by Brazil rose two places in the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, according to a Transparency International report released on Tuesday, which accuses former President Jair Bolsonaro of creating “the largest institutionalized system of corruption” ever in the country.
In this year’s edition of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), prepared by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Transparency International, Brazil reached the same 38 points, on a scale of zero to 100, that it received in 2021.
According to this NGO, Jair Bolsonaro’s term (2019-2023) was “marked by the dismantling of anti-corruption structures that took decades to build”.
Transparency International believes that the Bolsonaro government “created the largest institutionalized corruption scheme ever known in Brazil, known as the ‘secret budget'”.
“With this scheme, billions of reals were used to favor political allies, with a serious impact on health, education and infrastructure policies,” he emphasizes.
According to the report, “the combination of corruption, authoritarianism and economic depression“ showed up “particularly unstable’ in the country.
Considered a country to watch in 2023, Transparency International notes that Brazil’s current President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his Workers’ Party “have not yet presented a concrete anti-corruption plan for the future, nor have they defined how they will restore the autonomy of key institutions such as the Attorney General’s Office, the Federal Police and environmental agencies.”
Brazil’s trend over the past five years has translated into an increase of three points, but considering the last 10 years, it has lost five.
The CPI was created by Transparency International in 1995 and has since become a benchmark in the analysis of the phenomenon of corruption, based on the perception of experts and business executives on the levels of corruption in the public sector.
It is a composite index, i.e. it is derived from the combination of corruption analysis sources developed by other independent organizations and ranks 180 countries and territories in scale from zero (perceived as very corrupt) to 100 degrees (very transparent).
In 2012, the organization revised the methodology used to create the index to allow comparison of scores from one year to the next.
