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Brazilian graft scandal claims first victim

"The political situation is so delicate that, in the name of governability, it has been deemed preferable to create the image of a president who is absent from decision-making, uninformed."

`O Globo' editorial

Brazil's deepening corruption scandal has claimed its first prominent victim, with the chief of staff to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stepping down following allegations that he knew of and encouraged a multimillion-dollar scheme to buy votes in Congress.

"I am not ashamed of anything that I did," the aide, Jose Dirceu de Oliveira de Silva, said on Thursday evening after his resignation was accepted by the president, whose own political future has been threatened by the crisis.

Dirceu's departure came two days after Roberto Jefferson, leader of a small party allied with da Silva in Brazil's first elected left-wing government, testified at a congressional hearing that operatives of da Silva's governing Workers Party offered some members of Congress up to US$400,000 each to join a pair of other allied parties and then paid monthly stipends of US$12,500 to those who switched.

He further testified that he had advised Dirceu a half dozen times of the vote-buying scheme. But the payoffs ended, Jefferson contended, only after he was able to warn da Silva at meetings in January and March of what was going on.

The resignation allows Dirceu to reoccupy his seat in Congress, where he is expected to play an important role in efforts by the Workers Party to weaken a parliamentary inquiry, expected to drag on for months, into Jefferson's corruption allegations.

Despite the sacrifice of the man he calls "the captain of my team" and others called "the Rasputin of Brasilia," da Silva, who took office in January 2003 promising a new era of "ethics and morality" in government, remains under attack. Among the issues that have been raised is what da Silva knew and when he knew it. Though Jefferson was careful to portray the president as having been kept out of the loop by unscrupulous aides and acting promptly once he knew of wrongdoing, a state governor, Marconi Perillo of Goias state, a member of the main opposition party, has said that he informed da Silva of the vote-buying scheme in May last year.

"The political situation is so delicate that, in the name of governability, it has been deemed preferable to create the image of a president who is absent from decision-making, uninformed" and "surrounded by wrongdoers," the columnist Merval Pereira wrote in the daily O Globo. But the weakness of that argument, Pereira also noted, is "Dirceu's declaration that he doesn't do anything without Lula knowing about it."

Da Silva has promised to root out corruption in his government, but in his letter accepting Dirceu's resignation he praised his aide's "loyalty, dedication, competence and honesty," and urged him to fight "to undo the unfounded accusations launched by those who want to dismantle our history and our project for social change."

Yet, even with the crisis worsening, leaders of opposition parties who had been speculating earlier in the week about the impeachment of da Silva have pulled back.

"We're in opposition, but we can't destroy," da Silva's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, warned in a speech on Thursday. "We don't want everything to go up in flames, because that doesn't help. It doesn't help anybody."
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