Any Brazilian interested in politics has developed a new morning habit: checking to see which politicians were arrested in the earliest hours of the day. Such arrests have become  common lately.

This very morning, there was a police raid on two former big kahunas who are being investigated for taking bribes and disrupting investigations on the mega-company Petrobrás. On the evening of the same day, I left my gym to find that the president of the Senate has been ousted by order of the Supreme Court.

Because he is standing trial for corruption, he can´t legally be in the succession line to the presidency. In his seat now sits another senator accused of essentially the same corruption scheme, but investigations haven’t caught him yet. Any morning now.

Operation Carwash

Somewhere in the thick of all of this there was a car wash and gas station that was used as a front to distribute the money.This is all part of a gigantic clean-up operation called Operation Carwash, and if politics is a sport in Brazil, Carwash just elevated us into a new World Cup. Scoring comes in the way of the feds knocking on politicians’ doors at 5:30 a.m. with search and arrest warrants.

It all started in a very unassuming way. Your average money launderer gets arrested in an international drug trafficking scheme. It turns out that his books listed a Petrobrás director as a client. Said director was then arrested and confessed to taking bribes from a huge construction cartel operating within Petrobrás. Some of the bribes traced to politicians who appointed him.

The construction companies’ owners and directors were arrested and confessed to operating as a cartel. Everyone who was anyone in Petrobrás knew it and they were indirectly financing a big scheme to buy support in the legislature, control Congress, and elect politicians allied with the government. Investigators officially dubbed it a “bribocracy.”

Somewhere in the thick of all of this there was a car wash and gas station that was used as a front to distribute the money: hence the name Operation Carwash.

Delightful Devastation

Fast forward two years and in the last hundred days we have impeached a president, ousted and arrested a leader of the house, arrested a senator for interfering with investigations under orders from the former president Lula da Silva, arrested and convicted dozens of politicians involved, and just hours ago ousted the president of the senate.

And the political World Cup is only going to get better from here on.

Any morning now, we’ll get to see the plea bargain from Odebrecht, the largest construction company involved in the scandal. The bargain was signed last week and statements are being taken as I write this article.

Odebrecht was so organized that they had a “Department of Structured Operations,” entrusted with handling the hundreds of millions of dollars that went to different politicians and parties. It’s expected they will rat out somewhere north of 150 politicians: the current president, two former presidents, and pretty much everyone else in between.

Those politicians aren’t silly gooses though. They realized ending the investigation was a simple matter: pass a law stopping it. In fact, a senator was recorded explicitly talking about that. He’s now the leader of the government in the senate, and was also in Odebrecht’s “Structured Operations” list.

Any morning now.

But back to their plan. …. read more here