spurious” and “treasonous.”

The Chamber of Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities of Brazil’s Public Prosecutors Office has sent an urgent memo to the justice minister warning that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and three other communities were in danger. The Indigenous Missionary Council, or CIMI, a Catholic aid group, recorded attacks and threats in five states.

“What we are seeing is a new phase of illegal occupations of Indigenous lands,” said Cleber Buzatto, CIMI’s executive secretary.

The Bolsonaro Effect

According to Daniel Azevedo Lôbo, a public prosecutor in Rondônia, the region surrounding the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory is rife with criminal groups constantly looking to illegally exploit Indigenous territories or forest conservation units. In January, he said that dozens of suspected grileiros were planning a major invasion, and another had already taken place this year. Federal Police arrested one suspect, while the rest fled into the forest.

Grileiros “see themselves as workers and producers, but they are criminals,” Lôbo told The Intercept. He said that land grabbers in Rondônia likely felt encouraged by the new administration. “They always look for a way to legitimize their illegal actions,” he said. “The government might have changed, but the law didn’t.”

The 7,200-square mile Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau reserve is larger than the U.S. states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Around 200 tribespeople of different Indigenous subgroups live in villages on the margins, and an unknown number of “isolated” Indigenous people who do not have direct contact with the outside world reside deeper within the borders.

Using satellite imagery, Brazil’s Social Environmental Institute concluded that only 2 percent of the reserve is deforested, as compared to 70 percent in the surrounding area.

Federally protected Indigenous reserves cover 12 percent of Brazil's territory and are among the Amazon's most important defenses against rampant deforestation. The borders between protected and unprotected territories in places like Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in Rondônia and Araribóia in Maranhão are easily distinguishable in satellite imagery. Images: Google Maps

Rondônia is one of the Brazilian Amazon’s most deforested states, and much of the remaining jungle is in Indigenous lands and federal conservation units, making them popular targets for criminal gangs. By no coincidence, the state recorded 17 murders related to land conflicts in 2017, one of the worst rates in the nation.

Last year, Bolsonaro won in Rondônia by a wide margin and a retired military police officer from Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party was elected governor.

The Karipuna Indigenous territory, also in Rondônia, is similarly under assault from land grabbers. Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit, Unearthed, reported from the territory in 2017 after prosecutors said the tribe — with less than 60 members living on the site — was at risk of “genocide.” “They are close to the village now,” Adriano Karipuna told The Intercept recently. He visited the U.N. headquarters in New York last year to denounce a possible “massacre” against his people.

Federal Police have since seized tractors and other heavy machinery from the nearby community of União Bandeirantes and are investigating three suspects in connection with illegal logging. The Public Ministry, with the support of the Federal Police and FUNAI, is expected to request National Guard troops to defend the reserve.

FUNAI’s new president, Franklimberg de Freitas — an army reserve general who is currently the target of a government ethics enquiry for conflict of interest regarding his former consultancy gig for the Canadian mining firm Belo Sun — also visited Rondônia late last month following the recent invasions.

Next door in Mato Grosso state, prosecutors warned that they would meet any invasion of the Marãiwatsédé reserve of the Xavante people with an “energetic response.” In 2012, farmers illegally occupying the land were expelled by court order. Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported that Nelson Barbudo — also known as “Bearded Nelson” — the state’s most popular congressperson and Bolsonaro ally, had encouraged the invasion, calling their removal “a crime against producers.”

Twelve hundred miles south, in Rio Grande do Sul state, local prosecutors have opened an investigation into a reported incident in which two hooded men made threats and opened fire at a small Mbyá-Guarani encampment in the capital, Porto Alegre.

In Maranhão state, Claudio da Silva, who leads a local forest guard on the Caru Indigenous territory told The Intercept that a group of farmers that was removed in 2014 following a court decision was threatening to come back. “With the proposals of Bolsonaro, they are organizing to return to the Awá territory,” he said. “We can’t just cross our arms.”

From Bad to Worse

About 0.4 percent of Brazil’s population lives on federally protected Indigenous lands, which cover around 13 percent of national territory and contain some of the nation’s best-maintained forests. Climate scientists consider empowerment of Indigenous people and their lands as an important weapon in the fight against climate change. But regardless of who is running the nation, throughout recent history, those concerns have been sublimated to the short-term economic interests of major industries.

