TITLE:
Lawfare as an Instrument of Geopolitical Warfare in Latin America: The Brazilian Car Wash Operation and the President Lula’s Case
AUTHORS:
Bárbara Lou da Costa Veloso Dias, Ana Victória Delmiro Machado, Jean-François Y. Deluchey
KEYWORDS:
Lawfare, Democracy, Latin America, Brazil, Car Wash
JOURNAL NAME:
Beijing Law Review,
Vol.15 No.4,
November
29,
2024
ABSTRACT: Since 2009, specifically since the coup suffered by Honduran President José Zelaya, Latin America has been marked by episodes of political and institutional disruption that show how the justice system can be used to delegitimize, harm or annihilate political and economic enemies of neoliberal projects, led by the USA. These intervention strategies and tactics have been called Lawfare. In Brazil, the term introduced by Cristiano Zanin, Valeska Martins and Rafael Valim gained popularity in 2016, when the first two authors took on the legal defense of the cases brought by the Car Wash operation against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010, 2023-…). In Latin America, the concept became popular not only because of the prominence of the Lula’s Case as an internationally recognized paradigm case of Lawfare, but also because the strategies and tactics employed against the Brazilian president provided support for studying other episodes of judicial persecution experienced by various progressive leaders on the Latin American continent. This gave rise to the need to understand, using the case study method, why the Lula’s Case had become paradigmatic and what the origins, agents and true aims were behind a supposed crusade against corruption in Latin American countries, the results of which, until now, have represented nothing more than great instability in the democratic regimes in force and undue international interference, with the contours of a geopolitical dispute, particularly from the United States, over the main natural and energy resources of these nations.