The goal was Petrobras [Brazil's state-owned oil giant]. It was the Pre-Salt [Brazilian offshore oil]. And the Brazilian companies that were winning bids from US companies in the Middle East.
Lula's claim, which he has elaborated elsewhere, is that the idea of Lava Jato was "born in the Department of Justice in the United States," with the aim of destroying Brazilian competitors to US companies (in petroleum, naval construction and civil engineering, all sectors targeted by Lava Jato) (PT, 7/9/20). Perhaps Greenwald disagrees with Lula here. Then surely Lula's claim deserves a refutation, especially because its principal evidentiary basis is Greenwald's own archive .
Securing Democracy does note that Greenwald's work on the Snowden archive "proved that the NSA and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK were spying on [Petrobras,] the state-owned oil company whose proceeds fund Brazil's social programs" (p. 125). But the question of foreign intervention in Brazil appears principally in the past tense in Securing Democracy, and never in relation to Greenwald's own Vaza Jato archive.
I should note that I have not seen enough evidence to weigh in with confidence on Lula's assertion about the economic intentions of the Lava Jato team and its US collaborators, but he is correct about Lava Jato's economic effects. Brazilian scholars have shown that Lava Jato did severe damage to Brazil's major companies, and, consequently, to the economy and to employment in Brazil. In contrast, most of the US financial corporations responsible for the fraud that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis were protected as "too big to fail." Whatever the mix of intentions involved, Lava Jato was part of an asymmetrically structured global politics of corruption that disables companies from the Global South and frequently protects those from the Global North, contributing to global inequality.
From 'inevitable' to unmentionableDespite Greenwald's silence about US participation in what he convincingly shows to be a regime change operation in 21st century Brazil, Securing Democracy runs through the long history of US regime change operations in Latin America. Discussing US support for the 1964 coup against a center-left Brazilian government that was replaced by a 21-year military dictatorship, Greenwald notes that US "refusal to tolerate any form of leftism in Latin America's largest country-even if it meant the imposition of despotism where democracy had been taking root-was virtually inevitable" (p. 3). Greenwald also mentions Brazil's enduring "colonial relationship with the United States" (p. 12), and notes that he learned from Edward Snowden that Brazil has the "largest CIA presence in the hemisphere" (p. 12).
So why doesn't Securing Democracy examine US involvement in the process that removed the elected left from power in that country in 2016 and brought an admirer of right-wing despotism to power in 2018? What changed between 1964 and 2016 that made US involvement in left-to-right regime change operations in Brazil noteworthy, even "inevitable" then, but not worth mentioning now?
As Greenwald acknowledges in the book, to the United States, the PT governments' forging of a "foreign policy in a way that diverged from US dictates was intolerable" (p. 14). Fortunately for the US officials who found the PT's independent foreign policy intolerable, Lava Jato resolved this problem for them. Upon inauguration, Bolsonaro assumed a posture of alignment with Trump's government in matters of foreign policy.
Le Monde (4/11/21)
Although Greenwald does not examine the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy, this involvement has become politically important in Brazil and the United States. (One can find further English-language examination of the US role, drawing on both the Vaza Jato archive and other sources, in Le Monde and Brasilwire.) Besides Lula himself, Brazilian public figures ranging from members of Brazil's supreme court to politicians from Brazil's so-called "big center" have been critical of the US/Lava Jato collaboration.
In the US, 13 congressmembers wrote a 2019 letter to then-Attorney General William Barr demanding an explanation for the Department of Justice's collaboration with Lava Jato. That letter was followed up in 2021, when 23 congressmembers sent a similar letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, noting that "it is a matter of public record that US DOJ agents provided support to Brazilian prosecutors that were part of the Lava Jato operation."
That statement links to a 2017 speech by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco, in which he exults in DoJ collaboration with Lava Jato and in Lava Jato's conviction of Lula. The congressmembers' letter also notes that members of the DoJ and FBI were briefed by Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil, linking to Agà ªncia Pà ºblica's reporting (3/12/20) on the Vaza Jato archive. No hint of this appears in Securing Democracy.
I think there is still room for debate about the intentions behind US involvement in Lava Jato-a Brazilian "anti-corruption" investigation that, as Greenwald shows, pursued aims consistent with the history of US policy towards Latin America that Securing Democracy outlines. However, I see no justification for the complete omission of US involvement in a book that is largely about the politics of Lava Jato, and that draws on the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role. Whatever Greenwald's position is here, it deserves clarification, and the failure to examine the US role in Lava Jato is a significant flaw in an important book.
The Greenwald wars
Tucker Carlson interviewing Glenn Greenwald (screenshot via Salon)
I have no perfect theory of why Greenwald chose to omit evidence, stemming from his own "once-in-a-lifetime scoop," that Lava Jato worked with support from the United States, some of it clandestine. Greenwald is hard to figure out. He's a former hero of the left (he spoke at FAIR's 25th anniversary benefit alongside Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Michael Moore) who is now a regular and chummy guest of Trump-favorite Fox News host Tucker Carlson-whom Greenwald has absurdly referred to as a "socialist," along with Steve Bannon and "the 2016 iteration of Donald Trump." His merciless polemics against US liberalism often hit the mark, yet he can be dumbfoundingly credulous when conservatives espouse "working-class, anti-imperialism, anti-corporatist politics."
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