Operation Car Wash: one of US & Brazil's greatest miscarriages of justice

An interview with Brian Mier

The following transcript, edited for readability, comes from an interview with Brian Mier on the radio program By Any Means Necessary. Listen to it here.

Sean Blackmon: Brazilian Federal Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli has recently called the arrest of current President Lula da Silva, “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the country’s history.” This comes after Toffoli annulled all the evidence that was taken through the Odebrecht construction company’s leniency agreement, and this whole issue is bound in with the Operation Car Wash, that saw Lula imprisoned for some time. So I’m wondering what you make of this. It feels like a kind of official confirmation of what I think a lot of us have felt for a long time about that whole period.

Brian Mier: What we have all known the whole time has just been legally established as fact. So all of the mainstream media and even some ostensibly left journalists in the US who bought into this bullshit and used this scandal to advance their personal careers are now doing a lot of backpedaling. Because it wasn’t just that he annulled all the evidence from the Odebrecht leniency agreements related to the Lula case. He ruled that hundreds of imprisonments were illegal. Hundreds, including those of other top officials of the Brazilian Workers Party, other left wing figures in Brazil and people in Brazil’s business community and this is due to illegal manipulation of evidence by the prosecutors who were working closely the entire time with the US DOJ and the FBI.

Jaqueline Luqman: The dismissal of this evidence was apparently based on access to files that exposed a highly illegal operation. I’m wondering if you can give us some detail on what that operation was and how wide was its scope.

Brian: What we are really looking at was a ten year international project to annihilate the Brazilian Workers Party. That’s what it really was. The leniency agreement with Odebrecht entailed around $2 billion US in fines levied in a United States courtroom. His ruling establishes that that deal was made illegally, without going through the proper checks and balances in the Brazilian government. Odebrecht used these systems called Drousys and MyWebDay that are supposed to be sealed, but they were opened and tampered with before they were brought into the courtroom. That fact has been legally established. All of the evidence is now invalid. It can’t be used in civil cases, it can’t be used in hundreds of cases that are still ongoing against political targets of Operation Car Wash. And in his ruling Toffoli calls the entire operation, which involved the division of billions of dollars of fines between the Brazilian government, the US government and Switzerland, “a political power grab” that was designed to remove key figures from political life in Brazil, and he refers to it as the “serpent’s egg,” which is a kind of Brazilian language that we use when we talk about the birth of fascism. It was a project linked to the rise of the fascist Jair Bolsonaro, so the government could continue hammering through electorally suicidal neoliberal austerity structural adjustments: privatizations, paralyzation of all funding increases for the public health and education systems, destruction of labor laws, raising the retirement age... All of these things that were done after the coup against Dilma Rousseff - to keep that project going. On top of that the Supreme Court has already ruled legal, as evidence, all of the Telegram leaks of the conversations between members of the Car Wash prosecution team – the Curitiba DA’s Office – in which they talk about their meetings with the FBI and which agents were there and things like that. They met with a team of FBI agents every 15 days for years, led by Leslie Bakshies, that walked them through how to use American style lawfare techniques such as coerced plea bargain testimonies which had only been legalized in Brazil shortly before the beginning of Operation Car Wash. And he ordered the Federal Police – which hasn’t done it yet - he gave them 10 days to turn over all of the leaks. The Intercept only accepted about 3% of the leaks. At the time, Glenn Greenwald told the hacker, Walter Delgatti (who’s now in jail serving a 20-year prison sentence – the Intercept apparently did little to protect his identity) “No, no. We don’t need any more of these leaks. We can already publish enough articles with what you’ve given us.”

But then they didn’t share the remainder with anyone else. The Federal Police seized all of the evidence – it’s 6 terabytes. But then they’ve been sitting on it obviously because it implicates a lot of high ranking members of the federal police who were involved in the Car Wash operation. Now they have 10 days to turn that data over. So there is going to be a lot of more information coming out about this and definitely a lot more information about US and Swiss involvement in the whole, sordid affair.

