When Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff traveled to Cuba in 2012 to announce the biggest foreign investment in the island since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, a man in his mid-forties stood discreetly at her side. Marcelo Odebrecht, the head of Odebrecht­—the biggest construction company in Latin America, which was founded by his grandfather—had scored an almost $1 billion contract financed by a Brazilian public bank to modernize the Port of Mariel. In explaining the initiative after flying from Havana to Haiti with Rousseff, where his firm was also expanding investments, he summarized: “We act in alignment with Brazilian foreign policy.”

Fast-forward to January 2016. Odebrecht has been behind bars since June, accused of paying fortunes in kickbacks to politicians in exchange for contracts with Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras. A number of his competitors and associates were also arrested because of their connection to the scandal.

For her part, Rousseff is fighting an impeachment process indirectly linked to the Petrobras scandal, and an ever-increasing number of her allies (including Vice President Michel Temer) are either siding with the opposition or are in jail. The speaker of the congress, who gave up a fragile alliance with the government to push for Rousseff’s impeachment, is fighting to avoid prison after prosecutors found two accounts under his name in Switzerland that had been allegedly fed with oil money. Likewise, the former leader of the government in the Senate was jailed for trying to block investigations. Meanwhile, the Brazilian economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2015 and is expected to contract at least 2.5 percent in 2016, performing worse than Russia under Western sanctions.

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Roberto Simon was a Brazil Institute Public Policy Fellow in 2015 and is currently at the Harvard Kennedy School finishing an upcoming book on the role of Brazil's military government in the Pinochet-led coup in Chile on September 11, 1973