1206170

book-review2023
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X231206170LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESAbu-El-Haj/BOOK REVIEW

Book Review
Lava Jato in the Words of Its Task Force: Corruption
Probe and the Rise of the Far-Right in Brazil
by
Jawdat Abu-El-Haj

Jorge Pontes and Márcio Anselmo Operation Car Wash: Brazil’s Institutionalized Crime
and the Inside Story of the Biggest Corruption Scandal in History. London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2022.

Operation Car Wash is based on the memoirs of two Brazilian Federal Police
officers who participated in the country’s most notorious and controversial
corruption investigation. Originally published in Portuguese in 2020 and trans-
lated into English in 2022, it is authored by Jorge Pontes, a veteran officer, and
Márcio Anselmo, a junior agent. Robert Rothberg, a Harvard university profes-
sor and expert on political corruption, has praised it as a revelatory inside job
by two highly informed officers on systematic corruption and efforts to cope
with this deep-rooted phenomenon in developing countries.
Operation Car Wash dates to March 2014, when the Federal Police uncov-
ered a money-laundering scheme at a Brasilia gas station owned by a conserva-
tive supporter of the Lula government. From a routine police operation it
evolved into a mega-investigation of corruption at Petrobras. By 2018, it had
provoked a watershed in Brazilian politics with the impeachment of president
Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment of ex-President Lula along with scores
of PT militants, businessmen, governors, and influential politicians from the
entire ideological spectrum. During the 2018 general elections, the investiga-
tion unleashed an anti-PT electoral backlash that swept the far-right into power
under the leadership of the retired army captain Jair Bolsonaro. Many of the
themes of Bolsonaro’s campaign are found in this book, among them the notion
that the inner circle of the PT administration built an institutional network of
corruption infiltrating the three powers—state-owned companies, the civil ser-
vice, and private contractors, the equivalent of a deep state—that used embez-
zled public funds to co-opt conservative parties. For Pontes and Anselmo,
institutionalized corruption was not an isolated criminal act but a centralized
planning system for attaining political hegemony.
From the outset, they explain that their purpose is to go beyond the descrip-
tion of the Car Wash events to reveal its institutional causes. This ambitious
objective promises to be the book’s strength, but it has its shortcomings and
vulnerabilities. There is indeed a wealth of data and observations on embezzle-
ment schemes, key businessmen negotiating kickbacks, invoices fraud, over-
pricing, revolving-door tactics between corrupt managers in state and private

Jawdat Abu-El-Haj is a professor of political science at the Universidade Federal do Ceará.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 252, Vol. 50 No. 5, September 2023, 158–161
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X231206170
https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X231206170
© 2023 Latin American Perspectives

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 Abu-El-Haj/BOOK REVIEW  159

companies, and other forms of illicit behavior, but the assertion that the system
of centralized corruption was the work of a conniving Lula and his inner circle
lacks clear evidence. Throughout the book, these accusations seem to reinforce
the political narrative of Bolsonaro and his justice minister Sérgio Moro.
Reading between the lines of 11 disconnected chapters, the reader is led to
deduce two causes of political corruption in Brazil: (1) the diversion of the
Federal Police from investigating politicians’ shady deals and (2) the instru-
mental construction of a PT-planned embezzlement scheme to control the state.
For the most part, the veteran Jorge Pontes tackles the organizational culture of
the Federal Police, while Márcio Anselmo details the investigative side of Car
Wash (wiretapping, search warrants, and plea bargains).
Pontes describes the constant uneasiness among Federal Police freshmen
officers assigned to the Amazon region, many of whom believed that they were
being deliberately sidetracked to the endless pursuit of petty marijuana dealers
instead of investigating corrupt politicians’ complicity in environmental
crimes. That changed under Tomaz Bastos, Lula’s first minister of justice. After
nominating a highly respected director for the Federal Police, he introduced
new technologies, sent officers overseas on training missions, and signed coop-
eration agreements with first-class law enforcement agencies in the United
States and Europe. Although Pontes lauds Bastos for his support, he attributes
the modernization of the Federal Police to international agreements that the
first Lula administration had signed on environmental protection, greenhouse
gas emissions, money laundering, and international terrorism. For Pontes,
international pressure was the true catalyst for the conversion of the Federal
Police into an effective internal security agency, especially after September 11.
In a matter of few years, the Federal Police assumed many new roles beyond
antidrug enforcement: a Secret Service to protect national authorities, pursuit
of smuggling and counterfeiting, homeland security, regulation of migration,
investigation of environmental crimes, issuance of passports, inspection of pri-
vate security firms, financial crimes, and the protection of the indigenous pop-
ulation. It covered more areas than all the internal security agencies of the U.S.
government put together. This expansion, however, was not accompanied by
budget increases and the hiring of new agents. Subtle harassment and intimi-
dation added further hurdles to investigations of corruption: threatening
agents with transfer to inhospitable regions, using leaks to the press to abort
anticorruption operations, fake news, and external oversight. This was a repeti-
tion of a Brasilia tradition of going the extra mile to reduce transparency. In
these chapters Pontes pictures incorruptible agents willing to sacrifice their
personal interests to deal with Brazil’s gravest problem, the systematic embez-
zlement of public funds. However, many questions arise. Was the financial
pressure on the Federal Police a political ploy to limit its capacity or part of a
trend that affected federal government institutions as a whole? Did all admin-
istrations hamper Federal Police anticorruption operations? How was the
Federal Police able to track and arrest numerous high-profile notables while
being intimidated by influential politicians and their collaborators in all three
branches of the state?
The second thesis on the origins of institutionalized crime is tackled in
Chapters 5 (“From Organized to Institutionalized Crime”) and 7 (“Capitalism
160   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

