BRAZIL-Looney Tunes

Utter chaos and mayhem

First of all, I must apologize for not getting a report to you sooner but it rained hard for two days in São Paulo and aside from the flooding throughout the state and the city (which thankfully did not affect my home) I wound up without electricity for the entire day.

It also happened that today’s press carried a plethora of reports, all of which seemed to require pulling them together into some sort of pattern than can be understood in the rather Byzantine world of Brazilian politics.

I spent the day searching for an appropriate metaphor that could pull all of the information together and could only come up with a vision of the famous Road Runner cartoons in which a sinister character named Wiley Coyote relentlessly pursued a road runner (a fast running species of cuckoo that inhabits the Mexican and US deserts).

Wiley would build elaborate traps and schemes that invariably blew up in his face. The road runner would employ numerous defensive artifices (e.g. painting the entrance to a tunnel on the side of a cliff and then entering the tunnel. When Wiley ran up to enter the tunnel, he would smack into the solid granite wall and slide comically to the ground.) Anyone familiar with the Road Runner cartoons has witnessed the absolute mayhem and chaos caused by Wiley’s elaborate schemes.

It seems that no one involved in malfeasance in Brazil now wants to wind up a defendant in the courtroom of Federal Judge Sergio Moro. It wasn’t always that way.

When Moro became the chief magistrate of the Lava-Jato investigation, many power brokers chuckled at the thought of a first-level federal judge being able to challenge Brazil’s “elites”. However, Moro proved to be a highly meticulous, honest, and extremely competent magistrate. Practically none of his decisions wound up being reversed in appeal. 

Over the past two years, he has put a number of high-level executives into living quarters substantially more Spartan and smaller than what they had been used to. He recently sentenced the president of Brazil’s largest construction company (Odebrecht) and two of the executive’s sons to 19 years each in the “cooler”. On the same day he also meted out some 100 years of sentences to other defendants in the Lava-Jato investigation.

Now, one of the first concerns of any accused in the Lava-Jato investigation is whether he/she will wind up in Moro’s courtroom. A recent opinion from Moro regarding the corruption charges against Lower Chamber President Eduardo Cunha, Cunha’s wife, and his daughter, led Mrs. Cunha  (aka Cruz) to submit a writ to the court to have her alleged crimes judged by the Supreme Court simply because her husband has the right to a Supreme Court trial by virtue of his position in the legislature. There is nothing to suggest in the legislation that Mrs. Cunha/Ms. Cruz is anything but a common citizen who happens to be married to a government official! But she definitely does not want to have to show up in Moro’s courtroom.

The same fear apparently caused Lula to reportedly file a writ to have an investigation of his acquisition and ownership of a beachfront property in São Paulo transferred to the Public Prosecutor’s office in that State. Like Wiley Coyote’s elaborate schemes, this one appears to have blown up. 

The São Paulo prosecutor issued an order for Lula’s preventive detention. Analysts suggest that Moro would probably not have taken that approach. It was Lula’s bad luck that the São Paulo Prosecutor turned out to be José Carlos Blat, who is considered an even greater “hardliner” than Moro, albeit less meticulous and thorough than Moro.

The upshot of the initial scheme is that Lula now faces the prospect of occupying a “room” in the slammer. That was not in the cards!

To ensure that Lula would not have to sit in a cell, the administration is now reported to be considering nominating Lula to a cabinet office. That would give him a guarantee of Supreme Court protection and trial. So now Dilma faces the rather absurd situation of having her former boss as a subordinate in her cabinet. Some legal analysts suggest that appointing Lula to a cabinet post following a recommendation to arrest him might be construed as obstruction of justice by Dilma. The São Paulo decision to confine Lula to the hoosegow does not include his wife and two sons who have also been cited in the case. In any case, they would not be entitled to the same protections as would apply to Lula. To be sure, it’s a bit of a mess, no?

The public watches these machinations in wide-eyed wonder as the economy grinds to a halt and the only subject being discussed is the cartoon on the movie screen.

I will follow up more on this  tomorrow when I have had some time to get my mind around the amazing behaviors of all the actors in this spectacle. There is much more!