PLEA BARGAINING AND SELECTIVITY: WHO ARE THE WHISTLEBLOWERS OF CAR WASH OPERATION
CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY, SELECTIVITY, PLEA BARGAINING, CAR WASH OPERATION, LEGAL TRANSPLANT
Car Wash Operation (2014 to 2021) was considered the biggest crusade against corruption ever undertaken in Brazil and deepened an unprecedented political crisis in the period of redemocratization, from the constitutional mark of 1988. The pursuit of white-collar crimes, with the promise of taking to prison a class that seems to be outside the target of secondary criminalization, i.e., the owners of economic and political power, is based on the narrative of overcoming criminal selectivity as a way of legitimizing the entire punitive system and giving it purposes strangers to its vocation, such as reducing social inequalities, calling itself a role of political activism that it does not fit. The apparent success and public adherence to Car Wash Operation was due to a number of factors, among which, in the legal field, the dissemination of the use of plea bargain institute. The investigation on the subjects who were able to benefit from this institute, or those who were chosen to do so, indicates that there are specific characteristics that identify the group of informants and the group of denounced. In the former, the vast majority are businessmen investigated for crimes of corruption, money laundering, cartel formation and criminal organization, among other economic crimes. The group of denounced consists mostly of politicians and public agents. The distinction indicates that, despite the discourse of overcoming criminal selectivity, Car Wash operated another form of selectivity ideologically based on the idea that the State and the political class are corrupt and inefficient, while the market and its business community are endowed with virtuous and ethical values, thinking based on the North American neoliberal ideal. The adoption of bargaining mechanisms contains the promise of the legal system´s Americanization, which would mean, in the minds of some, a more efficient and fair justice. However, the transplant of an institute inspired by the Anglo-Saxon tradition to a procedural system with Roman-Germanic roots deepens its inquisitorial and arbitrary aspects, with serious consequences for the system of guarantees and fundamental rights. The false promise of overcoming penal selectivity in the investigation of white-collar crimes, thus, legitimizes the entire punitive system that, in the end, strengthens its primary vocation ‒ this one quite efficient ‒ of labelling its preferential segments of society: the lower classes, vulnerable and disadvantaged