Dallagnol, who has just stepped down as chief prosecutor for Lava Jato in Curitiba, in a file photo, Vladimir Platonow
The largest investigation against large-scale corruption in Brazil, the one that began by investigating money laundering in a car wash and landed a former president, among many other powerful, is on a tightrope.
Its future is uncertain.
The
Lava Jato case
has lost its chief prosecutor this week, criticism for alleged abuses committed in the anti-corruption crusade is multiplying - now they come not only from the left, but also from the right - and some decisions have been reversed.
The most important signal about the future of the investigations will arrive before the 10th, when the deadline for the State Attorney General's Office to decide whether to extend the mandate of the teams of prosecutors dedicated exclusively to the case for another year.
The main of these teams is that of Curitiba, where the investigation was born, where Sergio Moro was a judge, and where Lula da Silva, who ruled Brazil from 2003 to 2011, was imprisoned for more than a year.
The triumphant entry (and noisy exit) of Moro to the government of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro deprived the case of its main symbol.
And now he has just lost the chief prosecutor who has since embodied the investigation in the eyes of the Brazilians.
Deltan Dallagnol, 40, announced that he is leaving the case to care for his sick baby.
His departure frees the team of 14 prosecutors he led in Curitiba from a chief who, like Moro, has been under suspicion of bias since messages that reveal close contacts between judge and investigators were leaked in 2019.
Both Dallagnol and Moro are under investigation for that.
Some of the prosecutors feel so harassed by their bosses that the seven of the São Paulo team resigned the day after Dallagnol left, while accusing their superior of dismantling their work.
When the
Lava Jato case was
rolled out in Brazil six years ago, it could hardly be imagined that it would uncover the largest corruption plot in Latin American history.
Multiple ramifications have come to light from a bribery payment system discovered at state oil company Petrobras that reveal corrupt relationships between politicians and businessmen throughout the region.
While Lava Jato lives its lowest hours in Brazil, the Odebrecht scandal (a derivative case that stars the largest Brazilian construction company) gains traction in Mexico, where three former presidents have just been accused of receiving millionaire bites and in Guatemala a former accused minister threatens with pulling the blanket.
Although the anti-corruption crusade took the ousted president Dilma Rousseff forward and was one of the flags that promoted Bolsonaro's triumph, the judicial battle against this scourge is languishing and criticism is proliferating, now also from the right.
Even the attorney general, Augusto Aras, handpicked by Bolsonaro behind the backs of his peers' proposals, has publicly accused Lava Jato's special prosecutors of exceeding themselves.
"It is time to correct the course so that
lavajatism
does not last," Aras said in July in a debate in which he presumed that under his mandate the "
punitivism
" of prosecutors "on the lookout for their prey" came to an end. the show".
"We will continue to pursue crimes but within the universe of the Constitution and the laws," he added.
The top of the prosecutor's office that he leads must decide before Thursday the 10th whether to renew for one more year the mandate of the special prosecutors in the case who operate from Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
The investigations that began in 2014 have resulted in 210 convictions, including two against Lula, which led him to prison and prevented him from attending the last elections won by the far-rightist, whose family is now under suspicion of corruption in a case of embezzlement. public outside the Lava Jato.
The president is investigated for trying to hinder the police investigations of his children.
He was denounced by the former judge and minister Moro, who was investigated at the request of Lula for violating the required impartiality.
All matters that converge in the Supreme Court, whose 11 members have an indisputable political role.
The president of the Não Aceito Corrupcão Institute, the prosecutor Roberto Liviano, stated in a recent interview: "with the Bolsonaro Government we have regressed in the fight against corruption."
Thanks to Lava Jato, 5,000 million reais (950 million dollars, 800 million euros) have also been recovered for the Brazilian public coffers through the payment of fines and collaboration agreements.
The latter, popularly known as award-winning denunciations (you reduce your sentence in exchange for reporting others), have been key instruments for the investigations to advance but at the same time are considered by many accused and suspected of illegal coercive measures.
The corruption specialist Livianu maintains that now both the Executive, the Congress and the Senate have no interest in the battle but stresses that, if the special investigation teams dedicated to Lava Jato “ceased to exist, it would be necessary to put something in their place. because there is a social demand to fight organized crime and large-scale corruption ”.
Livianu admits that "they made mistakes, but whoever follows their trajectory closely knows that the number of hits is much higher."
Lava Jato prosecutors have 400 open investigations ranging from Petrobras contracts with multinationals to money laundering through art galleries, an anonymous source from the team revealed to Reuters.