Memory And Truth Effects: Brazil’s Corruption In Numbers In The Brazilian Parliament

In this essay, we present results of the research study that aims at analyzing the truth effects produced by the numbers of parliamentarians of each political party who are accused of having committed unlawful and fraudulent practices or violation of the legal norms during the period of redemocratization of Brazilian society. The analytical archive comprised copies of texts from databases available on the worldwide web, which present information from courts available on the Internet. The first database is part of the Ranking of Politicians project. The second database is the VigieAqui (meaning Monitor Here in Portuguese), a tool launched by the Instituto Reclame Aqui (meaning Complain Here Institute in Portuguese), which spotlights the names of politicians with pending judicial inquiries of proceedings, and lists exactly what these inquiries or proceeding relate to. In the analysis of the discursive corpus we draw upon concepts from Discourse Analysis, from writings by Michel Foucault and from the field of Memory Studies. The results indicated that, within the memory domain of political corruption in Brazil, there is a regularity of corruption practices in 92% of political parties acting at the level of the Federal Chamber of Deputies and in 79% of political parties acting at the level of the Federal Senate.