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WASHINGTON
— The rule of law and the independence of the judiciary are fragile
achievements in many countries — and susceptible to sharp reversals.
Brazil,
the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, is a fairly
young democracy, having emerged from dictatorship just three decades
ago. In the past two years, what could have been a historic advancement ―
the Workers’ Party government granted autonomy to the judiciary to
investigate and prosecute official corruption ― has turned into its
opposite. As a result, Brazil’s democracy is now weaker than it has been
since military rule ended.
This
week, that democracy may be further eroded as a three-judge appellate
court decides whether the most popular political figure in the country,
former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, will
be barred from competing in the 2018 presidential election, or even
jailed.
There
is not much pretense that the court will be impartial. The presiding
judge of the appellate panel has already praised the trial judge’s
decision to convict Mr. da Silva for corruption as “technically irreproachable,” and the judge’s chief of staff posted on her Facebook page a petition calling for Mr. da Silva’s imprisonment.
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The
trial judge, Sérgio Moro, has demonstrated his own partisanship on
numerous occasions. He had to apologize to the Supreme Court in 2016 for
releasing
wiretapped conversations between Mr. da Silva and President Dilma
Rousseff, his lawyer, and his wife and children. Judge Moro arranged a spectacle for the press in which the police showed up at Mr. da Silva’s home and took him away for questioning — even though Mr. da Silva had said he would report voluntarily for questioning.
The
evidence against Mr. da Silva is far below the standards that would be
taken seriously in, for example, the United States’ judicial system.
He
is accused of having accepted a bribe from a big construction company,
called OAS, which was prosecuted in Brazil’s “Carwash” corruption
scheme. That multibillion-dollar scandal involved companies paying large
bribes to officials of the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to
obtain contracts at grossly inflated prices.
The
bribe alleged to have been received by Mr. da Silva is an apartment
owned by OAS. But there is no documentary evidence that either Mr. da
Silva or his wife ever received title to, rented or even stayed in the
apartment, nor that they tried to accept this gift.
The
evidence against Mr. da Silva is based on the testimony of one
convicted OAS executive, José Aldemário Pinheiro Filho, who had his
prison sentence reduced in exchange for turning state’s evidence.
According to reporting by the prominent Brazilian newspaper Folha de São
Paulo, Mr. Pinheiro was blocked from plea bargaining when he originally
told the same story as Mr. da Silva about the apartment. He also spent
about six months in pretrial detention. (This evidence is discussed in
the 238-page sentencing document.)
But
this scanty evidence was enough for Judge Moro. In something that
Americans might consider to be a kangaroo court proceeding, he sentenced
Mr. da Silva to nine and a half years in prison.
The
rule of law in Brazil had already been dealt a devastating blow in 2016
when Mr. da Silva’s successor, Ms. Rousseff, who was elected in 2010
and re-elected in 2014, was impeached and removed from office. Most of
the world (and possibly most of Brazil) may believe that she was
impeached for corruption. In fact, she was accused of an accounting
maneuver that temporarily made the federal budget deficit look smaller
than it otherwise would appear. It was something that other presidents
and governors had done without consequences. And the government’s own
federal prosecutor concluded that it was not a crime.
While
there were officials involved in corruption from parties across the
political spectrum, including the Workers’ Party, there were no charges
of corruption against Ms. Rousseff in the impeachment proceedings.
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Mr.
da Silva remains the front-runner in the October election because of
his and the party’s success in reversing a long economic decline. From
1980 to 2003, the Brazilian economy barely grew at all, about 0.2 percent annually per capita. Mr. da Silva took office in 2003, and Ms. Rousseff in 2011. By 2014, poverty had been reduced
by 55 percent and extreme poverty by 65 percent. The real minimum wage
increased by 76 percent, real wages overall had risen 35 percent,
unemployment hit record lows, and Brazil’s infamous inequality had
finally fallen.
But
in 2014, a deep recession began, and the Brazilian right was able to
take advantage of the downturn to stage what many Brazilians consider a
parliamentary coup.
If
Mr. da Silva is barred from the presidential election, the result could
have very little legitimacy, as in the Honduran election in November
that was widely seen as stolen. A poll last year found that 42.7 percent
of Brazilians believed that Mr. da Silva was being persecuted by the
news media and the judiciary. A noncredible election could be
politically destabilizing.
Perhaps
most important, Brazil will have reconstituted itself as a much more
limited form of electoral democracy, in which a politicized judiciary
can exclude a popular political leader from running for office. That
would be a calamity for Brazilians, the region and the world.
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington and the president of Just Foreign Policy, is the author of “Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong About the Global Economy.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the National edition with the headline: Brazil’s democracy faces an abyss. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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