Brazil's corrupt politicians may finally serve jail time after convictions

Judges and public grow impatient at legal wranglings of ex-president Lula's aides, found guilty of graft last year

theguardian.com, Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro, Thursday 14 November 2013

Demonstrators hold images of (from l) Valerio, Dirceu and Cunha, outside the supreme
 court in Brasilia during their corruption trial, in 2012 - they were all found guilty.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

A year after it sentenced leading politicians to prison in what was labelled the corruption trial of the century, Brazil's supreme court has finally decided to actually send them to jail.

Among those likely to be imprisoned in the next few days is ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's former chief of staff and so-called strongman, José Dirceu. He and others convicted had been able to delay jail sentences with complex procedural appeals on some of the charges they were convicted on. Now they will be imprisoned while their appeals continue to be heard.

"It is an emblematic decision. People who commit these crimes will be subject to punishment like anybody else," said Roberto Dias, professor of constitutional law at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.

First exposed in 2005, the mensalão (big monthly payment) was a wide-ranging corruption scheme in which politicians from parties allied to the ruling Workers party, Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT, were paid bribes to support government measures.

The scandal nearly brought down the Lula government. Lula has always denied the scheme's existence even though in 2005 he apologised for it.

The court found 25 people, including Dirceu, the PT's former president José Genoino and former treasurer Delúbio Soares, and Marcos Valério, the advertising executive who operated the scheme, guilty in 2012.

But it failed to send anybody to prison when a number of the convicted mounted complex legal appeals – leading to widespread cynicism in Brazil, where politicians are rarely jailed despite the country's endemic corruption.

Dirceu, who was sentenced on different charges, is appealing against his conspiracy conviction but not his corruption conviction. On Wednesday night, the court decided that while his conspiracy appeal went ahead he could start serving time on his corruption conviction.

Because his corruption conviction is for less than eight years of the total of 11 he was sentenced to, he will begin a semi-open prison regime, said Dias. If his appeal against conspiracy fails, he will move to a closed-prison regime. Eleven of the 25 convicted should begin prison sentences in the next few days, Brazilian media said.

David Fleischer, professor of political science at the University of Brasília, said: "It was very a clear signal that [the supreme court judges] are not going to accept any more delaying tactics."

Brazilians expressed optimism that the politicians would actually see the inside of a cell, but also feared the convicted might find yet another legal loophole to avoid prison.

Guilherme Aquino, 33, a marketing executive in Rio de Janeiro, said: "I see this moment as a beautiful opportunity for us to begin to change the general feeling of impunity in Brazilian society."

The supreme court now needs to issue arrest warrants, said Fleischer. But this does not mean politicians jailed who still have political rights will lose them.

In June, under pressure from street protests that swept Brazil, the supreme court jailed federal deputy Natan Donadon for 13 years, for embezzlement and conspiracy.

In August he was taken from jail in handcuffs to the chamber of deputies, which decided in a secret vote not to remove his political mandate. "In Brazil, our judicial system doesn't work very well," said Fleischer.

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