Anticorruption and Imperialist Blind Spots: The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup

Abstract

A comprehensive examination of the evidence available, contained in U.S. government statements, English-language media accounts, and hacked Telegram chats among Brazilian prosecutors, indicates that the United States was closely involved in the "long coup" that removed the left from power in Brazil in 2016 and secured the election of the far-right in 2018. Just as after Brazil’s U.S.-backed 1964 coup, this evidence has largely been ignored by U.S. scholars. Latin Americanists would do well to return to the anti-imperialist tradition that established our field as a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy.

Um exame abrangente das evidências disponíveis, contidas em declarações do governo dos EUA, relatos da mídia em inglês e bate-papos hackeados no Telegram entre promotores da justiça no Brasil, indica que os Estados Unidos estiveram intimamente envolvidos no "longo golpe" que removeu a esquerda do poder no Brasil em 2016 e garantiu a eleição da extrema-direita em 2018. Tal como depois do golpe de Estado de 1964 apoiado pelos EUA, esta evidência tem sido amplamente ignorada pelos académicos norte-americanos. Os latino-americanistas fariam bem em regressar à tradição anti-imperialista que estabeleceu o nosso campo como um dos principais críticos da política externa dos EUA.

Keywords

Brazil’s “long coup,”U.S. imperialism Anticorruption Lava Jato

In October 2009, Brazil was finally beginning to fulfill its promise as “land of the future,” as the Austrian author Stefan Zweig dubbed it (2018 [1941]). Under the left-wing presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT), Brazil had lifted tens of millions out of poverty, expanded higher education, and assumed a prominent role in regional and global politics. On October 2, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2016 Olympics to Rio de Janeiro. One month later, the Economist (2009) heralded Brazil’s rise with the cover headline “Brazil Takes Off” and a graphic of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer being launched like a rocket. For many Brazilians, these were heady times.

Two days after the Olympic announcement, Rio hosted another important gathering, as judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement from all 26 states, Brasília, and six other Latin American countries gathered for a six-day conference organized by the U.S. Embassy, with funding from the state of Rio’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism. But the conference was less about terrorism than about defunding it by prosecuting financial crimes. Attendees learned about “formal and informal international cooperation, asset forfeiture, methods of proof, pyramid schemes, plea bargaining, [and] use of direct examination as a tool.” One speaker, the federal judge Sérgio Moro, shared insights on prosecuting money laundering. The consular officer reporting to Washington suggested that further judicial training could be provided through a task force in São Paulo, Campo Grande, or Curitiba (Kubiske, 2009).

By late 2018, Brazil’s progress had been put on hold if not reversed. The PT had been removed from power in 2016 through the spurious impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff. Her former vice president, the center-right Michel Temer, had imposed a return to neoliberalism, with privatizations and concessions to foreign oil companies. Between 2014 and 2019, inequality increased in Brazil at a similar pace to its historic decrease between 2001 and 2014. The poorest half of Brazil’s population lost 17.1 percent of its income, while the richest 10 percent of the population gained 2.55 percent and the richest 1 percent, 10.11 percent (Neri, 2019).

The sullying of the PT’s reputation that legitimized this owed much to Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), formed in Curitiba and led by Sérgio Moro. Lava Jato used plea bargains, international cooperation, asset forfeiture, and direct examination to prosecute financial crimes—not of terrorists but of politicians and construction and energy firms, notably, the state oil company, Petrobras. In fact, the economic downturn that eroded the PT’s popularity was fueled by Lava Jato’s attack on Brazil’s largest companies (Paula and Moura, 2021). Lava Jato’s biggest victory was the imprisonment of Lula—then leading 2018 presidential polls—on manufactured charges of accepting a beachfront condo upgrade in exchange for ill-defined favors to construction companies after his term had ended.

As private messages hacked from the Telegram app and leaked to The Intercept would later prove, Lava Jato worked precisely toward these ends. It sought to undermine the PT and later kept Lula from competing in 2018, which led to the election of Jair Bolsonaro. It is this process, in which Brazilian democracy was undermined by a politicized anticorruption campaign, that we call the “long coup.” For his role in this, Moro received international acclaim. In 2016, Americas Quarterly (published by the corporate think tank Americas Society/Council of the Americas) featured him on a Ghostbusters-inspired cover titled “Corruption Busters” (Spektor, 2016). Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people (Walsh, 2016), and in 2018 he gave Notre Dame’s commencement address (Notre Dame News, 2018). In March 2019, Bolsonaro made his first state visit, to meet Donald Trump in Washington. He was accompanied by his justice minister, Sérgio Moro, who had imprisoned his main rival. When Bolsonaro made the unusual move of visiting CIA headquarters, Moro in tow, the former Paraná governor Roberto Requião (2019) tweeted, “Is it true that when Moro walked into the CIA his wifi connected automatically?”

