With no one eager to talk about the revelations, the question is what will ex-president Lula do about it

Two decades after a political earthquake, a powerful aftershock that should be rocking Brazil apart is being met with thunderous silence.  

What is now termed “the Banestado leaks” and “CC5gate” is straight out of vintage WikiLeaks: a list, published for the first time in full, naming names and detailing one of the biggest corruption and money laundering cases in the world in the past three decades.   

This scandal allows for the healthy practice of what Michel Foucault characterized as the archeology of knowledge. Without understanding these leaks, it’s impossible to place in proper context events ranging from the sophisticated assault by Washington on Brazil – initially via NSA spying on President Dilma Roussef’s first term (2010-2014) – all the way to the “|Car Wash” corruption investigation that jailed Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and opened the way for the election of neofascist patsy Jair Bolsonaro as president. 

Credit for the scoop on this George Orwell-does-hybrid-war plotline is due, once again, to independent media. The small website Duplo Expresso, led by young, daring, Bern-based international lawyer Romulus Maya, first published the list.    

An epic five-hour podcast assembled the three key protagonists who denounced the scandal in the first place, back in the late 1990s, and now are able to re-analyze it: then-governor of Parana state Roberto Requiao, federal prosecutor Celso Tres and now retired police superintendent Jose Castilho Neto.

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