In early 2014, rising young Brazilian attorney Sergio Moro invented Operation Car Wash.[1] This was an investigation alleging that many millions of dollars had bribed public officials across Latin America, starting, investigators said, with executives at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, and with Brazilian politicians in the ruling Workers’ Party.
Attorney Moro during an earlier stint in Italy had published a thesis on a US/Italy “anti-corruption” probe that had nearly destroyed Italy’s political left wing.
Moro then became a judge in Brazil. In 2016, Americas Quarterly gushed,
“By the time he got (involved with) Car Wash, Moro already had access to a deep chest of legal tools; it just took someone with his mix of creativity, intellect and meticulousness to use them to their full potential. A federal judge since age 24, he had trained abroad at Harvard University and the U.S. State Department.”[2]
Just months later, on April 16, 2016, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), with its corporate members Exxon, Citi, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs, headlined a release, “The anti-corruption movement in Latin America is gaining ground,” saying,
“Less corruption in (Latin American) government will offer U.S. firms new opportunities. Think what the end of corruption in Brazilian public works [that is, in Petrobras oil-development projects] would mean for U.S. engineering and construction companies.”
At the time – known as likely as not to CFR, to Car Wash investigators, and to Moro – a US asphalt company, Sargeant Marine LLC, had been bribing Petrobras for years (see full story in this Site’s essay, “Democracy Hypocrisy as Lawfare”).
Despite or because of this, Moro had long trained his sights on Brazilian former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula.
Moro and fellow prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol tapped Lula’s telephones, and the pair released the wiretap content to media outlets before formally pressing charges.[3] Moro also issued a bench warrant to detain Lula for questioning and leaked that warrant, too, to the media; published photographs of Lula made it appear he was under arrest.
Two months after the CFR release, in July 2016, Moro tried Lula, won a conviction, and in July 2017 sentenced Lula to a nine-year imprisonment.[4] On appeal, Lula remained free. But in 2018, as part of Operation Car Wash, police were tipped that Lula had been bribed with a luxury condo building, and Lula was arrested, jailed, and charged anew, again facing trial by Moro.
But by 2022, all investigation and trial of Lula by Moro was found to be dishonest and illegal.[5] Was it just over-ambition or also US involvement that tainted Moro’s effort against Lula?
To a striking extent Lula, very much like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, has long upset US interests who target Latin American resources.[6] Before a G-20 summit in London in March 2009, Lula caused an uproar by declaring that the global economic crisis of the time was caused by “the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before seemed to know everything, and now have shown they don’t know anything.” [7]
The United States’s NSA spied heavily on Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras.[8] It is likely these phone-surveillance records were used in Operation Car Wash.[9]
When he learned of an arrest and jailing of Lula, on April 6, 2018, Moro’s fellow prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol praised “a gift from the CIA.”[10] This was said in a private conversation that was hacked and later leaked. This important statement by the Car Wash prosecutor signifies almost certainly that the CIA was the source of allegations (eventually found false), against Lula.[11]
This jailing of Lula allowed the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a crony of Moro’s. As president, Bolsonaro gave Moro a plum cabinet job, and the pair soon visited Washington Dec, with a first stop, unannounced, at CIA premises in nearby Langley, Virginia. The CIA had no comment on this.
On October 30, 2022, Lula defeated Bolsonaro for the Brazilian presidency. Four days later, the US think tank Global Americans wrote,
“Lula’s pursuit of foreign policy objectives in Latin America and the world will likely significantly undercut the position of the United States on promotion of real democracy.” [12]
This raises the question, what should fairly be regarded as the position of the United States “on promotion of real democracy?”[13]
Meanwhile, Lula has cut in half the deforestation rate in Brazil’s Amazon Basin, a rate increased under Bolsonaro and predicted ultimately to be fatal to the Earth due to its acceleration of global warming. Under Bolsonaro, Amazon deforestation The Merco Press reported on January 6, 2024.
“In 2023, deforestation alerts in the Amazon fell by 50 percent….In 2022, the alerts had registered…the highest level ever.[14]
As such, Brazil under Lula has reversed a dangerous trend and – because the Amazon forest is of No. 1 importance – can fairly be said now to lead action against global warming.
Although this essay doesn’t detail fully how Operation Car Wash was clearly US-sponsored, or that it affected other Latin American nations adversely (around half a dozen of these), these topics are covered in this Site’s essay “Democracy Hypocrisy Causes Lawfare.”
[1] Begun with a tip involving money laundering at a Brasilia petrol/auto wash station.
[2] Americas Quarterly, January 27, 2016. AQ is an affiliate of the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
[3] The Intercept, March 15, 2021.
[5] Reuters, April 8, 2022
[6] A 2010 article in The Washington Post said that, before winning the presidency in 2002, Lula had been a “strident union organizer known for his bushy beard and Che Guevara T-shirts.”
[7] In fact, irrationality in real estate, not in oil, caused that recession, but the American WASPs who control real estate are of the same interest group as those who control Big Oil. In its way, Big Real Estate is an extractive industry (see my “Bitter Heat,” chapter 9).
[8]The Intercept, July 4, 2015 The list obtained by The Intercept from WikiLeaks is extracted from an NSA database.
[9] In 2016, immediately following the soft coup which removed Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro ally and one of Brazil’s most powerful men, General Sérgio Westphalen Etchegoyen, who was then Brazil’s newly named head of institutional security met with the CIA’s chief in Brasilia. The secret meeting was accidentally revealed when Etchegoyen’s agenda was published.
[10] “Lava Jato: The CIA’s Poisoned Gift to Brazil”. The Wire. 19 February 2021. Dallagnol had been frustrated over inability to try Lula, who had been free on appeal.
[11] The trial was nullified in 2021 when Moro was found to have conspired with prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol toward convicting Lula – when Moro instructed Dallagnol to find proof of a tip that Lula had been bribed with a gift of a triplex building.
[12] Global Americans, November 3, 2022. Slogan of the think tank is “SMART NEWS & RESEARCH FOR LATIN AMERICA’S CHANGEMAKERS” and its favorite message is “Latin America has gone global.”
[13] An essay on this Site, “Democracy Hypocrisy As Lawfare,” addresses this question vis a vis Latin American nation in general.
[14] Citing a report January 2024 by Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE).