Mani Pulite — Italy’s “Lava Jato”
Originally published July 2015
Brazil could ask its Italian cousins what happens when democracy is torn up in the name of anti-corruption — they have a couple of examples.
Terra Nostra
There are an estimated 35 million Brazilians of Italian descent. Parts of Brazil’s south such as São Paulo are inherently Italian in character, with up to 60% of Italian ancestry. Dating back to the renaissance and with later waves of mass immigration in the late 19th century and during the 1920s, Italian cultural, economic & societal influence on these regions is strong, to the extent that it eclipses older Portuguese colonial foundations.
As a result many Brazilians of Italian heritage qualify for an Italian passport and move to and from the European Union with comparative ease.
Italians with relatives in Brazil who are now observing its distant judicial-political machinations could be forgiven for feeling a sensation of déjà vu.
Mani Pulite (or ‘Clean Hands’) was a sequence of mass prosecutions conducted during the 1990s and which had many parallels with Brazil’s own current anti corruption operation — Lava-Jato (‘Car Wash’).
Beginning in 1992, the Italian operation, led by prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro in Milan, used the pretext of investigating corporate bribes to politicians but was used to obliterate the entire political establishment through trial-by-media. It began with the Tangentopoli bribery scandal — the analogue to Brazil’s Petrobras scheme. (See also Professor David Nelken’s ‘A legal revolution? The judges and Tangentopoli.’)
Mani Pulite saw the eventual toppling of Bettino Craxi’s socialist government amid charges of corruption, and an end to the 4 largest and oldest political parties in Italy — the Christian Democrats, the Italian Socialist Party, the Italian Socialist Democratic Party, and the Italian Liberal Party. As a result, none of the parties that founded the Italian state in 1948 — the parties responsible for drafting Italy’s post-war Constitution — are present in today’s parliament. (Mussolini had previously come to power on an anti-corruption platform, later he was revealed to be riddled with it).
Shortly before his death in 2012, and seeking to make amends, Reginald Bartholomew, former US Ambassador to Italy in the early-mid 1990s, confessed to US intelligence and law enforcement’s involvement in the operation — something long dismissed as conspiracy theory.
Mani Pulite was an operation with enormous ramifications which effectively ended the First Republic and paved the way for the economically & culturally ruinous era of Forza Italia, the political vehicle of TV tycoon Silvio Berlusconi and also a spate of privatisations in what was called the “pillage of Italy”. Berlusconi was able to use nepotism and his control of media to evade prosecution for his own corruption scandals for many years.
Worse still, it enabled the emergence into powerful positions of “post-fascist” parties Alleanza Nazionale & the separatist Lega Nord.
As the Berlin wall fell and what was known as the cold war drew to an end, as a key strategic ally in the Mediterranean and NATO member, the United States felt that Italy had drifted too far from its influence and saw corruption as the tool with which to reset the traditional Italian political class in its favour.
As in present day Brazil, the incentives were not only geopolitical but economic. Italy’s then enormous public sector was viewed as low hanging fruit for privatisation by a cabal of outside investors, as is the case in Brazil today.
In effect, Italy’s post-war establishment was swept away only to be replaced by something worse.
Some in Brazil have predicted a similar end to its party political system as a result of Operation Lava-Jato, which is led by 43 year old prosecutor Sérgio Moro who, in 2004, long before commencement of the operation, laid out considerations concerning the political & economic effects of Mani Pulite in this document. In it he discusses strategies, examples & similarities with Italy and also dangers facing Brazil if it follows the Italian example. [Note: A US State Department cable recently released on Wikileaks reveals that Moro has been collaborating with the United States since at least 2009.] Brazil’s inquisitorial legal system already had strong influences from Pre-WWII Italy.