Requião was implying that Moro’s “anticorruption” crusade and the long coup it set in motion enjoyed active U.S. support. This article argues that he was correct. It is the most thorough—and, as far as we know, the only—scholarly analysis that brings together the evidence currently available of U.S. collaboration with national elites between 2009 and 2018 to damage the left under the aegis of anticorruption. Particularly considering the cloak of classification under which U.S. agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Justice operate and the short time that has passed since Rousseff was impeached, the evidence for U.S. involvement is overwhelming. And scholars in the United States have had virtually nothing to say about it.

We are four Americans and a Brazilian-American hailing from anthropology, geography, history, and information sciences. We place ourselves at the left of the ideological spectrum and are deeply committed to combating imperialism, particularly when it originates from our home, the United States. We have been involved to varying degrees with advocacy organizations such as the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil, which has raised awareness of the havoc wrought by the long coup and Bolsonaro presidency, and we have written in both popular and scholarly publications about U.S. imperialism in Brazil. In particular, four of us have been regular contributors to Brasil Wire, a progressive, voluntarily managed outlet created to challenge corporate media framings of Brazilian politics.

In this article, we look at the evidence available, which we believe shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the United States played a significant role in Brazil’s long coup. The first section reviews the 1964 military coup as evidence of prior U.S. involvement in destabilizing Brazilian democracy and how this has often been ignored or denied by academic and media establishments. The next section examines evidence showing U.S. involvement in the persecution of the PT. We then look at how the role of the United States has been largely ignored by scholars outside Brazil although incisively addressed by Brazilian scholars. The final section considers possible motives for U.S. actions. We conclude that a crucial political role for U.S. Latin Americanist scholars is denouncing the imperialist actions of our own government in the region, and we challenge our colleagues to take a more decisive stance against it. Of course, it is not our intention to deny that corruption existed under the PT or that the party’s own errors contributed to its troubles. The fact remains, however, that despite these imperfections, the PT won four consecutive presidential elections (and a fifth in 2022). The party was defeated only after a concerted and U.S.-supported media campaign in Brazil internationally reshaped the narrative.

The use of anticorruption to legitimate imperial involvement in the undermining of democratically elected Latin American leftist governments in the twenty-first century has parallels to the use of anticommunism in the century before. However, despite this farcical repetition of a tragic history, the twenty-first century has also brought surprises. After this article was first drafted, in October 2022, Lula defeated Bolsonaro in the presidential contest that Lava Jato had denied Brazil in 2018. Bucking the historical pattern, the administration of Joe Biden repudiated Bolsonaro’s numerous attempts to subvert the democratic process. We suspect that this anomalous U.S. defense of the democratically elected Latin American left results from the Biden administration’s antagonism toward a figure largely understood in the United States as a “tropical Trump,” more than signaling a decisive break with the historical pattern.

U.S. Imperialism and Its Denialists in Historical Context: The 1964 Brazilian Coup

It should come as no surprise that U.S. media and many scholars have ignored (or applauded) U.S. involvement in the long coup. For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story; the second half involves justifying, minimizing, or denying U.S. involvement. Cold War justifications for U.S. intervention privileged anticommunism as the United States destabilized progressive governments, installed friendly dictators, funded brutal military regimes, and provided expert training in repression of leftist dissidents (Livingstone, 2011: 2). As with recent interventions, such actions have generally only been belatedly, if ever, acknowledged by important sectors of U.S. journalism and academia.

In 1961, President Jânio Quadros resigned, leaving vice president João Goulart as his successor. The U.S. government disliked Goulart for his Cold War neutrality, land reform initiatives, 1962 profit remittance law, and promotion of industrial nationalization. By 1962, John F. Kennedy and Ambassador Lincoln Gordon had decided that Goulart should be removed (Green, 2010: 29). Key fronts in the crusade against Goulart included the Alliance for Progress (Green, 2010: 6–27) and the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which worked to steer unions toward anticommunism (Corrêa, 2021). Meanwhile, CIA-produced propaganda portrayed an imminent communist takeover (Black, 1977: 131). As Phyllis Parker (1979) revealed, the United States organized Operation Brother Sam, which positioned U.S. ships off Brazil’s coast, ready to help the plotters if needed. The conspiracy involving the Kennedy administration, business interests, and right-wing Brazilian politicians and military officers came to fruition in 1964. During the two decades of military rule that followed, the United States remained allied with the Brazilian generals.

