Corruption as a Narrative: presidential wrongdoing and literary journalism in Brazilian New Republic, 1985-2016

The dissertation consists in an analysis of literary journalism books on Brazil’s presidential corruption scandals. The ubiquitous presence of high-profile politician names inside corruption scandals in Brazil’s New Republic (19852016) has altered and complicated the form that Brazilians are constructing their belongingness narratives. Although corruption is not a new vocabule in the Country’s history, the new democratic experience has changed the way that political wrongdoing is being punished. After decades of military regime, Brazilians have faced two impeached presidents, and a ex-president prison, all of them surrounded by corruption scandals. Great part of this narrative construction is derived from mass media, not only expressed by daily news, but also literary journalist books that quickly became best-sellers (Conti, 1999; Figueiredo, 2000; Dória, 2009; Netto, 2016; among others). These books’ narratives, regardless author’s political position, presented the same inner framework of what would be corruption, and how it should be controlled. It is always implied that the punishment of few high-profiles individuals would lead to the expiation of all nation, in model extremely related to René Girard’s concept of Victime Emissaire (2016). Hence, the nation itself would not be corrupt or guilty. This narrative conflicts to the sociological interpretations of Brazilian corruption (Pinto, 2011), in which the political wrongdoing is comprehend as a banalized phenomen occasioned by the Country’s socioeconomic disparities. Thus, the mass media narrative promotes a distorted perception of the corruption problem, and stimulate the quest of punishing high-profile political opponents instead of dealing with the wider social problem