POLITICS-BRAZIL: Public Heat on Politicians to Fight Corruption

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 20 2001 (IPS) - The fight against corruption in Brazil, driven by increasing public pressure, has closed in on Jader Barbalho, president of the Senate, and is threatening two state governors.

Barbalho lost support even from his Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) as a result of the accumulating denunciations against him and evidence that he diverted public funds in the 1980s, when he was governor of Pará state and when he served as national minister of Agrarian Reform.

Meanwhile, Ignacio Ferreira, governor of Espiritu Santo, faces parliamentary impeachment hearings due to charges that he illegally financed his electoral campaign with a loan from a state- run bank, and for several cases of corruption involving his direct advisers, including his wife.

In Rio de Janeiro, governor Anthony Garotinho, a potential presidential candidate for the socialists, is accused of having bribed a tax inspector in order to cover up fraud committed when he worked as a radio and television presenter in 1995.

Former employees of his company filed the charges against Garotinho based on recorded telephone conversations in which the governor’s voice can be heard authorising the illegal payoff.

At least six other governors – out of the total 27 in the country – are caught up in corruption scandals and charges entailing embezzlement of public funds. They are the target of investigations by police, judicial and tax authorities, as well as attempts by their political rivals to remove them from office.

There are “signs of the growing indignation of the population, and public pressure is getting the authorities moving” in efforts to halt corruption, says Claudio Weber Abramo, executive secretary of Transparency-Brazil, the local office of the Berlin-based Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog.

Throughout the 1990s, there was a series of scandals and political expulsions in Brazil, as lawmakers, mayors and even a president, Fernando Collor, were removed from office or forced to resign.

Civil society’s concern about the problem is a relatively new component of the Brazilian political arena. The public is increasingly aware that reducing corruption has “strategic importance” because it involves eradicating an obstacle to the country’s development, Abramo told IPS.

However, the battle against corruption has not been completely effective because the existing monitoring mechanisms are not applied in a systematic way, he added.

The Brazilian parliament, for example, does not have a history of “ongoing control” as far as its compliance with the duty of providing oversight of the government.

Parliamentary Investigative Commissions, a tool that has had a strong impact on corruption in some cases, are not ideal for this situation, Abramo said, because they are “sporadic and attend to the electoral interests of the moment.”

Nevertheless, the expert acknowledged that advances in Brazil’s corruption fight have been made over the last decade, “though not at the desired pace, and with occasional reversals.”

The Chamber of Deputies has expelled several of its members in recent years, ever since the discovery in 1993 and 1994 that parliamentarians were fraudulently acquiring funds from the government budget.

But it was the Senate that turned into the centre of scandals last year, when the first senator in the body’s history was removed from office on corruption charges. Now it is the president of the Senate himself who finds himself in a blind alley.

The most serious accusation, one that still lacks any convincing answer, fingers Barbalho as beneficiary of the equivalent of more than four million dollars diverted from the Banco do Estado de Pará in 1984, during his term as governor of that state.

He has been unable to elude the charges because the cheques involved in the transaction clearly include his name as the recipient of the funds, and there is proof that the money was deposited into bank accounts in his name.

The case is recorded in several reports drafted by the Banco Central since 1991, and is now under investigation by the Federal Police and the Public Ministry, which is preparing to file an indictment against Barbalho in the Supreme Court.

Barbalho also faces charges for having benefited from the fraudulent expropriation of rural properties when he was minister of Agrarian Reform in the late 1980s.

Given the deterioration of the senator’s public image and its contamination of the Senate itself, Barbalho has been abandoned to his fates by President Henrique Cardoso, for whom he was once an important ally, and by his own party.

Other leaders of the PMDB are trying to convince him to request a four-month leave from the Senate in an attempt to quiet those calling for his resignation and to forestall a parliamentary investigation, as opposition lawmakers are demanding