U.S. opposition to Goulart had little to do with communism; the financial and geopolitical interests that motivated the coup were apparent early on. Corporations had much to lose from Goulart’s reforms. For example, in 1963 the Hanna Mining Company objected to Goulart’s expropriation decree. Hanna board member, John J. McCloy, led Gordon to the office of Brazil’s first military president, Humberto Castelo Branco, to explain that restoring Hanna’s concession “might be a condition for receiving U.S. economic assistance” (Black, 1977: 88). Financial motivations are further suggested by corporate responses to Senator Frank Church’s hearings on U.S. support for torture in Brazil. Worried about exposure, U.S. corporations requested that congressional hearings be “closed and discreet” (Green, 2010: 238–241).

All along, the U.S. government denied involvement, repeating the mantra that the coup had been a “revolution” preventing a fall to communism (Green, 2010: 43). The U.S. media uncritically parroted this. Before the coup, the New York Times’s Rio correspondent, Tad Szulc, warned against “rising Leftist influence” and supposed Marxist organization of peasants (Green, 2010: 25). Meanwhile, the headline in Life’s April 17, 1964, issue stated, “Arrested: A Big Yaw to the Left.” The 23-page Reader’s Digest screed by the noted anticommunist Clarence W. Hall, rife with undocumented claims, was made into a pamphlet with instructions for mailing abroad (Hall, 1964). James Green (2010: 39) calls it “almost a caricature of bad, early 1960s Cold War propaganda.” Michael Weis (1997) concluded that “the U.S. government was able to manage the news to hide U.S. involvement in the coup and to present a skewed version of reality” that would soon justify coups across Latin America.

Despite overwhelming evidence uncovered by Brazilian and U.S. scholars, the record has barely been corrected. At the level of political and popular discourse, false narratives about the coup and military regime continue to mislead a public conditioned to interpret U.S. foreign policy positively. Furthermore, writers connected to the institutions crucial to narrative management—the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, the media, and Wall Street—are often responsible for what becomes “common knowledge” about Latin America (Swart, 2022: 224–226). For example, entries about the coup in the 2008 edition of the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture read like Cold War propaganda. In the entry “Revolution of 1964,” Marshall C. Eakin (2008) limits U.S. involvement to mere “support,” repeating the pretext of U.S. concerns about “a leftist revolution.” Lewis A. Tambs’s entry on the regime’s first dictator, Castelo Branco, limits U.S. relations with Brazil to “financial aid and investment.” He states that the regime’s series of repressive institutional acts “insured internal order” and “purified the government” (2008: 14). Notably, Tambs cites John W. F. Dulles, son of John Foster Dulles and nephew of former CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles’s own entry on Luís Carlos Prestes faults “violence-minded leftists” and the Brazilian Communist Party for the coup. Dulles (2008: 362–363) sneers at the existence of U.S. “imperialism” by putting it in scare quotes.

Recent textbooks have not done much better. Both Latin America and the Caribbean and Latin America since Independence: A History with Primary Sources reproduce tropes about communism and omit U.S. intervention. The former lauds dictator Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979) as a champion of democracy and calls the coup a “revolution” (Goodwin, 2013: 93). The latter draws parallels between Castro’s Cuban Revolution and the region’s right-wing dictatorships (Dawson, 2014: 202). Neither text mentions the United States’ role in Brazil’s dictatorship. It is thus not surprising that recent U.S. collaboration with anticorruption investigators has been ignored in most U.S. reference sources. Two unsigned articles, for instance, mislead readers into believing that Dilma Rousseff was impeached for corruption.¹ An entry in ABC-CLIO’s World Geography: Understanding a Changing World incorrectly connects Rousseff’s impeachment to the Petrobras corruption scandal that Lava Jato uncovered (World Geography, n.d.).²

Although we are not claiming that the United States was directly involved in Rousseff’s impeachment, these examples illustrate how segments of the U.S. intelligentsia were complicit with Lava Jato’s crusade to weaken the PT. Significantly, they primarily cite mainstream Anglophone media outlets, showing the shape of the echo chamber inhabited by U.S. corporate media and the authors of popularly oriented academic accounts. Kevin Young (2013) notes that “even the nation’s leading liberal media almost never acknowledge U.S. support for [repressive] regimes.” His analysis of five years of reporting by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR on three dictatorships reveals that the U.S. role is mentioned only 6 percent of the time. When discussing the abuses committed by U.S. allies, U.S. support is rarely mentioned or is glossed over as “a force for democracy and human rights” (Young, 2013). Yet despite denials or justifications for U.S. meddling from government and media sources, evidence invariably surfaces in official documents, legal proceedings, lapses in the standard media narratives, and leaks.

