POLITICAL AND CORPORATE CORRUPTION IN BRAZIL

THE CRIMES OF THE POWERFUL, LEGAL IMPERIALISM, AND OPERATION CAR WASH.

Abstract

The article addresses Brazilian political-corporate corruption as a structural phenomenon of capitalism and anti-corruption ideology as an instrument of geopolitical dispute. Based on Frank Pearce's Marxist criminology of the powerful and Luís Eduardo Fernandes' concept of “legal imperialism”, it demonstrates that the amoral pursuit of profit and the need for electoral self-reproduction converge to capture the state apparatus, generating a “market for functional actions” capable of transforming public policies into commodities. The punitive system, in turn, operates selectively: it penalizes street crimes and protects corporate crimes, legitimizing bourgeois hegemony. Since the 1990s, the United States has been exporting anti-corruption norms and financing think tanks that spread the ideology of anti-corruption; in Brazil, this agenda materialized in Operation Car Wash. The articulation between business elites, the media, and judicial bodies has led to the strategic use of criminalization (lawfare) to dismantle development policies and reconfigure the power bloc in favor of a neoliberal and anti-democratic offensive. It can be concluded that “grand corruption” stems from the structural relationship between the capitalist state and big capital, which is leveraged and instrumentalized in favor of US imperialist interests, meanwhile criminalization processes are oriented by interests identified in the intra-class political struggles.