The art of selling and buying rotten fish.
Talk given at the Liu Institute, UBC, on November 1, 2019 on a Round Table called “Is Brazil Democracy in Danger?”
Thanks for inviting me to this panel, although I was not sure I should be talking here I said yes because I am interested in talking about democratic processes not only in Brazil but in my home country Argentina, as well as here in Canada.
While writing this I remembered that one part of the story started with me writing an email on September 1, 2017 to many of the people here in this panel that said this:
Hope this email finds you all well.
I am emailing you just as a reaction to the email below. It seems that the School of Law is giving an award ($100K) and one of the three nominees is the Lava Jato Task Force. This is troubling. At the minimum, they have been a willing part of the ’soft coup d’etat’ that took Dilma from her democratically elected power and at maximum they have directly worked to take the PT from Gov. in Brazil and are judicially harassing Lula so he won’t come back to power. Are we giving them a prize?
As Latinoamericanists I think we should do something about it. I am not an expert at all on Brazil’s politics but this is not right.
Any ideas on what to do about it?
I was pissed that my own University’s Faculty of Law was considering giving an award about democracy to this group of judges and prosecutors that became known as the “Lava Jato Task Force”. I could not understand why they would do that. Knowing their biased and often partisan views on the democratic process and their weaponization of the legal system I could not see why them. Furthermore, the decision to include them as a rightful recipient not only validated their practice of politically-driven use of plea deals influencing witnesses to cooperate or jail them but also sent a wrong message to Brazil and the world. This candidacy was used in Brazil to visibilize how “anti-corruption” the team was. So among many UBC scholars, we had this frantic email exchanges to figure out a way to do something about it. We sent emails to the President of UBC, the Faculty of Law, and to those organizing the awards, to warn them that this was no right. They were going to make a huge mistake if they would award them with their Allar Prize Award for International Integrity.
I am not sure whether our call for excluding them from the award did anything but the Faculty of Law via the Allard Prize committee ended up awarding it to Khadija Ismayilova. Yet, despite everything we know so far about the Lava Jato Task Force the Allard Prize Award website, still celebrates the three finalists (there is no apology or remorse about their decision to include them). See here:
I now think it makes a lot of sense that they were included in the shortlist. UBC, the Faculty of Law, and the Allard Prize Award committee perhaps did not know much. Perhaps they were seduced by their allure of anti-corruption. Perhaps they did not properly debrief the contradictions around this group of judges and prosecutors. Perhaps they bought and swallowed the rotten fish. Again, according to the Allard website: “Beginning as a local money-laundering investigation in 2014, Operation Car Wash grew into the largest anti-corruption campaign in the history of Brazil, and, perhaps, the world”. Naturally, they had to be short-listed. Right?
The most interesting thing of all this, perhaps another political twist in this saga, is that the journalist Glen Greenwald, the same that broke the news about the NSA massive surveillance via Edward Snowden was the MC of the ceremony and probably said good things about the Lava Jato Task Force that night (I did not participate on the event). As part of The Intercept, he is now at the center of a bigger controversy in Brazil because they leaked conversations and chats from Sergio Moro (who was awarded the Ministry of Justice under Bolsonaro) directing the team of his prosecutors to incriminate Lula and other Labor Party politicians during the Lava Jato campaign. I guess the whole circle is closed now that he is against those who celebrated two years ago. Perhaps he has now realized that they were not so honest after all.
Several reflections arise from this brief introduction.
One, that UBC and the Faculty of Law were one small cog in a larger topography of legal and political dishonesty, knowingly or not, we voluntarily bought rotten fish and chose to celebrate it. UBC played a role in increasing the value of this rotten fish.
Two, the question of whether Brazil’s democracy is at risk should be reframed. I think all democracies are at risk. Democracies are fragile. The weaponization of justice and the usage of ‘law-fare’ to harass political opponents, that is, the influence of the executive power over the justice system, have further jeopardized democratic processes. We saw that in Brazil with the persecution of the PT (Lula is still in prison), in Argentina against the Kirchnerism (many are still in prison without any firm sentence), and similar processes in other Latin American countries.
Three, ‘law-fare’ often goes in tandem with media protection. In the end, Lava Jato did not win the Allard award. After many criticisms their protected aura of ‘anti-corruption’ appears to reverse only when the Interceptor began to leak information about their irregular incrimination of Lula and other PT related figures. We now know that law-fare has been used as a way to weaponize the justice system against political oppositions in Brazil and Argentina. In Argentina, many political opposition members and businessmen are still in jail without proper legal process. The final reflection of all this: Buying rotten fish not only can poison us, but it can also kill us all.