Evidence for the U.S. Role in Lava Jato

In Uncle Sam’s Own Words

Brazil signed the Anti-Bribery Convention of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1997. The convention was modeled on the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a U.S. law prohibiting overseas bribery by U.S. companies (Spahn, 2013). In 1998, the FCPA’s jurisdiction was expanded to apply to any foreign company doing business in the United States or conducting transactions in dollars (Department of Justice, 2017b). Brazil’s adherence to the convention and the 1998 expanded jurisdiction of the FCPA provided a legal basis for the Department of Justice to work with the Lava Jato task force. So cozy was the relationship that some argue that the Department of Justice took the lead in the investigation (Ohana, 2019). The Department of Justice and its Brazilian partners levied billions of dollars in fines on Brazilian companies in civil cases that were frequently decided in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.³

In 2014, filings by U.S. firms against Petrobras referenced the role of the Department of Justice in Lava Jato (see Kaltman vs Petroleo Petrobras S.A., U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, 2014). In 2015, legal blogs wrote about it (Torres, 2015), and in 2016, the Department of Justice’s website casually mentioned it. A December 21, 2016, Department of Justice press release stated:

Odebrecht pleaded guilty to a one-count criminal information filed today by the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, charging the company with conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). . . . The FBI’s New York Field Office is investigating the case. . . . The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs also provided substantial assistance. The SEC and the Ministério Público Federal [Federal Public Ministry] in Brazil, the Departamento de Polícia Federal [Federal Police Department], and the Office of the Attorney General in Switzerland provided significant cooperation.

From December 2016 to June 2019, the Department of Justice issued four press releases referencing its relationship with the Brazilian Public Ministry within the ambit of the FCPA and Lava Jato. In Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd's June 7, 2020, response (Mier, 2020) to the August 20, 2019 letter signed by 14 U.S. congresspeople demanding clarification of the U.S. role in Lava Jato and Lula’s election-year imprisonment, all four press releases were cited as showing that the relationship between Lava Jato and the U.S. Department of Justice was a matter of public record.

In another press release, from September 27, 2018 (Department of Justice, 2018), the Department of Justice’s Criminal Fraud Section thanked Brazilian law enforcement for its assistance and specified the distribution of the fine levied on Petrobras, with around $US85 million going to the SEC and the Department of Justice. By June 7, 2021, the evidence of Department of Justice involvement in a Lava Jato investigation that by then was well-known for its illegal activities and politicization (Fishman et al., 2019) was so overwhelming that Congressman Hank Johnson was joined by 22 other members of Congress in a follow-up to a 2019 congressional letter, also sponsored by Johnson, concerning the Department of Justice’s role. The 2021 letter states: “It is a matter of public record that U.S. Department of Justice agents provided support to Brazilian prosecutors that were part of the Lava Jato operation.” The public record referenced was especially damning: a July 19, 2017, speech by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco at the Atlantic Council (Department of Justice, 2017a). Blanco praised the cooperation between the Department of Justice and Brazil, citing the “extraordinary results” of collaborative investigations on FCPA cases involving Embraer, Rolls Royce, Braskem, and Odebrecht. Blanco also cited Lula’s conviction as a success of Brazil’s anticorruption campaign. Brasil Wire was among the first media outlets to break this bombshell revelation (Mier, 2017), and it led Lula’s defense team to file a motion to dismiss all Lava Jato charges because of illegal collaboration with a foreign government (Conjur, 2018). The motion was based on the following section of Blanco's speech (Department of Justice, 2017a):

At the core of the tremendous cooperation between our two countries is a strong relationship built on trust. This trust allows prosecutors and agents to have direct communications regarding evidence. Given the close relationship between the Department and the Brazilian prosecutors, we don’t need to rely solely on formal processes such as mutual legal assistance treaties, which often take significant time and resources to draft, translate, formally transmit, and respond to.

The motion (based on documents released almost two years before The Intercept revealed that the FBI had met with them) held that Lava Jato prosecutors subverted Brazilian national security law and the terms of the Anti-Bribery Convention by bypassing the Brazilian Justice Ministry and communicating informally about a pending case with foreign officials (Martins et al., 2018). In March 2022, Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice ordered the Justice Ministry to release previously sealed information regarding partnerships between Lava Jato and the Department of Justice to Lula’s defense team, so we expect that as time passes, more information on U.S. collaboration will become public (STJ, 2022).

