And that brings us to the judge and executioner of the whole drama: Sergio Moro, Car Wash's leading actor.
Moro's academic career is hardly exciting. He's not exactly a theorist heavyweight. He graduated as a lawyer in 1995 in a mediocre university in the middle of nowhere in one of Brazil's southern states and made a few trips to the US, one of them financed by the State Department to learn about money laundering.
As I noted before, his chef-d'oeuvre is an article published way back in 2004 in an obscure magazine (in Portuguese only, titled Considerations about Mani Pulite, CEJ magazine, issue number 26, July/September 2004), where he clearly extols "authoritarian subversion of juridical order to reach specific targets" and using the media to intoxicate the political atmosphere.
In a nutshell, judge Moro literally transposed the notorious 1990s Mani Pulite ("Clean Hands") investigation from Italy to Brazil -- instrumentalizing to the hilt mainstream media and the judiciary to achieve a sort of "total delegitimization" of the political system. But not the whole political system; just the Workers' Party, as if the comprador elites permeating Brazil's rightwing spectrum were cherubic angels.
So it comes as no surprise that Moro's prime sidekick as Car Wash unrolled is the Marinho family's oligopoly, the Globo media empire -- a nest of reactionary, and not very clever, vipers who entertained very cozy relations with the Brazilian military dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1980s. Not by accident, Globo was informed about Lula's Hollywood-style "arrest" way before the fact, allowing it to invest in CNN-style blanket coverage.
Moro is viewed by legions in Brazil as an indigenous Elliot Ness. Other lawyers who have closely followed his work though hint he harbors the warped fantasy of a Workers' Party as a mob leeching and plundering the state apparatus with the aim of delivering it, in pieces, to trade unions.
According to one of these lawyers who talked to Brazilian independent media, a former president of the Lawyers' Association in Rio, Moro is surrounded by a bunch of young fanatical prosecutors, with little juridical knowledge, and posing as the Brazilian Antonio di Pietro (but without the solidity of the "Clean Hands" Milanese prosecutor). Worse, Moro is oblivious that the implosion of the Italian political system led to the rise of Berlusconi. In Brazil, it would certainly lead to the rise of a clown/village idiot supported by the Globo empire, whose oligopolistic practices are quite Berlusconian.
The digital PinochetsA case can be made that the Hollywood blitz on Lula holds a direct parallel to the first attempt at a coup d'etat in Chile in 1973, which tested the waters in terms of popular response before the real deal. In the Brazilian remix, assorted Globo media maggots pose as digital Pinochets. At least many a street in Sao Paulo now bears graffiti to the effect of "Military coup -- Never again."
Yes, because this is all about a white coup -- in the form of a Rousseff impeachment and sending Lula to the gallows. But old (military) habits die hard; Globo media maggots are now extolling the Army to take to the streets to "neutralize" popular militias. And this is just the beginning. Right-wingers are getting ready for a national mobilization on Sunday calling for -- what else -- Rousseff's impeachment.
Car Wash's merit is to investigate corruption, collusion and traffic of influence in abysmally corrupt Brazil. But everyone, every political faction, should be investigated -- including those representing Brazilian comprador elites. That's not the case. Because the political project allied with Car Wash couldn't care less about "justice"; the only thing that matters is to perpetuate a vicious political crisis as a means to drag the seventh largest economy in the world into the mud and reach the Holy Grail: a white coup, or good ol' regime change. But 2016 is not 1973, and the whole world by now knows who's a sucker for regime change.
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