Corruption in Brazil exists on all levels of society from the top echelons of political power to the smallest municipalities. Operation Car Wash showed central government members using the prerogatives of their public office for rent-seeking activities, ranging from political support to siphoning funds from state-owned corporation for personal gain. The Mensalão scandal for example used taxpayer funds to pay monthly allowances to members of congress from other political parties in return for their support and votes in congress. Politicians also used the state-owned and state-run oil company Petrobras to raise hundreds of millions of reais for political campaigns and personal enrichment.
Corruption was cited among many issues that provoked the 2013 protests.What's REALLY behind the Brazilian riots? CNN June 14, 2013 Corruption directly affects the welfare of citizens by decreasing public investments in health, education, infrastructure, security, housing, among other rights essential to life, and hurts the Constitution by expanding social exclusion and economic inequality.
Studies by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) from 2009 estimate that the Brazilian economy loses from corruption, every year, from one to four percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the equivalent of one value over 30 billion reais. The following year, a study by the Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Fiesp) found that the annual cost of corruption in the country is 1.38 percent to 2.3 percent of the GDP. In 2013, a study by the Industry National Confederation showed that each real misappropriated by corruption represents a damage to the economy and society of three reais.
According to the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International, in 2025, Brazil was placed in 107 out of 182 countries.
The "Brazilian way" is seen as a practice of "small corruptions", such as evading taxes, stealing cable TV signals, jumping the queue, simulating or concealing business, among others.
Definition All types of corruption exist. Clientilism, cronyism, and nepotism are widespread in Brazil, and many critics note that members of the Brazilian Supreme Court openly mingle with politicians. Bribery (Portuguese: propina or suborno) is also rife throughout the Brazilian bureaucracy. But one of the most common types of corruption in Brazil is embezzlement of public funds through overbilling, called superfaturamento in Portuguese (literally "super invoicing"). This technique allows individuals to enrich themselves, and also finance political campaigns (as seen in the Petrobras scandal), and is closely linked to public contracts with private enterprises. Construction contracts to build roads, sewage, and public buildings are frequently involved. An estimated 30% of all Brazilian public funds are embezzled this way each year.
Fernando Filgueiras writes: tolerance to corruption is not a deviation of the Brazilian character, a propensity and cult of immorality, not even a situation of cordiality, but a practical disposition born of a culture in which preferences are limited to a context of needs, representing a survival strategy that occurs through the material issue. According to Raymundo Faoro, corruption is a "vice" inherited from the Iberian world, the result of a patrimonialist relationship between government and society.
Measurement The scale of corruption in Brazil is immense, but largely under-reported in the media and historically not investigated, prosecuted or punished, so it is difficult to estimate just how large the problem is. The Car Wash (Lava Jato) investigation may have changed this. Corruption in Brazil increases the already enormous Brazilian shadow economy, which some sources estimate at 16.1% of the gross domestic product, a number that probably needs to be adjusted up considerably if corruption as such is included as part of the shadow economy.
Transparency International's 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index gave Brazil a score of 35 on a scale from 0 ("highly corrupt") to 100 ("very clean"). When ranked by score, Brazil ranked 107th among the 182 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector. For comparison with regional scores, the best score among the countries of the Americas was 75, the average score was 42 and the worst score was 10. For comparison with worldwide scores, the best score was 89 (ranked 1), the average score was 42, and the worst score was 9 (ranked 181, in a two-way tie).
Political corruption
Political corruption is widespread in Brazil. A series of sources documenting historical corruption have only recently started to be published, some of them with references up to Colonial times. A unique complex network analysis revealed associations between those involved in corruption scandals included not only active (elected and non-elected) politicians, but also both state-owned and private companies favored in bidding processes for large infrastructure construction projects. Some of these were cited both in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. The complexity of such corruption networks has been compared to mafia, drug traffic networks and terrorist networks.
The practice of —invoice-padding—in Brazil is a common form of corruption in contracts and purchases for public institutions. Recent examples have been reported in small primary schools where products like pencils and notebooks were bought with padded invoices, as well as in grand-scale construction projects, roads, football stadiums, (not least in connection with large-scale events such as the Olympics and FIFA's World Cup). Furthermore, bribes are also common in the police.
Generally, corruption occurs through resources from the public budgets of the union, states, and municipalities destined to health, education, social security and social and infrastructure programs, which are siphoned off to fund election campaigns, corrupt public officials, or even into personal bank accounts abroad. On October 13, 2020, Transparency International pointed to a "progressive deterioration of the institutional anti-corruption framework in the country" and serious setbacks in the fight against corruption in Brazil.