U.S. Media Coverage

From 2014 to 2016, articles published in the United States’ most influential newspapers (Stevenson and Sreeharsha, 2016; Kiernan, 2014; Segal, 2015) reported on the Department of Justice and SEC partnership with Brazilian investigators that used the FCPA to target companies vital for Brazil's development. For example, a 2016 New York Times article explained that fines against Odebrecht and Braskem were the result of a joint investigation by U.S., Swiss, and Brazilian authorities, referring to the Brazilian side as “Operation Car Wash” (Stevenson and Sreeharsha, 2016).

The Odebrecht and Braskem case made headlines as the largest foreign bribery case ever decided in a U.S. court. A 2016 Reuters article explained that Lava Jato represented a nearly three-year partnership between U.S. and Brazilian authorities within the ambit of the FCPA (Rosenberg and Raymond, 2016). But December 2016 was the last time any major U.S. outlet mentioned U.S. involvement. The New York Times, for example, published at least 37 articles on Lava Jato between 2015 and Lula's 2018 imprisonment, but the last of its three articles mentioning the U.S. role appeared in 2016 (Stevenson and Sreeharsha, 2016).

By early 2016, Lava Jato had helped create the conditions for Rousseff’s impeachment, and it was working publicly toward the arrest of likely 2018 presidential candidate Lula—while also sparing members of the Partido da Democracia Social Brasileira (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy—PSDB), the PT’s main center-right rival. Even as the U.S. press was reporting on U.S. collaboration with Lava Jato, most outside Brazil saw the operation as a legitimate, even heroic, investigation. Thus, that collaboration might have seemed morally justified. By 2017, Lava Jato’s neutrality was coming under scrutiny, with critiques of the operation finding their way into publications such as Foreign Affairs (Robertson, 2017) and reporting on the economic devastation wrought by Lava Jato appearing in the Washington Post (Lopes and Miroff, 2017). It is noteworthy that as U.S. consensus about Lava Jato’s benevolence faded, so did reporting on U.S. involvement.

Although the U.S. press lost interest in the topic, it remained important in Brazil. In June 2019, the evidence on U.S. interference via Lava Jato was already so strong that the PT leader in Congress, Paulo Pimenta, was able to prepare a dossier full of information. It included names of U.S. prosecutors, public statements by government officials, proof of parallel meetings and events, official schedules, proof of informal collaboration in violation of national sovereignty laws, and the presence of U.S. agents in Brazil acting without the knowledge of government authorities (Pimenta, 2021). Pimenta shared this with members of the U.S. Congress. In addition, during a June 19, 2019, EU Parliament meeting, Pimenta accused the United States of creating Lava Jato as a laboratory for Moro and the prosecutors to enact the illegal guidance that they were receiving from the United States (Ohana, 2019). Weeks later, a series of bombshell articles published by The Intercept with local media partners began to confirm Pimenta’s allegations.

Walter Delgatti, The Intercept, and Operation Spoofing

Lula was released from prison November 8, 2019, 580 days after the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court, under a nationally televised threat from Army Commander General Eduardo Villas Bôas, had ruled to open an exception to the Brazilian Constitution, allowing his imprisonment before his appeals process had played out. His release came one day after the court reversed that ruling. We bring this up because Lula’s release is frequently mischaracterized (Danner, 2021) as based on a technicality. The hundreds of activists camped outside his prison,⁴ petitions demanding his release signed by intellectuals and scholars from around the world (CTB, 2018), and visits to him by heads of state certainly helped stimulate public sympathy. However, it was the court’s admission of error that led to his freedom. Likewise, the Operation Spoofing scandal, in which the hacker Walter Delgatti turned over 57 GB of Telegram conversations between Moro and Lava Jato prosecutors he had obtained to The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald,⁵ helped shift public opinion, but it did not have a direct relationship to Lula’s release (STF, 2021; see Angelo and Caligari, 2021).

In 96 articles released in partnership with some of Brazil’s foremost media outlets between September 2019 and March 2020 (Intercept Brasil, 2020), The Intercept revealed a wide range of offenses involving collusion between judge and prosecution with the explicit goal of removing former President Lula from the 2018 presidential elections, annihilating the PT, and helping elect Bolsonaro. Then, on March 12, 2020, in partnership with the independent media group Agência Publica, The Intercept released the information that Brazilian journalists and U.S. scholars and activists who had been following Lava Jato since its outset had been waiting for: U.S. federal agents had collaborated with the entire illegal process. Intercept journalists published Telegram conversations that revealed that the Lava Jato team held repeated secret meetings with a group of 17 FBI agents, bypassing Brazil’s Justice Ministry guidelines, national sovereignty laws, and the terms of Brazil’s FCPA partnership to collaborate on sensitive elements of the condo case against Lula (Fishman, Martins, and Saleh, 2020).

