"Brazil is probably no more corrupt than other countries of similar size and wealth. It came out better than China and India and a long way ahead of Russia in the latest index of perceptions of corruption compiled by Transparency International, a German NGO. Brazil is blessed with competitive and aggressive media and tenacious institutions that investigate such scandals, revolving around the public-prosecutor’s office, a semi-autonomous part of the federal government and its local equivalents. This scrutiny has a price: the government thinks that another watchdog, the audit tribunal, is holding up spending on infrastructure unnecessarily."