the Brazilian Way”). Riddled with antileft narrative reminiscent of the Cold
War, the book argues that, prior to the PT, corruption had been limited in scope
and scale. At most it was similar to organized crime: spontaneous and frag-
mented, easy to detect and control. However, under the command of Lula's
inner cabinet, corruption became an institutionalized crime. It originated in the
presidential staff but soon crept into ministries, the judiciary, the legislative
branch, state-owned companies, political parties, infrastructure private con-
tractors, and subnational governments. Rationalized corruption served a dual
purpose: enriching the PT’s top brass and controlling the state by bribing con-
gressional leaders.
The embezzlement was based on institutionalized delinquency, illicit acts
committed in state-owned companies in an alliance with the country’s largest
infrastructure contractors. In several chapters Pontes and Anselmo detail the
system of bribery and the trail of illicit funds. The process begins when political
appointees to state-owned companies negotiate kickbacks with private con-
tractors. Contractors overprice construction jobs to include bribery. Once pay-
ments by the state-owned companies reach the contractors, cash is stashed in
suitcases and delivered to political appointees, and bribes are distributed by
party leaders to the rank and file in the Congress to maintain their political
allegiance. Corruption became so routine that contractors established special
accounting divisions to keep records of falsified invoices, overpricing, and
bribes. The most notorious was Odebrecht’s Department of Structured
Operations, tied directly to the company’s president, Marcelo Odebrecht.
During elections, kickbacks became more voluminous because of the galloping
costs of political campaigns.
Pontes and Anselmo still argue that institutionalized corruption was behind
some key industrial policies and foreign economic relations during the PT
administrations. For them, the national champions policy existed only because
of embezzlement. PT-promoted infrastructure projects in Latin America and
Africa made institutionalized corruption a global business, linking Brazilian
politicians, contractors, and foreign governments in schemes of fraud.
The book certainly offers a detailed analysis of the way corruption operates
in Brazil and the difficulty of reversing this entrenched practice. However, the
question is whether corruption was PT’s instrumental policy to dominate the
Brazilian state or a modus operandi that outlasted presidencies. Two facts
mentioned in the book support the second interpretation. First, during inter-
rogation Emilio Odebrecht (Marcelo’s father) declared, "Everything that is
happening is an institutionalized business. It’s just how it’s always been.”
This blunt statement by a business insider means that the same corruption
schemes were carried over from the dictatorship to Sarney, Collor, Cardoso,
and Lula. Hence, PT was hardly a founder of institutionalized corruption.
Rather, it was a left party seduced by the ease with which bribery reins in
conservative politicians and guarantees large congressional majorities. PT’s
misfortune was that it backfired and caused a reversal of democratic gover-
nance and a pretext for an autocratic reawakening in Brazil. Secondly, Alberto
Youssef, the money launderer involved in both Banestado (the Paraná-state-
owned bank) and Car Wash, declared during his plea bargain that the same
methods were adopted by various governments and that "everybody knew
 Abu-El-Haj/BOOK REVIEW  161

what was going on,” implying that the Federal Police had knowledge of insti-
tutionalized corruption.
I conclude this review with a few questions about corruption, the political
system, and capitalism. Isn’t corruption an outcome of the “coalition presi-
dency,” a system of government that demands large party coalitions to secure
governability? Under this political arrangement, no matter what party is in
power the glue that sustains majorities is thousands of managerial positions
allocated to party coalitions. Isn’t such a clientelistic exchange of offices for
loyalty a legalized corruption? Shouldn’t a political reform that regulates the
allocation of authority positions in the Brazilian state be on the agenda?
Although Brazilian democracy ended two decades of authoritarian rule,
many of the mechanisms of the old regime continue to regulate relations
between the executive and the legislative branch. On one hand, the presidency
is endowed with extraordinary powers to set political agendas. On the other,
party leadership in the Congress secures the loyalty of the rank and file through
the distribution of offices and cash payments. Wouldn’t the concentration of
political power in the presidency and party leaders lead to ever more sophisti-
cated methods of usurpation of public goods by the political elite?
Finally, Brazilian capitalism is still commanded by dynasties that owe their
fortunes to political patronage, especially among contractors of public works.
Odebrecht, Andrade Guiterrez, OAS, and Mendes Junior—the so-called four
sisters—have been involved in every corruption scheme since military rule.
They have expanded and thrived under authoritarianism and democracy; they
have supported the right and the left and paid allegiance to both the free mar-
ket and state planning. Those capitalist enterprises are commanded by families
that know the value of bribery as the key to their fortunes. Why wouldn’t regu-
lators ignore overpricing when public works costs consistently surpass original
estimates by severalfold?
This could have been an eye-opening book on corruption in a capitalist soci-
ety had the authors avoided political scapegoating. Certainly, PT fell into the
trap of oligarchic politics, but it was far from being an all-powerful organiza-
tion that built a deep state. In this book, the authors fall into the same dilemma
as Judge Sérgio Moro, the main protagonist of Operation Car Wash. Moro
promised society to conduct an exemplary investigation that would reaffirm
the rule of law. But Moro eventually tossed the entire probe onto the shady
grounds of political manipulation.
Pontes and Anselmo criticize Bolsonaro and level accusations of corruption
at his government, but their thesis that PT was the true founder of a deep state
legitimizes the far-right narrative. Nowadays a generalized doubt troubles
Brazilian public opinion—whether Operation Car Wash was a sincere effort to
rid Brazil of malignant corruption or a far-right pretext to delegitimize the PT
as a political force.