On February 9, 2021, the STF ruled the Operation Spoofing data admissible as evidence and ordered that all the data—hundreds of times more than what was received by The Intercept—be released to Lula’s defense. Lula’s lawyers immediately filed their second motion to dismiss based on illegal collusion between the Lava Jato task force and a foreign government. One of the justifications cited in the motion was a comment made on the day of Lula’s imprisonment by Lava Jato chief Dalton Dallagnol that it was a “gift from the CIA'' (Conjur, 2021).

On March 8, 2021, before the new motion could be ruled on, the court reversed all convictions of Lula in response to an earlier motion filed by Lula’s defense team in November 2020 accusing the prosecution of illegal forum shopping (Falcão and Vivas, 2021). The motion was based on the fact that the justification for moving the case out of Lula’s home of São Paulo, where Moro had no jurisdiction, to Curitiba (alleged involvement in an ill-defined Petrobras corruption scheme) had been removed from the charges a week after the case was transferred (Angelo and Caligari, 2021). Moro is now under investigation for judicial bias for his role in the case. In a New York Times op ed, Gaspard Estrada (2021) called the affair “the biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.” The involvement of the U.S. government in this scandal surely deserves greater scrutiny than it has received from U.S. scholars.

Scholarship, Anti-Imperialism, and Imperialist Blind Spots

The role of the United States in Lava Jato has been widely acknowledged by Brazilian scholars (though not equally across social science disciplines), many of whom have not hesitated to call out the United States for its role in fostering the country’s economic and institutional crisis that started in the mid-2010s. A recent wave of works has sought to highlight institutional and ideological connections, formal partnerships, and informal collaborations between central Lava Jato figures and U.S. (and also Swiss) institutions. Some works argue that the United States’ fight against corruption in Latin America took on a neocolonial character in that anticorruption came to be used as a convenient tool for neutralizing competitors threatening U.S. hegemony in the region (Warde, 2018: 107: Souza, 2020). Others have highlighted the geopolitical element of these actions, arguing that the ideological affinities and working partnerships of Lava Jato and the U.S. government indicate how new iterations of U.S. imperialism sought to revive the neoliberal agenda in the post–Pink Tide context (Gloeckner, 2020; Martins, Martins, and Valim, 2019; and Proner, 2021).

But while Brazilian scholars ask pointed questions about the U.S. role in Lava Jato and its political fallout, U.S. scholars have largely remained silent. Some legal scholars have effusively praised Lava Jato; other scholars have been cautiously critical, and still others, particularly social scientists, have forcefully condemned Brazil’s long coup and mobilized international resistance. What they all have in common is their silence on the U.S. role. This is especially perplexing because, from the 1960s through the Chilean coup and the Central American wars of the 1980s, Latin Americanist scholars have been vociferous critics of U.S. meddling. If we could not remain silent in the face of CIA support for the Brazilian coup of 1964, Nixon’s fomenting of a coup in Chile, and Reagan’s arming of death squads in Central America, why did we remain silent as the Department of Justice trained Brazilian officials in anticorruption strategies to discredit a left-wing government that challenged the United States?

Paradoxically, the U.S. scholars who have admitted U.S. involvement have been those who approve, mainly legal scholars. These scholars, most of whom do not speak Portuguese, assume that Brazil suffers from an “innate culture of corruption” (Tobolowsky, 2016: 385) whose remedy lies in emulating the Global North, above all, the United States, which one of them calls an “ethically minded” “Boy Scout” that eliminated large-scale corruption a century ago (Campbell, 2013: 248–249). For these analysts, any possible U.S. hand in Lava Jato is positive, indicating that Brazilians are learning to “build a system that now exists in the US and has proven central to anticorruption enforcement” (Spalding, 2017: 209) and placing themselves “in compliance with international standards” (Richard, 2014: 362). Imperialism? How is it imperialist to help a child in need? Indeed, sympathetic legal scholars played a role in making Moro and his task force into international celebrities. For example, Harvard Law’s Matthew Stephenson spent years cheerleading Lava Jato, undoubtedly influenced by his friendship with the lead prosecutor. His admiration was barely dented by the Intercept revelations, which he dismissed as “frivolous” exaggerations without evidence of “politically motivated prosecutorial action” (2019).