Many questioned Operation Lata Jato’s true motives since the beginning, and have accused Moro (who is tacitly aligned with Centre-Right PSDB) of being intent on eliminating the Workers Party (PT) as a political force, with selective pursuit of their Politicians cementing depiction of the “party of corruption” with help of Brazil’s narrowly-owned hegemonic media.
Distant cousins
There are other parallels and symmetries during turbulent periods in the two country’s respective political histories. Left movements in Italy had long been subverted & sabotaged by the United States since the second world war as part of a covert “stay-behind” operation codenamed Gladio. This included the ‘Strategy of Tension’, where domestic terrorism was used to convince the population that it was in the midst of a communist overthrow.
Brazil has known similar: in 1981 a faction within the Dictatorship attempted to stage “Left Wing” terrorism in order to roll back civil liberties and moves towards re-democratisation. A planned bombing of a workers day parade in Rio de Janeiro literally backfired, with one agent killed and another badly burned when one of their explosive devices detonated in a parked car. The Military government at first blamed Left Wing groups for the explosion, an allegation later disproven.
More successful was an instance in 1989. Days before the first direct election since the end of Military rule which saw Neoliberal candidate Fernando Collor come to power, high profile businessman Albino Diniz was kidnapped. Segments of the media blamed his capture on militants from candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party (PT), and with campaigning already forbidden in the days prior, they were unable to clear their name until the election was lost.
A bridge between the ‘Strategy of Tension’ era and Mani Pulite was Romano Prodi. He served as the Prime Minister of Italy, twice from 1996 to 1998 and from 2006 2008, was later President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and is now a member of the Club of Madrid. Prodi was ridiculed for claiming in 1978 to have received the whereabouts of kidnapped prime minister Aldo Moro through a séance. It would be a story which would later see him twice accused of being a KGB agent.
A key difference though, between the present day Italian and Brazilian operations, is that Lava Jato also includes telegenic, high profile prosecutions of key personnel from large and state-protected companies such as construction giant Odebrecht, opening up the possibility of more foreign competition.
Similarly, Lava Jato’s imprisonment of Eletronuclear chief, Almirante Othon, the long term mastermind of Brazil’s homegrown nuclear energy programme, has raised eyebrows, his arrestperceived as an attack on the country’s energy sovereignty. 77 year old Othon was eventually given a 43 year Prison Sentence for corruption at Eletronuclear.
Again a window opens for entry of foreign corporations into Brazil’s energy sector, which like construction, currently lays virtually paralysed by the operation — some estimates put the economic cost of the Lava Jato as anything up to 2.5% GDP and millions of jobs.
Another key difference between Mani Pulite & Lava Jato is the ostensibly anti-corruption street mobilisations, publicised and encouraged by mainstream media in Brazil.
Main opposition party PSDB, defeated in October 2014, initially distanced itself from presidential impeachment calls, instead demanding new elections, but came out of the closet in favour of institutionally ousting Rousseff — neither of which have constitutional provision without proof of her wrongdoing. At the same time it aired TV broadcasts which called supporters to pro-impeachment street protests in August 2015. August is a symbolic month politically in Brazil, marked by the 1954 suicide of President Getulio Vargas in the midst of a Coup d’Etat.
Although implicated in various corruption schemes, PSDB themselves have evaded any high profile casualties to Lava Jato, despite leading figures such as defeated Presidential Candidate Aécio Neves having been cited for corruption in testimony numerous times.
Some in Italy describe “twenty years wasted” as a result of Mani Pulite. Those wishing for the end of the Worker’s Party as a political force could well be conjuring up Brazil’s own Silvio Berlusconi. Rather than a “market friendly” PSDB administration with a broad popular mandate, “cleaning” out Brazil’s political establishment could instead result in a saviour populist in the vain of the former Italian President. To an extent, it already happened before with Collor and Far-Right Jair Bolsonaro is already being cited as a potential presidential candidate in 2018. Bolsonaro, incidentally, polls highest amongst the country’s elite than any other candidate.
Be careful what you wish for.
