From Corruption to Street Crime: Discursive Elasticity and Field Inertia in the Brazilian Penal Field

• In Event: Corruption, Compliance, and the Politics of Accountability

Abstract

This paper analyzes the legal mobilization around the largest corruption scandal in world history: Brazil’s ‘Operation Car Wash’. The investigation exposed a multibillion-dollar bribery scheme implicating high-ranking politicians and businesspeople. For the first time in the country’s history, powerful individuals joined the young, Black, working-class men who comprise most of Brazil’s incarcerated population. Seeking to institutionalize this shift, prosecutors in 2016 proposed the Ten Measures Against Corruption, a legal reform inspired by global anti-corruption ideas. However, the bill was killed in Congress, setting the stage for a paradoxical outcome. In 2019, former Car Wash judge Sergio Moro revived the Ten Measures in the Anti-Crime Package, merging the anticorruption agenda with far-right president Bolsonaro’s tough-on-street-crime policies. To explain this transformation, I develop a discourse-centered field analysis. I introduce the concepts of discursive elasticity and field inertia to analyze how traditional punitive discourses were stretched to target elite crime and then recoiled against street crime. Based on over a year of fieldwork in two Brazilian cities, 116 interviews, and an analysis of legal actors’ discourse in legislative debates, I show how prosecutors’ efforts to advance anticorruption reforms mobilized punitive logics that were ultimately repurposed to expand state repression against the racialized poor.

Author

• Eduardo Gutierrez Cornelius, University of Minnesota