It is not surprising that legal scholars, with their spotty knowledge of Brazil and unquestioned acceptance of the United States as a global model, have not seen U.S. involvement as a problem. More difficult to explain is the silence of humanities and social science scholars. Despite Latin American studies’ founding in the United States as a tool for the advancement of U.S. policy in the region, since the 1960s Latin Americanists, often influenced by Marxist, anti-imperialist colleagues in Latin America, have emerged as forceful opponents of U.S. meddling (Berger, 1995)—until now. At first, this was due to a lack of direct evidence of U.S. involvement; indeed, two of us asserted in 2016 that there was no evidence of U.S. involvement in the parliamentary coup against Dilma (Pitts et al., 2016). But even as evidence emerged that Lava Jato was inherently biased against the PT and that its efforts were actively supported by the United States, scholars remained silent. A 103-page report commissioned by the Latin American Studies Association and produced by a panel of U.S., European, and Brazilian scholars roundly condemned the coup but ignored the possibility of U.S. involvement (Chalhoub et al., 2017). Similarly, the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil (USNDB) and the Washington Brazil Office (WBO), led by some of the most prominent U.S. Brazilianist scholars, have focused public efforts on the crippling effects the coup, Temer’s neoliberal turn, and Bolsonaro have had on Brazilian democracy. Behind the scenes the USNDB and the WBO have taken steps to highlight U.S. involvement, most notably by working with Congressman Hank Johnson on the two congressional letters to the Department of Justice. But in the area where they were best positioned to make an impact— the role of the United States in sidelining the PT—perhaps more could have been done.⁶

Motivations for U.S. Involvement

It is concerning that so few scholars have taken evidence of U.S. involvement in Brazil's long coup seriously. In fact, after more than a century of extensive U.S. support for the overthrow of governments that threaten U.S. interests, any nondemocratic transfer of power from left to right in Latin America should immediately raise the question of U.S. involvement. The precedents are abundant and clear. Moreover, during the first decades of this century, much of Latin America was undergoing a so-called Pink Tide and eschewing United States–led neoliberal policies. This period was also characterized by coups against progressive governments for which United States support has been well-documented, such as those in Venezuela in 2002, Honduras in 2009, and likely also Bolivia in 2019. Yet, for Brazil, few U.S. scholars have investigated the abundant connections. We consider here some economic, geostrategic, and possible personal reasons for U.S. involvement in Brazil, as documented in the public record. We note that, for an amalgam of interests and institutions as sprawling and tangled as the U.S. state, the ascription of a singular motive is rarely possible. We have already discussed the paternalism that likely provided ideological motivation to some of those foreigners involved with Lava Jato and the U.S. scholars who promoted it. We discuss here some other factors that may have played a role.

For Lula's defense team, it was a "collection of U.S. geopolitical and personal interests" that led the United States to collaborate with the process against the PT (Moreira, 2020). This strategy began to form around Brazil’s 2006 discovery of massive offshore petroleum deposits. As Lula's defense lawyer Valeska Martins noted, the first step involved U.S. spying on Petrobras, Rousseff, and members of her government, as revealed in the Snowden leaks (Moreira, 2020). Indeed, as early as 2016, long before Operation Spoofing had made it unequivocal that Lava Jato served political ends with the support of the United States, the Brazilian journalist Luis Nassif (2016) drew some of these connections. He noted that Lava Jato’s actions suggested extensive knowledge about Petrobras's supposed misdeeds and that the Snowden leaks had shown the United States to have interests in Petrobras. Similarly, the former U.S. ambassador Thomas Shannon described the development of Odebrecht as "part of the power project of the PT and Latin American Left" and admitted that the State Department had concerns about Brazil's project of South American economic integration (Estrada and Bourcier, 2021). And in the analysis of Guido Mantega, finance minister under Rousseff, her impeachment was motivated by her administration's measures reducing profit margins for big banks. Between 2011 and 2013, Brazil started taxing the derivative market, allowed public banks to reduce interest rates, and mounted a campaign against bank fees. This took a toll on financial profits, picking a "fight with a big dog," as Mantega put it (Brasil Wire, 2021). Taken together, these analyses suggest that international capital had an interest in pushing back against the PT’s redistributive policies, domestic industrial development, and regional integration.

