Politização da justiça e fragilização da democracia no Brasil contemporâneo.

Abstract

This study discusses the modus operandi of the corruption-fighting operation named Car Wash, more specifically by evaluating how police agents, prosecutors and judges in federal courts, as authorities associated with it, have acted, with this research being focused on the consequences of their decisions and actions in the political arena. Thus, it aims at verifying the suspicion of a political-ideological bias demonstrable within the well-known operation, which makes it as an instance of a process in which the justice system is instrumentalized for political ends, or, to put it in the terms of this research, as a case of politization of justice. So, by applying the document (news stories, interviews, criminal complaints, and sentences) research method, in addition to that of Discourse Analysis applied to a corpus formed by discursive sequences excerpted from private messages by some Car Wash authorities which were leaked in 2019 by the news site The Intercept Brasil, in a scandal punned as “Leaking Wash” (Vaza Jato), evidence is sought and identified, showing what could be classified as lawfare thus carried out especially against Brazil’s political leader with the highest rate of popularity, mainly on the left side of the spectrum. The identification of certain discursive formations in this content, which indicate elements that form and conform the ideology underlying the lavajatista discourse, is confronted with some Car Wash authorities’ practices in order to verify how solid the political bias premise is. Lavajatismo itself, by the way, is eventually presented in our analysis as one more of such discursive formations, which is characterized by relativistic and politically selective punitivism, which has had an influence upon an antipolitics mood that has become widespread in the voting population. In such a process, it is argued that corporative media have had a significant and negative role, which is also discussed here.