Before Bolsonaro, the situation was already increasingly dire for Brazil’s Indigenous communities as the agribusiness lobby has grown more powerful in state capitals and in the corridors of power in Brasília. In 2017, under President Michel Temer, FUNAI’s budget was cut by nearly half, and a law was passed that effectively gave amnesty to land grabbers who had continuously occupied lands since before 2011. A similar measure had already been passed in 2004.

Invasions of Indigenous lands jumped from 59 in 2016 to 96 in 2017, according to CIMI’s annual report “Violence Against Indigenous People in Brazil.” The study highlighted that “one can see a significant increase in invasions; theft of natural resources such as timber and minerals; illegal hunting and fishing; soil and water contamination by pesticides; and fires, among other criminal actions.” It was also one of Brazil’s bloodiest years on record for land dispute-related violence, with at least 70 killings, according to rural violence watchdog Comissão Pastoral da Terra.

Before Temer, President Dilma Rousseff’s administration recognized very few Indigenous lands, experts say, to appease allies in Congress who represented major agricultural interests.

During her mandate, she also inaugurated the controversial Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam. Before construction began in 2011, environmentalists warned — correctly — that it would cause enormous damage and subsequent deforestation in the region.

But under Bolsonaro, Indigenous leaders in the region believe that the actions of unscrupulous loggers and land grabbers will only get worse.

Leo Xipaya, an Indigenous leader who fought against Belo Monte for years, has no doubts about it: “Bolsonaro’s plans put Indigenous people at risk.”

The post Jair Bolsonaro Praised the Genocide of Indigenous People. Now He’s Emboldening Attackers of Brazil’s Amazonian Communities. appeared first on The Intercept.

Bolsonaro cancela entrevista em Davos e culpa comportamento da imprensa —-> https://t.co/J7zf6Kme8P

#folha #Bolsonaro pic.twitter.com/27E48r2OZF

— Folha de S.Paulo (@folha) January 23, 2019

The scandal most centrally involves Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flávio, who has long been a state deputy from Rio de Janeiro, but was just elected to the Federal Senate with a massive vote total in the last election. The scandal began with the discovery of highly suspicious payments into and out of the account of Flávio’s driver, a former police officer and long-time friend of the president’s.

Each new discovery has escalated the scandal’s seriousness: One unexplained deposit was found going into the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle; both the driver and Flávio himself began using highly suspicious maneuvers to try to stymie the investigation; the amounts of the suspicious transfers began rapidly increasing to US$2 million; and then deposits were found going into Flávio’s accounts in small increments of multiple deposits in rapid succession: at times up to 10 cash deposits made within three minutes, the hallmark of money laundering and evading banking regulations.

But two recent events have converted what looked to be a classic scandal of money laundering and kickbacks into something much more ominous and terrifying. Earlier this week, Rio de Janeiro police arrested five members of Brazil’s most dangerous militia, one linked to the 2018 assassination of City Council Member Marielle Franco of the left-wing PSOL party. As it turned out, Flávio Bolsonaro formally praised two of the leading members of that militia; gave an award to the militia’s chief; and, most astonishingly of all, kept the mother and the daughter of the militia chief on his payroll for the last 10 years. That the Bolsonaro family has been discovered to have such close and intimate ties with militias, including the one involved in Franco’s brutal assassination, stunned the country.

Then, on Thursday, Brazil’s only LGBT member of Congress, the longtime leftist critic of Bolsonaro, Jean Wyllys, who just won a third term in the November election, announced that he has fled the country and will not assume his office due to serious threats to his life. In explaining why he fears for his life, Wyllys specifically cited these new revelations that the Bolsonaro family is linked to the militia blamed for the death of Franco, who was in the same party as Wyllys (my husband, David Miranda, is a Rio de Janeiro city council member in that same party and, as the alternate behind Wyllys, will now assume Wyllys’s seat in Congress, becoming the only LGBT member of the lower house).

Prior to Wyllys’s stunning announcement, we began work on a short video documenting the key facts of this genuinely shocking scandal that has paralyzed the Bolsonaro presidency before it could even begin and, today, drove the country’s only LGBT Congress member not only from office, but from the country. Watch:

The post Video: The Dramatic Scandal Swallowing the Bolsonaro Presidency Just Drove an LGBT Congressman to Flee Brazil appeared first on The Intercept.