BRAZIL CORRUPT POLITICAL CLASS

Of the 513 members of the lower house in Congress, 303 face charges or are being investigated for serious crimes. In the Senate, the same goes for 49 of 81 members.

Of 65 members on the impeachment commission, 37 face charges of corruption or other serious crimes according to Transparencia Brasil but are nevertheless allowed to sit in judgement on the President.

Due to Brazil’s system of parliamentary immunity only the Supreme Court has exclusive authority to prosecute and judge members of congress. Criminal activity cut right across ideological and regional lines to include politicians of all major parties in both government and opposition.

Brazilian politicians openly commit crimes against the public administration as a strategy. Many use politics as a means to increase their own personal wealth. The second motivation is that elections are now so expensive they are financial races and politicians practice corruption to irrigate their campaigns.

For all of its history, corruption has been a cancer that has stunted development. The reason the country can’t seem to rise to its potential is because of corruption and all the distortions that it causes.

Reducing the number of political parties could help reduce incentives for corruption. This is because in Brazil’s highly fragmented system, where dozens of parties vie for power, governments can only rule by building coalitions. Since there are so many parties, all with their own disparate interests, leaders often resort to patronage to get anything done. Reducing the number of parties by decreasing fragmentation, could help eliminate some incentives for the systemic corruption otherwise needed to grease the wheels of government.

Another source of incentives for corruption is Brazil’s massive government bureaucracy. Like everything else in Brazilian politics, public sector employment, which has grown by 30% in the past decade, has often served as a pretext to dole out patronage and buy loyalty.This type of politics has long led to the creation of redundancies and outrageously unjustifiable expenses as people in power look not only to forge alliances, but also to provide their friends, relatives, campaign donors, etc., with government-issued salaries. No surprise, then, that this helps to feed the culture of corruption.

Indeed, people have been known to get government jobs even if they already have other jobs, and even if they don’t live in the city where they are supposed to be working. There is the  need to decrease the size of the government, not only because it is disproportional and inefficient, but also because it creates incentives for corruption.

Corruption extends beyond the public sector, however. The biggest corruption-related problem Brazil is facing relates to the links between the public and private sectors.

Another critical pathway for corruption has been the provision of subsidized loans to companies by the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). This type of lending has increased exponentially in recent years, and as a result, by 2014, the Brazilian government had some type of participation in over 700 companies. Given the history of corruption in Brazil, it is hardly surprising that some of these companies receiving preferential subsidized loans from the government turned out to be giving back to the same government in the form of corruption, especially considering that many of the loans did not go to Brazilian small and medium-sized enterprises, as originally intended, but largely benefited huge, powerful companies.

Brazilian politicians enjoy broad immunity and consequences for corrupt politicians have been notoriously lacking throughout all of Brazilian history, and this tradition of impunity has allowed corruption to become increasingly audacious and brazen.

For politicians, impunity remains the norm, rather than the exception. This is because it is all but written into Brazilian law through the generous legal protections for which they are eligible. The worst of these is known as the “foro privilegiado,” or “privileged forum,” a provision which dictates that politicians of a certain stature can only be tried by the Supreme Court. This almost guarantees immunity as the court is a notoriously overburdened and slow body of just 11 people facing an estimated 100,000 cases every year . All told, about 20,000 Brazilian public servants are currently protected by the privileged forum. Although there are some justifications for why sitting politicians should receive some legal protections, the scale of the Brazilian case is clearly disproportional. The current system does nothing but embolden politicians to become corrupt, encourage criminals to run for office, and create delays and gridlock that hurt the country.

Sadly, the legal privileges for politicians don’t end with the privileged forum. Another problem is the almost endless scope for appeals, even for Supreme Court decisions, and the myriad possibilities to reduce the severity of initial sentences.

Overall, considering all of the insidious ways, big and small, in which corruption permeates the Brazilian political system, it is clear that it ends up being extremely costly. Indeed, a sizable portion of GDP, estimated at between 3 and 5%, is lost to corruption each year. Brazil, a continent-sized country blessed with innumerable natural resources and a large, diverse population, will never fulfill its potential as long as corruption is allowed to continue as part of the routine, without any serious consequences for the establishment as a whole.