Sean: Yeah. And what you’re touching on here I think is really important, Brian, in terms of how overtly political this whole attack on Lula da Silva was. And you describe it as an international sort of effort to remove the Brazilian Workers Party and seemingly undermine progressive elements in Brazil in general. And so my question is why was such an effort necessary? What was the character of this attack and why was it as expansive as you describe?

Brian: First of all if you look at the history of dependency capitalism in Latin America, they [the US] always resort to - since World War 2 when it became the major player in the Americas when England faded out - they’ve always fostered the most brutal and authoritarian regimes in order to push through the structural adjustments they believe are needed to further enrich US corporations operating in the region. It was important to take the Workers Party out so that they could privatize the offshore petroleum reserves that were expected to propel Brazil into one of the World's 5 largest petroleum reserve holders. They needed to give more access to agricultural production for corporations like Cargill, which built this massive grain terminal on the Amazon river in an area that was surrounded by hundreds of miles of closed canopy rainforest. It needed to push through what it needed to advance the interests of the same corporations that basically control the US political process. Also, as we've seen since Lula took office again in January, there are geopolitical reasons why the US is not happy with the Workers Party. Look at Lula's relationship with the BRICS. Look at his refusal to take sides in the Ukraine Russia conflict. Look at how he's relating to China right now, how he is interacting with China. The Democratic Party prefers him to Bolsonaro, or at least did for the first few months of his government, for opportunistic political reasons of its own related to Bolsonaro's idiotic taking sides with Trump in the US political scenario and his relationship with Steve Bannon and those kinds of figures. If Bolsonaro had just said when the Democrats sent the US national security advisor to Brazil to invite it into NATO and things like that - if Bolsonaro had just played along with them there is a good chance that they would have supported his attempt at an auto coup during the waning months of last year. The sad fact of the matter is that the US, since even before it became the main player in the region, dating back to the 1800s with the Monroe Doctrine, has always tried to destroy any country in Latin America that tries to exercise even the minimum amount of sovereignty - especially in relation to the natural resources that are so coveted in the US and commodities like bananas in Honduras, beef in Brazil, oil, minerals - that kind of stuff. Any attempt to take national control or even partial national control over those sectors of any economy in Latin America is met with bloodshed, with coups, armed invasions, mercenary armies and assassination attempts. We've seen what happened in Central America in the 80s with all the bloody dictators that the US supported. We saw it during the overthrow of Dilma Rousseff, the overthrow of Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. We see the US’ dirty hands all over Bolivia, attempted coups in Venezuela. I'm sure it's meddling right now in the Argentinian elections - I'm sure this is going to come out. And that's just the way it goes. Luckily for the people of Latin America right now, the US influence is waning. Last year Brazil did 3 times more business with China than it did with the US. The US influence is fading but it's still a very dangerous force in Latin America.

Jaqueline: Yes, absolutely. And now that this evidence has been thrown out and this decision has been made, what does this mean for the people who have been exposed as having committed these crimes? Will they pay? How will they be made to pay and have they?

Brian: One of them, the head of the Car Wash task force, Deltan Dallagnol, has been removed from office as Congressman anwouldd he is facing all kinds of criminal charges that he no longer has parliamentary immunity to protect him from. Sergio Moro, who has fallen greatly in popularity since he was cited as a possible presidential candidate, due in part to the Telegram leaks and things like that - he is on the verge of being thrown out of office for campaign fraud because he switched parties during his election campaign and allegedly used some of the campaign funds from the first party to fund his electoral activities while he was running for the second party. So he is on the verge of being thrown out. If he is thrown out of the Senate, he will face dozens of criminal charges. My guess is that both of these two figures are going to end up in jail, as will several other people involved in the operation. I don't know what would ever happen to the US Department of Justice and FBI for their role in the operation - probably nothing. What is going to happen to the Swiss Federal Police involved? Probably nothing. But at least the Brazilian comprador elites who facilitated this imperialist project are facing jail time, political ruin and bankruptcy.