History
Colonial and imperial times (1500-1889)
Nepotism may have arrived in Brazil with the first caravel. A letter written by Pero Vaz de Caminha, asks the king to order "from the island of São Tomé to fetch Jorge de Osório, my son-in-law". To occupy and administer the new territory, a task quite complicated by the geographic distance and precariousness of communications, the Portuguese crown had to offer incentives and relaxed the vigilance of its representatives. This generated an environment so favorable to the practice of corruption, that already in the 17th century, Padre Antônio Vieira denounced it in the Sermon of the Good Thief:
There have been reports of corruption in the highest spheres of power since the beginning of the 19th century. At that time, the following verses ran through the streets of the national capital:
Fourth republic and military era (1946-1985) Kubitschek government In the era before the military dictatorship, a particularly notable example was the city of Brasília itself, which historians believe was systematically overpriced when built in the early 1960s, costing 12.3% of the entire country's GDP.
Military era Little to no evidence of corruption was made public during the military dictatorship era (1964–1985). Recently, however, several cases have become increasingly public knowledge and have been reviewed in books including Elio Gaspari's series of historical analyses and in the news. Cases ranged from smuggling whiskey and luxury clothes to outright extortion of companies by military-appointed governors (e.g., Haroldo Leon Peres in the state of Paraná), who illegally favored their companies in contractor licensing (e.g. Antonio Carlos Magalhães and Magnesita) and used public money to save their own companies from bankruptcy (e.g., Paulo Maluf and his wife Sylvia in the Lutfalla case). British documents pointed out a number of other cases which were suppressed in the 1970s referring to overpriced purchase of UK equipment for construction of ships in Brazil.
Sixth republic (1985-present) Sarney government With the fall of the military dictatorship and the start of the redemocratization process, accusations of endemic corruption in all spheres of government were highlighted and started to receive attention, with then-President José Sarney himself being denounced, although those accusations were not taken forward by the National Congress. In the period between 1987 and 1989 a political crisis, allied to the economic crisis, broke out. Suspicions of overpricing and irregularities in public infrastructure projects were cited, such as the bidding for the North–South Rail. The accusations also said that José Sarney practiced nepotism, that is, he favored friends and acquaintances with concessions on radios and TVs. The dissatisfaction in a wing of the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), the current MDB, led to the founding of the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB). The height of the crisis came during the creation of the new constitution at the National Constituent Assembly, where party members put the duration of his mandate in check, voting for a four-year term for Sarney, despite the five-year thesis prevailing, led by a majority of the caucus PMDB and conservative politicians.
A Parliamentary Investigation Commission (CPI) was started in 1988 to investigate the corruption accusations, and several requests for impeachment were filed, The CPI named the former president as one of those responsible for the scheme, for having released money from funds controlled by the Presidency to municipalities, without criteria. As soon as the funds ran out, Sarney used the so-called contingency reserve with the help of the Minister of Planning, Aníbal Teixeira.
Collor government In the last two decades of the 20th century, particularly after the end of the military regime, notorious cases of corruption gained great prominence in the media, having even resulted in the removal of Fernando Collor de Mello – first president of Latin America to suffer an actual impeachment process.
The first accusations appeared in the second semester of Collor's government. The then-president of Petrobras, Luís Octávio da Motta Veiga, quit, alleging pressure from the former financial secretary of Collor's campaign, Paulo César Farias ("PC Farias"), and the president's brother-in-law, ambassador Marcos Coimbra, to offer loans to the airline company VASP, which had been recently privatized. In 1991 the First Lady Rosane Collor was accused of irregularities at the charity (LBA). In May 1992, Pedro Collor, the president's brother, accused PC Farias of illicit enrichment and being a "goon" for the president in his business in an interview to Veja.
From 1993, the extent of the accusations shook faith in the institutions and future of the country, and sparked the installation of a Parliament Investigation Committee (CPI), which became known as the CPI do Orçamento, presided over by then-senator Jarbas Passarinho and having as rapporteur the governor of Pernambuco at the time, Roberto Magalhães. In 2014, however, former President Collor was exculpated and acquitted by the Supremo Tribunal Federal of allegations of corruption that were brought against him and which had resulted in his impeachment.
Itamar Franco government The new government assumed by Vice President Itamar Franco was initially supported by all political forces in Congress, except the Liberal Front Party (PFL), which also began to suffer allegations of involvement of ministers in corruption. Several of his ministers, including Henrique Hargreaves and Alexandre Costa.
FHC government