Comment on Brazil graft cases: Beginning of impunity's end?

Brazil graft cases: Beginning of impunity's end?

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A federal investigation into a kickback scheme at Brazil's state oil company has, so far, ensnared 30 executives. Brazil is witnessing an unprecedented flurry of legal activity, provoked by a growing middle class whose anger over corruption erupted in protests last year, and independent agencies increasingly capable of handling complex probes. The kickback scheme at the oil company Petrobras allegedly included executives from Brazil's powerful construction companies paying bribes for inflated contracts, with some of the money being funneled into the campaign coffers of the ruling Workers' Party and their allies. More arrests are expected, according to Attorney General Rodrigo Janot, who recently told an anti-corruption conference in Brasilia that everyday Brazilians have made it clear they'll "no longer tolerate corruption and the gall of some bad public officials and private businessmen." Congress was set to strip them of such authority until last year, when protesters across Brazil staged raucous anti-government marches, in part to denounce the corruption stealing their woeful public services of tax money. A truth commission last week released its finding from a nearly three-year investigation into atrocities committed by the 1964-85 military regime, the first public accounting of that painful period.

 

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