What will the entrance exam for the Public Prosecutor's Office be like?

On the afternoon of the day Temer was arrested, I came across on TV the press conference of the young men and women from the Public Prosecutor's Office, responsible for the accusation that led to the imprisonment of the former coup-plotting president.

Knowing how tedious these interviews were, generally laudatory of the Lava Jato prosecutors' role, I didn't intend to spend more than three minutes on it. I ended up staring at the TV practically throughout the entire questioning of the prosecutors by the reporters.

Complete explanations about the reasons for the arrest of Temer and his accomplices, replete with robust evidence? No. Justifications for the need for the spectacular operation? Also no. A convincing explanation of how that preventive detention fell within the cases foreseen by law? Not at all. The more the young people, handsomely paid by public funds, spoke, the stronger my conviction grew that the arrests were made in violation of the law.

Suddenly, the following question came to mind: what kind of public examination do applicants for a position in the Public Prosecutor's Office undergo, in order to earn a starting salary of 30 reais? Here, it is worth remembering that most of those who pass are children of middle and upper classes, without any prior experience in legal matters.

I believe I have the right to suspect that the exams do not include questions about the Constitution, the Penal Code, and the Code of Criminal Procedure. And even less so about constitutional and Enlightenment principles such as due process, presumption of innocence, and the right to a full defense and to challenge evidence.

(I open parenthesis: Temer deserves no solidarity whatsoever, as he is a miserable and treacherous coup plotter. A man of schemes, who plays politics to amass money, Temer is very likely guilty of all the accusations against him. I close parenthesis.)

You have to be the most naive of human beings not to realize that the arrest had the clear objective of creating a political event capable of overshadowing the two resounding defeats suffered by the Public Prosecutor's Office and Lava Jato in the Supreme Court: the suspension of the billion-dollar foundation with money from Petrobras and the decision to refer cases related to illegal campaign financing to the electoral court.

I wonder: how can a veteran in the ranks of corruption like Temer be the subject of such a weak indictment as the one presented by the Public Prosecutor's Office, which relies heavily on inferences, conjectures, assumptions, projections, and rudimentary associations of facts? Not to mention the time lag in the reported crimes and the brutal assault on the rule of law that someone represents when they are imprisoned without even being tried in the first instance.

Prosecutors and Judge Marcelo Bretas point to 40 years of continuous crimes perpetrated by the criminal organization headed by Temer. None of this mattered, however, to Lava Jato, when President Dilma was stabbed in the back by a habitual criminal.

However, what most highlighted the fragility of the incompetent punitive measures of the Public Prosecutor's Office was the journalists' questioning about the exact amount of the gang's embezzlement, since the figures were controversial until then, with the last information given to the press pointing to a theft of around 1 billion and 800 million reais.

From what I understood of the prosecutors' confusing response, this amount results from a projection based on a simple rule of three: if Temer's gang stole X in Angra 3, then in 40 years they pocketed X multiplied by 40. That's the level of the Lava Jato vigilantes.