Klaus Hart Brasilientexte

The CPIs (Commissions for Parliamentary Enquiry) need to resort to the Intensive Care Unit for reparative surgery. They act as police stations in a policy enquiry. They belittle denunciations of corruption as if putting one™s hand on illicit funds were simply due to a faulty character.

 They forget that the occasion makes the thief and don™t question the institutions nor the country™s legislation which are the responsibility of parliamentarians.

Showing the CPIs on television turns them into a sort of legislative Big Brother show. The public is always on the lookout to see who will be eliminated next. In the wave of voyeurism which ravages the country at the moment, there is a perverse attraction for the spectacle of people being humiliated and offended by deputies who argue, violently at times, for the audience™s attention so as to gain prestige and votes. Proof of this is that few show they are capable of asking questions. They do not investigate, do not read reports, they act on the impetus of destroying the opposition party and protecting their own.

A legislative body doesn™t deserve to be compared to a police station. It is not in its nature to pressure those being questioned to the point where, under psychological torture, they become the accused. The onus of proof belongs to those who do the accusing unless the person being questioned takes the initiative and admits his or her fault as happened with several of the accused.

Ethics cannot be reduced to individual behaviour, as if this were the only cause of corruption. One must take into account the web of social relations and institutional connections which constitute reality. Identifying the corrupt person is not enough, it is necessary to establish the causes of corruption. This is the role which differentiates a CPI from a police enquiry.

It is up to the legislative body to regulate national institutions making them legal, establishing their rights, duties and limitations as well as researching the loopholes in legislation which favour corruption. How do businesses cheat the tax system and hold funds that are not accounted for? Why is it so easy to remit fortunes abroad? What makes transparency in the parties™ finances so difficult? Where are the loopholes in campaign finances? Why so much fraud in tenders? This, yes, is what legislating is all about.

A CPI should never close its investigation by presenting the nation with a list of suspects. Not to run the risk of false testimony, it is better not to name them if there is no convincing and definitive proof. Persons whose names have been irresponsibly besmirched in a few minutes are doomed to spend the rest of their lives trying to clear their name.

It is up to the Public Ministry and to the police to investigate, name and punish those who have been proved to have broken the law. The CPIs must turn intensely towards the work of the Congress and investigate the causes of corruption, bad administration and the breakdown of parliamentary decorum. These causes often put down roots within the very legislation which rules our institutions and which looks more like Swiss cheese due to the many holes through which criminal activity can enter. The origin of legislation lies in the Congress. To legislate is the essential function of elected parliamentarians.

The population has a right to do anything which is not forbidden by law however the authorities should only do that which is permitted by law. It is discouraging to see a CPI drain itself in a sea of conclusions or deductions when it was hoped that, alerted by it, the Congress would take on the job of hastening political reform. What is being done to stop the parties from incurring in fraud again?

As far back as I can remember I have observed that certain words symbolize the paradigms which move our political life. In the 50s and 60s the theme was development; during the 70s and 80s democracy, in the 90s modernization, nowadays it is ethics.
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Ethics slips into conservative moralism when it is separated from the senses. Morality tends to fall into moralism, but the word ”ethicism does not exist. Because ethics, so well emphasized in the works of Aristotle, implies universal, perpetual principles which guide great human projects. It is ethics which provides the elements for ”militant discernment, as Emmanuel Mounier says.

If our political parties lose sight of historical strategies, replace the national project with an election project, fail to give meaning to the nation and become mere consortiums in the power struggle, then ethics will evaporate in the abstraction of inflammatory speeches and politicians will slide into the ground of hypocrisy. In ancient Greek theatre, the hypocrite was the actor in the chorus who proclaimed the opposite of what was really happening on the stage.
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What is more serious than corruption is an election dissociated from consistent projects to help Brazil not be ashamed of itself, of its children consumed by the drug trade, of the wandering multitude of landless people, in other words projects which alter our most serious problem: social inequality. Voters do not want to give their vote to a candidate; they want to vote for hope.

 *Frei Betto is a writer, author of ”Calendário do Poder (Calendar of Power) (Rocco).

About the Author

He is a Brazilian Dominican with an international reputation as a liberation theologian.
Within Brazil he is equally famous as a writer, with over 52 books to his name.  In 1985 he won Brazil™s most important literary prize, the Jabuti, and was elected Intellectual of the Year by the members of the Brazilian Writers™ Union.

Frei Betto has always been active in Brazilian social movements, and has been an adviser to the Church™s ministry to workers in Sáo Paulo™s industrial belt, to the Church base communities, and to the Landless Rural Workers™ Movement (MST).

In 2003-2004, he was Special Adviser to President Lula and Coordinator of Social Mobilisation for the Brazilian Government™s Zero Hunger programme.

Ouro Preto, Weltkulturerbestadt in Brasilien, Osterprozession, Procissão de Páscoa 2015. **