It is not surprising that anticorruption enforcement might serve U.S. corporate and foreign policy interests. In 2014, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell noted, “The fight against foreign corruption is not a service we provide to the international community, but rather an enforcement action necessary to protect our own national security interests and the ability of our American businesses to compete globally” (Estrada and Bourcier, 2021). Similarly, in 2017, in a document defining U.S. national security policy for the purpose of training special operations forces for nonconventional wars of the future, the Pentagon admitted that the fight against corruption could serve to destabilize U.S. “competitors” or “enemies” (Fiori and Nozaki, 2019). As Perry Anderson (2019: Kindle locations 925 and 929) noted, Lula's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, led a "front of poorer states to thwart Euro-American attempts to ram more 'free trade' arrangements—free for the United States and the EU—through the WTO at Cancún" and "Washington and Brussels have still not succeeded, eight years later, in imposing their will on the less developed world in the abortive Doha Round; credit must first go to Brazil." In addition, the Lula government recognized Palestine as a state, defied the U.S. blockade on Iran, forged closer ties with Russia and China, and annulled a deal for U.S. control of Brazil's Alcântara satellite launch base. All of this was reversed under Temer and Bolsonaro, who signed a deal returning Alcântara’s control to the United States in 2019 (Mitchell, 2020).

Additionally, a former Department of Justice official who oversaw Latin America claimed, "If we add to all this a rather bad personal relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and Lula, and a PT apparatus that is still suspicious of its North American neighbor, we can say that we had work to do in order to redress the situation” (Estrada and Bourcier, 2021). Obama even managed to swipe at Lula in his 2020 memoir, claiming that Lula “reportedly had the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss, and rumors swirled about government cronyism, sweetheart deals, and kickbacks that ran into billions” (Obama, 2020: 337). As Obama prepared to leave office in 2016, his Department of Justice was working closely with Lava Jato as it secured the downfall of a Brazilian left more electorally successful than U.S. leftists could dream of, paving the way for Bolsonaro's election.

The United States, then, had abundant motivations to want the PT gone, along with the party’s nationalist and integrationist rhetoric that challenged U.S. hegemony in Latin America and beyond. But it faced the same problem it had already encountered in Venezuela: how to remove a government that enjoyed widespread popular support? The answer was to erode that support through anticorruption investigations that would sully the PT’s public image and deal a near-mortal blow to some of Brazil’s largest corporations. This is not merely conjecture or the ravings of leftist scholars blaming the United States for all the world’s problems; rather, over the past decade, convincing evidence has emerged that clearly demonstrates that the U.S. government, particularly the Department of Justice, under both Obama and Trump, played a key role in supporting Lava Jato’s politically motivated witch hunt against the PT.

Conclusions

We conclude by reiterating a central element of our paper’s findings: The lawfare tactics used against Dilma and Lula resembled in many ways the destabilization of the early 1960s that culminated in the military coup of 1964. Ultimately, however, the ethical considerations involved are not easily resolved in terms of politics or sources. As Latin Americanists—not simply scholars but Americans who love the region and see it not as a problem to be solved but as a model to be emulated—where do we stand? In contrast to scholars of other regions covered by area studies—for example, Africa, Eastern Europe, or East and Southeast Asia—we do not have other empires to blame for our region’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century problems. Neither the U.K., France, Russia, China, nor even Spain or Portugal has been responsible for repeated meddling, coup-mongering, and outright invasions in Latin America: our own country has been and still is. The marines may no longer show up on the beaches to overthrow an inconvenient president, the CIA may not arm new generations of insurgents, but our government’s meddling is no less real today.

Latin American studies was founded to keep other empires out of the United States’ “backyard.” Decades of government and corporate funding have sought to ensure that our field remains in the service of U.S. imperial designs. Yet starting in the 1960s and continuing through the Chilean coup, the Central American wars, and the Washington Consensus, we Latin Americanists have emerged as the foremost scholarly critics of our country’s imperialist project. The United States has long used invasion, insurgencies, and economic blockades to advance its interests in Latin America. Today, it has added the tool of anticorruption to its arsenal.

We have written this article to demonstrate the many continuities between recent U.S. imperial actions in Brazil (and beyond) with the better-known twentieth-century imperial actions of the United States in Latin America. But we also offer it as a challenge to our fellow Latin Americanists in the United States. As scholars writing on the U.S. “backyard” (or “front yard,” as President Joseph Biden put it) (White House, 2022), from within the house that those yard metaphors imply, we have a responsibility to critically examine the often covert and inevitably denied role of our government in the region.

Footnotes

Notes

Brian Mier is a TelSur TV journalist and former coeditor of Brasil Wire. Bryan Pitts is assistant director of the UCLA Latin American Institute and the author of Until the Storm Passes: Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (2023). Kathy Swart is a professor and librarian at Pierce College in Washington, where teaching courses on Latin America led her to critically examine dominant narratives. Rafael R. Ioris is a professor of Latin American history and politics at the University of Denver. Sean T. Mitchell is an associate professor and chair of sociology and anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark. He writes about inequality politics in Brazil and elsewhere.

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