Opinion: Srgio Moro went from Brazil's sheriff to Bolsonaro's useful idiot. Can he pull off a presi
Opinion: Sérgio Moro went from Brazil’s sheriff to Bolsonaro’s useful idiot. Can he pull off a presidential bid?
Sérgio Moro, Brazil's former justice minister, is running for president. (Eraldo Peres/AP)
By Mac Margolis
Today at 3:40 p.m. EST
Former Brazilian criminal judge Sérgio Moro speaks softly but carries a big schtik. Start with the title of his new memoir, “Against the System of Corruption,” a self-aggrandizing slogan the former graft-busting judge once boasted as his job description and now means to repurpose for his presumptive presidential candidacy.
He’ll need more than a catchphrase. Moro’s boosters hope he’ll blaze a middle way in an election torn between choleric right-wingers and an avenging left. Yet polls show him running a distant third in the October election, with around 9 percent support. He trails both President Jair Bolsonaro (22 percent), under whom Moro briefly served as justice minister, and front-runner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (48 percent), the former president whom Moro jailed only to see the verdict both voided by the Supreme Court as biased and pilloried in public as a hit job. Bolsonaro’s recent hospitalization for abdominal pain — stemming from complications from the stab wound he sustained in the 2018 campaign — is expected to slow him down but not dampen his reelection ambitions or win him much of a sympathy bump.
No matter, Moro has a mission. His book defines 2014 as Brazil’s Year Zero. That year launched Operation Carwash, the sprawling investigation into pay-to-play schemes over which Moro himself presided. He has probable cause. In seven years, Carwash generated 179 criminal actions, 209 plea agreements with confessed offenders, and orders to confiscate $2.7 billion in purloined public money. The case spilled across the Americas, toppling presidents, executives, bureaucrats and shady enablers from Peru to Panama. The U.S. Justice Department called Carwash the “largest foreign bribery case in history.”
Yet Moro’s actions betray ambitions beyond the chambers. He played unapologetically to public opinion. Hence, Carwash’s moralizing mise-en-scene of predawn police raids, moguls in handcuffs, wiretaps and strategically leaked testimony. This was bracing fare for a public fed up with politics as usual. It also boomeranged.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/04/srgio-moro-went-brazils-sheriff-bolsonaros-useful-idiot-can-he-pull-off-presidential-bid/