The Master affair is the best possible tenth birthday party for .
The losses caused by Master have barely begun to be counted, but we can already say that it is a scandal of the same order of magnitude as , which stopped the country for two years and was the immediate cause of the 2016 impeachment.
During the petrolão investigation, the loss recorded by Petrobras was around R$6 billion. In 2015, Deltan Dallagnol estimated that total losses (counting losses, bribes, etc.) would reach R$20 billion. A somewhat controversial calculation put the gap at R$42.5 billion. Correcting for the IGP-M, it amounts to around R$80 billion.
The collapse of companies in the Master ecosystem has already generated a loss of around R$50 billion to the Credit Guarantee Fund. The operation by the Bolsonarian government of the Federal District to save the Master with the BRB caused a loss of at least R$8 billion. State governments and city halls invested money from retirees in Master. The government of Cláudio Castro (PL-RJ) alone gave R$1 billion in retirees’ money to Vorcaro.
But impeachment wasn’t just about oil and Lava Jato. It was, above all, a demonstration of the superior political shielding capacity of Brazilian right-wingers.
On April 19, 2016, I published arguments that I had already been developing in Sheet. The title, given by the American editor, summarizes my position: “Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment is not a coup; it’s a cover-up”. It wasn’t a coup, it was a hush-hush operation.
How the famous right wing overthrew Dilma because she first didn’t want to, and then couldn’t, stop Lava Jato. The maneuver was successful: immediately after impeachment the operation began to suffer defeats in the courts. In 2020, I said the argument that it was no longer needed, as I had finished it.
Ten years later, the right is once again able to profit from the wave of political outrage generated by a major corruption scandal. But now the maneuver is much more impressive: now she’s the one who stole it.
As I have already argued, it is primarily a right-wing scandal. Only the Bolsonaro faction has, in the Master’s selection, the governor who broke the BRB, the governor who gave R$ 1 billion from retirees to the Master, three former ministers of Bolsonaro (Wajngarten and Ronaldo Bento), Jair himself, who, like Tarcísio, received donations from Vorcaro’s brother-in-law, and a deputy who tried to change the law to save the scheme: Filipe Barros, from the PL of Paraná, who is today his running mate. Sergio Moro. That’s right, that Moro from 2016. That’s right.
In the 2016 elections, the first after the petrolão, he was massacred. Ten years later, the right is gaining votes for breaking the Master. He was able to blame the system and identify the system with , which had just arrested its coup leaders.
Now, the group that stole with Master can return to power allied with the group that attempted the coup on January 8, 2023. What has changed in these ten years is this: the Brazilian right no longer has to choose between “coup” and “cover-up”.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
