One of the largest corruption crackdowns in recent history is being quietly wiped away.
Brazil’s Supreme Court is tossing out key evidence, setting aside major convictions and suspending billions of dollars in fines in a historic series of bribery cases, arguing that biased investigators, prosecutors and judges broke laws in their ravenous pursuit of justice.
In rulings over the past year — most stemming from legal challenges from people who claim they were treated unfairly — the court has undone cases in which senior politicians and business executives had pleaded guilty.
The decisions are now cascading across Latin America, leading to the dismissals of at least 115 convictions in Brazil, according to anticorruption groups. The reversals are also casting doubt over many other cases in Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina, including the convictions of several former presidents.
It all amounts to a broad unraveling of Operation Car Wash, a sweeping investigation that, starting a decade ago, uncovered a vast corruption scheme spanning at least 12 countries. Investigators found that corporations had paid billions of dollars in bribes to government officials in exchange for public projects.
The findings upended Latin America’s political landscape, shutting down multinational businesses and leading to billions of dollars in fines and hundreds of convictions. Some of the region’s most prominent politicians and executives were sent to prison, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
Its undoing is now a dreary conclusion to an investigation that had once been viewed as a sea change in Latin America, promising to root out systemic corruption that had rotted the underpinnings of governments.
The public had cheered the convictions as a new dawn for the region. A decade later, Brazil and other nations have little to show for it. For some, the reversal is another example of the impunity those in power have long enjoyed.
“People who should be paying for their mistakes or their crimes, to some extent, will get away with it,” said Maíra Fernandes, a criminal lawyer and professor at the Getúlio Vargas Institute, a Brazilian university.
At the same time, she added, the reversals are not without merit. Leaked recordings and other evidence showed that a judge and prosecutors had coordinated against defendants, employed aggressive tactics to force confessions and ordered illegal wiretaps. “Even if it leaves a bitter taste,” she said, “it’s a consequence of an operation that dirtied its hands, that violated the rules.”
In 2018, a far-right lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro used an anti-corruption message to ride Operation Car Wash’s momentum to Brazil’s presidency. But his administration was then also stained with corruption scandals, and he ultimately shuttered Car Wash as new investigations began looking into his family. This past week, Brazilian authorities recommended charges against him for plotting a coup after he lost the presidency in 2022.
Most of the decisions to reverse Operation Car Wash have been issued by a single Brazilian Supreme Court justice, José Antonio Dias Toffoli. In an interview, Justice Toffoli said his decisions were based on prior rulings by his Supreme Court colleagues that Car Wash investigators, prosecutors and judges had illegally colluded, invalidating the evidence collected. He said he had merely extended that decision to other cases.
“Illegal evidence cannot be used to convict,” he said.
“We do this with great sadness,” he added during a recent Supreme Court hearing. “Because the state has proceeded wrongly.”
Some critics, however, believe Justice Toffoli should not be deciding the cases.
Before joining the Supreme Court, he worked as a lawyer for Mr. Lula’s political party and, later, as counsel to Mr. Lula as president. In 2009, Mr. Lula nominated him to the nation’s highest court. Mr. Lula and his party were central targets of the Car Wash investigation.
The justice was also once linked to the investigation he is now dismantling.
In 2019, Marcelo Odebrecht, the chief executive of Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant, named Justice Toffoli in a statement to the police about the company’s corruption scheme, suggesting the judge may have played a role, according to local news reports.
Justice Toffoli denied any involvement and was never formally charged with a crime.
“The accusations are so untrue that the interested parties have never formally challenged my participation in these cases,” he said in an interview.
After reports linking him to the scheme, Justice Toffoli made a highly unusual move to grant the Supreme Court the authority to open its own investigation into attacks against the court itself.
He called the investigation the Fake News Inquiry, and in one of its first acts, a fellow justice ordered a magazine to censor an article linking Justice Toffoli to Car Wash. (The magazine was later able to republish once it showed the article was factual.)
