What does a meaningful anti-corruption revolution look like? I’ve already asserted this month that what’s going on in Brazil is best understood as a success story for anti-corruption reforms and the rule of law, if not for democracy itself. I suppose I should defend that claim.
The story begins about ten years ago, when optimism in Brazil, economically and politically, was at an all-time high. But a series of events would precipitate major change. It began in 2005 with a now-seemingly-miniscule (though at the time, substantial) vote-buying scandal called Mensalao. Brazil then began a long-slow decline into the present recession. In the context of these political and economic turns for the worse, Brazil was chosen to be one of only three countries to host the world’s two most expensive athletic events back-to-back: the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games (the others being Russia, who is doing so now, and the U.S., back in the 1990s). The last straw was the government’s decision to increase fares on subsidized public transportation. That’s when the widely publicized protests began, which concerned the misuse of public funds.
In this context, Brazil enacted four major statutes. In 2011, it adopted major procurement reforms, and an equivalent of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Then in 2013 came the two biggies: the so-called Clean Companies Act, which imposed corporate liability for official bribery, and a RICO-style organized crime bill that created a new obstruction of justice charge. Long story short: these laws, working together, have allowed enforcement authorities to expose and prosecute systemic corruption. In other words, in response to public protests about government corruption, a democratically elected body enacted a series of reforms that are now being used to root out corruption and hold both public and private officials accountable. This, I submit, is precisely how an anti-corruption revolution is supposed to work.
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Posted by Andy Spalding on May 25, 2016 at 08:31 AM
Comments
Great series of posts about current situation in Brazil. This narrative, however, leaves out important details. The current anti-corruption investigation which is causing so much political instability in Brazil is also due in large part to the recent provisions allowing for plea-bargaining by criminal defendants. This provision was originally enacted not as a way to fight corruption. Rather, it was enacted in the after match of huge protests in June 2013, where a group of protesters (so-called “Black Blocks”) made use of violence and destruction of public buildings as a protest strategy. Congress then enacted a new law to charge Black Blocks members as belonging to criminal organizations with very tough sanctions. Drafters buried a plea-bargaining in that law, without Congress paying much attention to it. That provision is now being used as a main weapon in anti-corruption investigation that is targeting members of the same Congress that approved it in the first place. Irony can be a beautiful thing in politics.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 25, 2016 11:20:20 AM