In “O Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma”, the character Genelício is the archetype of the indolent, inept barnabé, and diligent only in the art of appearing busy. Pretend to work while obsessively dealing with obsolete rules and irrelevant protocols. He said he was dedicating himself to writing a monumental volume entitled “The Audit Courts in Asian Countries” — an initiative as useless as learning Javanese in another caustic text by . The author was writing in 1911. More than a century later, however, the once exotic and almost irrelevant topic of audit courts has become a central issue on the public agenda in the current situation.
Rui Barbosa, in his opinion on the creation of , already warned of the risk of the institution becoming an “apparent and useless ornament”, a true “Court of Make-Believe”. The famous jurist could not have imagined that the danger would be even greater: that the audit courts would become auxiliary cogs in a protective plot of large-scale illicit schemes.
The contemporary feeling is that of. Even the Federal Police, which still appeared as a bulwark of credibility, is beginning to be affected. Practically all institutional actors are under suspicion. The Master affair deeply shook — and not just two of his ministers. The INSS CPI and the shielding schemes it revealed further aggravated the wear and tear on the government and the Legislature as a whole. The president of the Senate faces accusations, the deputy leader of the government was the target of search and seizure, and the investigations reach the family circle of the President of the Republic. The exposure of digital militias in processes involving corruption is not completely new either — just remember the episode of “dirty blogs” —, although previously their actions were more limited to party-political terrain.
How did we get here? The incentive structure changed with the post-Lava Jato free-for-all. But none of this would be exactly unprecedented if we were just talking about the old promiscuity between the State and large private interests. The country’s largest construction company maintained an entire “structured operations” department, dedicated exclusively to the systematic payment of bribes to thousands of public agents. J&F, on a similar scale, distributed around R$500 million to almost two thousand political actors. The manual is known, the script is repeated, the characters just change costumes.
What is effectively new are two elements. First, the complaints involving members of the Republic’s higher institutions, such as the audit courts. Second, the growing connection of these schemes with organized crime — a phenomenon already known at the subnational level, notably in Rio de Janeiro, but which now reaches the center of the system. It is no coincidence that a Court of Auditors advisor from that state is now behind bars.
Society and the press are strongly polarized, which creates important limitations for the exercise of some form of social accountability. The only reaction to this state of affairs came from the press. Or more precisely from individual journalists. Lima Barreto lives.
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