That inquiry has since given way to a much more powerful and combative Supreme Court.
Justice Toffoli has remained resistant to criticism. This year, he opened a criminal investigation into Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog, after it had criticized his moves to reverse Car Wash rulings.
He told investigators to check old leaked recordings in which a Transparency International official, Bruno Brandão, discussed directing some Car Wash fines to the group’s anti-corruption efforts.
Transparency International denied the accusations. Last month, Brazil’s top federal prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to drop the investigation, citing no evidence of wrongdoing. Mr. Brandão said in an interview that Justice Toffoli’s rulings had “opened the floodgates for impunity.”
Operation Car Wash began in 2014, when Brazil’s federal police busted a money-laundering operation at a carwash in the nation’s capital. After some digging, they realized they had stumbled upon something much, much bigger.
Over time, investigators discovered that some of Brazil’s biggest companies — including a group behind the beef giant JBS, the state oil company Petrobras and Odebrecht — had been bribing officials in power across Latin America and Africa in exchange for lucrative government contracts. The scheme was found to involve at least $3 billion in bribes, many of which had been laundered through schemes like the carwash.
It led to hundreds of convictions, including of Mr. Lula, then the former president. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2017 for accepting home renovations from construction companies in exchange for favors. Mr. Lula has long denied the charges.
With Mr. Lula in prison and ineligible to run, Mr. Bolsonaro easily won the 2018 presidential election.
About a year later, Operation Car Wash began to unravel.
Mr. Lula was released in 2019 after serving 19 months in prison, when Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that he had been jailed prematurely. Less than two years later, the court threw out his convictions, ruling that the federal judge who oversaw Operation Car Wash, Sergio Moro, had been biased.
Leaked recordings published in 2019 by a news site, The Intercept Brazil, showed that Mr. Moro had steered prosecutors on how to pursue convictions, jailed suspects to force plea deals and ordered illegal wiretapping of defendants and their lawyers. The revelations were an enormous blow to Car Wash’s legitimacy.
“They obviously went way beyond what is permitted,” said Leandro Demori, the former executive editor at The Intercept Brazil. “They polluted the whole investigation.”
Mr. Moro, now a senator, denied any bias or illegality, noting that his rulings were later backed by other judges, including on the Supreme Court. “My conscience is clear,” he said.
Cleared of charges, Mr. Lula could run for president again, and in 2022, he defeated Mr. Bolsonaro.
Since then, the reversals have accelerated. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that other cases, beside that of Mr. Lula, had been tainted by the illegal conduct of investigators, prosecutors and judges.
Justice Toffoli has since used that decision as the basis for a series of sweeping rulings with widespread implications.
In September 2023, he accepted a motion by lawyers representing former Odebrecht executives and tossed out evidence from the company’s plea deal. He also suspended a $2.5 billion fine against the company and tried to dismiss all criminal rulings against Mr. Odebrecht, the former chief executive, but was overruled by Supreme Court colleagues.
The Odebrecht decisions had a domino effect, casting doubt over the convictions of politicians and executives across Latin America. Lawyers in other countries could now use Justice Toffoli’s rulings to try to undo high-profile convictions, like that of Peru’s former President Alejandro Toledo, who was sentenced last month to 20 years in prison for taking bribes from Odebrecht executives.
Justice Toffoli also suspended a $3.2 billion fine against the parent company of JBS. (Critics have noted that Justice Toffoli’s wife has worked as a lawyer for the company in separate cases.)
JBS’s parent company said it wanted to amend its “arbitrary and illegal fine.’’
Odebrecht, which has since changed its name to Novonor, declined to comment. Petrobras did not respond to a request for comment.
In interviews, legal scholars agreed that Brazil’s Supreme Court had a responsibility to address Car Wash’s errors. But they also mourned the demise of Latin America’s best attempt at cracking down on corruption.
Rafael Mafei, a law professor at the University of São Paulo, was blunt: “From a results point of view, Car Wash was a complete failure.”
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