"The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office will be remembered as the one that brought institutional terror."

GGN Newspaper - The anti-corruption package from the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office will create a commission to receive corruption complaints, inaugurating the Republic of Informants. This is the opinion of Roberto Tardelli, a lawyer and retired public prosecutor, who states that the dictatorship has reached the arms of the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office, precisely the body that has the constitutional duty to fight for democracy.

Tardelli says he is "relieved" to no longer be part of the organization that "conspired against democracy, that brought state terror, institutional fear, that transformed this country into a place where scoundrels will be celebrated as heroes."

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History will mark the Public Prosecutor's Office as the one that brought institutional terror.

Roberto Tardelli

Retired lawyer and public prosecutor.

Times of horror and death for the democratic rule of law. Dark times; I was a child when AI-5 emerged and was already a public prosecutor when it was gone, without leaving – we imagined – any regrets.

It left behind fond memories and its mark. One of those marks is the anti-corruption package from the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office, which, among other contemporary shames, creates a Commission to receive corruption complaints, a kind of Gestapo, to harass in the name of morality.

The Republic of Informants – or perhaps the Republic of Reporters – has been inaugurated, and the foundations have been laid for the most dangerous country in the world to live in. The dirty work, to which even the military did not stoop, has been done.

Brazil, the Country of Fear. The Country of the Commission that will demoralize, embarrass, blackmail, pressure, annul, humiliate, and expose inconveniences. In the darkest Stalinist period, there were these commissions in the Communist Party, which spread throughout the countries of Eastern Europe. Submission or exclusion were the options these commissions offered.

The dictatorship arrived in the arms of the Public Prosecutor's Office. It arrived in the hands of those who have a constitutionally mandated commitment to fight for democracy. It came in the hands of the Public Prosecutor's Office, let that be clear, let that be clear that the people who naively took to the streets asking for signatures for a petition they didn't understand were deceived, were betrayed.

Not all prosecutors or all attorneys will be appointed, only the most prominent, only those who consider themselves brilliant, only those who will command the destinies of the Public Prosecutor's Office, explicitly or in the shadows of the obscure forest of Power.

Those who cannot endure it will be persecuted; first, they will be demoralized. Then, persecuted, they will be punished; holy wrath will burn them in the corridors. The purifying fury of the samurai will encourage snitching, denunciation, it will encourage the idea that one can earn extra money, that to earn extra money, it will be enough to denounce, it will be enough to denounce as if one were fishing, one day the fish of the reward for the snitching will arrive and the car will be exchanged. It is a legal villainy of immense proportions.

The snitch receives a science fiction name: the whistleblower. It's worth repeating, this will be the villain of the 21st century, protected by law, the first scoundrel to be protected by law, the whistleblower, the untouchable, intangible scoundrel, superior to those who were not scoundrels. Villainy will be virtuous if it is in the name of Good; if scoundrels proliferate, everyone will report everyone else, and anyone wanting a bandage at a health clinic will have to beg on their knees for it.

I say with relief: I no longer belong to the ranks of the institution that betrayed the country, the people, democracy, that conspired against democracy, that brought state terror, institutional fear, that transformed this country into a place where scoundrels will be celebrated as heroes.

There will be no privacy, no intimacy to be respected, for the public interest will be superior to all that, and the telephone will be the noose around the neck, and technology, marvelous for liberation, will be used to oppress. Big Brother is in the aristocracy of the civil service.

My friend, are you enjoying the plea bargaining that livens up the Jornal Nacional every day and feeds Veja magazine? Well, most of you have no idea what it is, you've never seen this band play, but you like it and delight in seeing people get arrested, politicians are all thieves.

What you don't know is that a plea bargain is an agreement, a deal, that can be extremely lucrative if done with a minimum dose of bilateral pragmatism.

This agreement, my friends, is made without anyone knowing the details of the negotiations, even though it involves public money. Nobody, except those directly involved, knows what goes on in the conversations, what is promised, what is included, and what is taken away. Prison is a horror, and plea bargaining is the key to jail. There is no record of how these plea bargains, these conversations, operate. This is called Negotiated Justice; justice becomes a commodity to be traded, sold, exchanged, like a used car, put up at a Sunday flea market.

The Public Prosecutor's Office owns the warehouse where information and sentences are bargained for—in another legal name for it, plea bargaining—which we've become accustomed to seeing in American films and which has become the worst judicial experience in the Western world. Why? Because our Brave American Boys are leaders in prisons, and yet crime hasn't decreased there.

It seems like a nightmare. It's not. To my friends, I honestly say that democracy has suffered the hardest blow in the last thirty years, or even more. A democracy that will dawn much smaller, will dawn almost dead, looking at us with its remaining eye, begging for help. Help.

The situation, unfortunately, is very serious.

Roberto Tardelli is a Partner Lawyer at the law firm Tardelli, Giacon e Conway. Retired Public Prosecutor for the MPSP (São Paulo State Public Prosecutor's Office).