Brazilian president Rousseff under fire over missing money

In Brazil's print media universe, weekly news magazine Carta Capital is the only vehicle of national importance that openly supports president Dilma Rousseff and her ruling Workers Party.

So the current edition has its hands full trying to explain away the recent massive protests which saw hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets demanding an end to Workers Party corruption – and Rousseff’s impeachment.

In page after page, it seeks to undermine what most of the country’s media viewed as a great and rare demonstration of civic spirit by what is historically a depoliticised population. For one of the magazine’s commentators, the march was a “conservative and coup-mongering reaction”. For another, “the vulgarity exhibited by the right before the dictatorship is reborn”. A third peered into the souls of those taking part and saw “the miasmas of oligarchical backwardness and the vapours of hypermodern technological barbarity”.

Selective focus

It is easy to understand

Carta Capital

’s disdain for the protesters, few of whom probably read it. The overwhelming majority on the streets did not vote for Rousseff in last October’s polarised election, being mainly white and wealthy. Their indignation against corruption only seems directed at the Workers Party variety. There was no outrage at the illegal schemes run by opposition parties in the fiefdoms they control.

And the magazine was never going to feel much sympathy for a popular movement among whose organisers are groups openly agitating for military intervention. Inchoate demands ranging from impeachment to state secession from the union to a coup were far more prominent among marchers than calls for a root-and-branch political reform, the most democratic and civic-minded solution to Brazil’s eternal institutional crisis.

But to understand the protesters' rage at Rousseff and her Workers Party, Carta Capital readers only have to turn to page 28 where reporter Fabio Serapião has the latest developments in the Petrobras scandal.

Just a day after dozens of Brazilian cities saw marches against Workers Party corruption, federal police arrested Renato Duque, the state-controlled oil giant's former services director. Behind a false wall in his home they found a secret cupboard with its own air-conditioning system which contained volumes of neatly organised documents that public prosecutors believe will map the route hundreds of millions of euro stolen from Petrobras took on its way to Workers Party coffers.

The former executive is facing trial and a long stretch in prison, having already been identified by others arrested in the year-long investigation as the Workers Party “operator” in the multibillion-euro corruption scheme. That will increase the pressure on him to talk in return for a reduced sentence.

Party fears

A Duque plea-bargain reportedly has the Workers Party terrified. After all, he is related by marriage and owed his job in Petrobras to José Dirceu, party founder, right-hand man of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and currently serving out his sentence for his role in the

mensalão

scandal that almost cost Lula his presidency in 2005.

This is all potentially lethal for Rousseff. She was chairwoman of the Petrobras board when the company was being looted by a mafia of politicians and private contractors. Her failure to raise any flags at the time signals either silent complicity or incompetence.

With this crisis threatening to wreck her second term, Rousseff made what is becoming her annual pledge of political reform and new anti-corruption measures. It was met with derision in light of her failure to deliver on previous such commitments.

Petrobras investigation

A more meaningful signal to the population that she is, as she repeatedly insists, committed to combating corruption would be to stand against the manoeuvrings by the Workers Party’s backroom operators to try to derail the Petrobras investigation even at this late stage.

She could also publicly defend the federal prosecutors from the intimidation and threats they are receiving from her nominal allies in congress, furious that their painstaking work has brought them closer to being formally charged with corruption.

After all, a full investigation could favour the president if she is innocent of all wrongdoing as she insists. It would likely reveal how the opposition whom most of the protesters voted for is as guilty as her own Workers Party. And it would almost certainly expose the corruption of her own coalition partners at a time when, sensing her political weakness, they are openly undermining her from within government.

The situation right now in which the president and the Workers Party are shouldering the blame for the corruption of an entire political class could be reversed.

But such calls for bravery are unlikely to be heeded. Rousseff lacks the political skill or capital to follow such a risky path on her own. And the Workers Party, its founding radicalism burnt out, is far too compromised to risk it.