Brazil's Rousseff Says Netflix TV Show on Graft Scandal 'Distorts Reality'

Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has criticized The Mechanism, a Netflix television series depicting the country's infamous Car Wash investigations. Rousseff claims the series, which premiered last week, is “distorting reality” and dissimenating lies about her, as well as her predecessor, Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da Silva.

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“The country is still alive, despite the illusionists, the vendors of hate and coup-mongers on duty,” Rousseff wrote in a statement on her official website. “Now, the 2016 pro-coup narrative gets fresh new colors, a distorted version of history with typical shades of the country's latent fascism.”

“The Netflix series, 'The Mechanism,' is deceptive and disingenuous. The director (Jose Padilha) invents facts. He doesn't reproduce fake news. He, himself, has become the creater of fake news.”

Rousseff noted that the series reproduces the same false narratives propagated by “Brazilian (mainstream) media in order to assassinate reputations.”

The former leftist president also said the series falsely uses the character representing Lula to say “stem the bleeding.” The phrase, a reference meaning to halt the Operation Car Wash corruption investigations, was, in fact, by former Planning Minister Romero Juca, who is the president of President Michel Temer's Brazilian Democratic Movement party. 

Secretly recorded while under threat of being investigated for corruption, Juca told Sergio Machado, the former president of Transpetro, that a “change” in the federal government (led by Rousseff before her impeachment in 2016) would result in a pact that would “stem the bleeding.”

Dilma was impeached in a highly disputed senate vote charged with misogynystic ferver. Some have called it a “soft coup,” which saw the rise of senate-imposed President Temer and his administration, many of whom have been implicated in the Car Wash corruption investigations.

Promoted as being a series “loosely inspired by true events,” the eight-part TV program portrays events involving the Car Wash investigations, one of the largest corruption scandals in Brazil's history, which has seen dozens of high-ranking business tycoons and politicians jailed, according to the BBC.

Padilha is also director of the award-winning “Elite Squad” and “Elite Squad 2.”