After having sent nearly 280 people to jail and having retrieved some US$800 million to state coffers, Brazilian prosecutors dismantled last week the so-called Car Wash Task Force that handled the largest anti-corruption probe in the history of the country.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro warned last week that because of a lack of trust in the electoral system – which he has repeatedly claimed is vulnerable to fraud – his country could experience a political crisis similar to the one in the United States.

Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, has been named the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s 2020 Person of the Year for his role in promoting organized crime and corruption.

In two massive operations that spanned three continents, authorities in North America, Europe and Brazil cracked down on transnational organized crime groups and drug traffickers, arresting nearly 750 suspects.  

The U.K.Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said it has secured nearly £1.2 million (US$1.58 million) last week from the Brazilian owner of a luxury apartment in West London, which is believed to have been purchased with money stemming from Latin America’s biggest corruption scandal, Brazil’sOperation Car Wash.

Acting on request of the government of Brazil, U.S. authorities seized virtual currency worth an estimated US$24 million which Brazilian authorities claim are proceeds of a fraudulent scheme, theJustice Department announced Wednesday.

Brazilian prosecutors again targeted the family of the country’s PresidentJair Bolsonaro, charging on Monday his son Flávio with embezzlement, money laundering and heading a criminal organization, localO Globo newspaper reported.

Angelica Andrade will never forget January 25, 2019, the day her sister died.

A member of a rescue team walks next to a collapsed tailings dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale in Brumadinho, Brazil, Feb. 13, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Washington Alves)

As part of a COVID-19-related corruption probe, the federal police raided the residence on Tuesday of the governor of Rio de Janeiro, who has been a vocal critic of the way Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been handling the coronavirus crisis. 

Brazil’s state of Rio de Janeiro has widened a “volunteer work programme” for which inmates receive reduced sentences and which human rights groups claim is illegal, the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported last week.

Authorities in Mexico have reportedly arrested a former public official accused of embezzling more than US$1 million from the country’s corruption-riddled state-owned oil company.

As the coronavirus is keeping the world locked down, some governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to crack down on press freedom and access to information. 

With Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro claiming that COVID-19 is just a “little flu” and refusing to impose stronger measures to fight the pandemic, some criminal gangs have started imposing their own “coronavirus curfew” in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.

Hundreds of prisoners have escaped from four open prisons in south-east Brazil after they were told they will no longer be able to leave the facility and nobody can visit them due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Secretariat of Public Security of Sao Paulo announced on Tuesday.

A Brazilian lawmaker proposed on Tuesday a bill suggesting that politicians convicted of corruption should be punished with amputation of both hands,Reuters reported.

Experts have warned that Brazil’s decision to remove checks on timber exports will drastically exacerbate illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

A Brazilian court has sent a former shipbuilding firm consultant to jail for 19 years after judges found him guilty of bribing officials of the state-controlled oil company Petrobras in order to obtain construction contracts. 

Brazil’s State Prosecution Office has filed a criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, journalist and co-founder of the Intercept on Tuesday, accusing him of having illegally obtained a series of online chats between prosecutors and the judge who was overseeing Brazil’s biggest corruption case, Operation Car Wash.  

When officers entered on Sunday morning one of the prison blocks in Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay, they found it completely empty apart from one inmate trying to disappear through a tunnel that was dug from one of the cells to the outside of the prison walls.

Brazil's President signed on Wednesday a new anti-crime bill which introduces harsher punishments for corruption, gang violence and organized crime.