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Brazil’s Jaw-Dropping Corruption Scandal Comes to Netflix

With “The Mechanism,” the Brazilian director and screenwriter José Padilha explores the sweeping corruption and kickback scheme that has engulfed Brazil.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

Billions of dollars looted from the public coffers. Scores of powerful politicians and wealthy businessmen ratting on each other in hopes of avoiding long prison terms. A small but valiant team of prosecutors and investigators trying to bring the white-collar crooks to justice.

Brazil’s ongoing scandal, known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, is as perversely spectacular as the most extravagantly imagined crime novel or Machiavellian episode of “House of Cards.” So it was perhaps inevitable that it would be turned into a Netflix series — by the same director who made “Narcos” for the streaming service, no less.

The result is “The Mechanism,” whose eight episodes will be available beginning March 23. Like most of his 200 million countrymen, the Brazilian director and screenwriter José Padilha has been transfixed as the scandal has metastasized from a simple investigation of money-laundering at a gas station in the capital of Brasília into a national crisis that threatens the foundations of the world’s fourth-largest democracy.

“The mechanism” is Mr. Padilha’s term for a sweeping corruption and kickback scheme that, he argues, seized control of democracy in Brazil almost from its return in 1985, after a 21-year military dictatorship. He and millions of other Brazilians believe that politicians, bankers, businessmen and judges have conspired to steal vast sums from the state, regardless of who is in office.

“The fact that the mechanism has no ideology is fundamental,” Mr. Padilha said. “My thesis is that the mechanism operates in all elections at all levels of government in Brazil, everywhere. Companies that are big clients of the government, usually construction companies but also big commercial banks, finance them all, either legally or through secret slush funds.”

In return, whoever is in power “hires those companies to perform services, and the companies inflate the contracts heavily, with kickbacks either to individual politicians or their parties.”

Virtually all of the 20-odd parties with seats in the Brazilian Congress have been stained by the scandal, soon to begin its fifth year. One president has been impeached; her predecessor has been convicted of corruption and money laundering; and her successor is being investigated by the real-life equivalents of the prosecutors and police officers that Mr. Padilha portrays.

“Brazil is very interesting as a case study, in the sense that the corruption is not in the politics,” he said. “The corruption is the politics.”

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“The Mechanism” dramatizes Brazil’s Operation Car Wash, which has metastasized from a simple investigation of money laundering at a gas station into a national crisis that threatens the foundations of the world’s fourth-largest democracy.Credit...Karima Shehata/Netflix

The creators and cast of “The Mechanism” went into the series knowing that they were taking on a weighty and controversial topic. Supporters of the nominally left-wing Workers Party, which was in power from 2003 to 2016 and was the main focus of early phases of the investigations, vociferously maintain that their leader, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (and the one convicted of corruption and money laundering), is the object of a witch hunt. Some even allege that the judge overseeing the Car Wash investigations is a C.I.A. plant.

“I’m from the generation born during the dictatorship, when all of civil society was united in opposition to the military, so I’ve never experienced anything like this,” said Elena Soarez, who wrote the script of “The Mechanism” with Mr. Padilha. “The country has been riven, with families divided and lifelong friends quarreling, and that makes this a special challenge to write.”

Rather than focus on politicians and business magnates, the series revolves around three fictionalized characters: a well-connected and morally warped money launderer and two tenacious police investigators, an older man and a younger woman. Though the intricacies of the Brazilian legal and political system may not be familiar to foreign viewers, the series’ political thriller format — cast and creators referenced works like “All the President’s Men,” “Scandal” and “Three Days of the Condor” — certainly will be, as will be the idiosyncrasies of the main characters.

“I’ve always enjoyed watching noir detectives, and now I finally get to play one, a guy who is fighting against his external and internal demons,” said Selton Mello, cast as the investigator Marco Ruffo. “Ruffo is an obsessive in a search for justice, an almost solitary figure amid the machinery of corruption, a kind of Quixote with a lot of personal dramas.”

Throughout his international career, which began in 2002 with “Bus 174,” a documentary which used a bus hijacking to examine how Brazil’s criminal justice system treats the poor, Mr. Padilha has focused on the related issues of crime, justice and violence. scrutinizing both those who mete it out and those who are on the receiving end. Regardless of where, what language or in what medium he has worked, whether in a pair of “Elite Squad” movies about SWAT-like teams in Rio, his 2014 remake of “RoboCop,” or in “Narcos,” the police have always been central to the stories he tells.

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Mr. Padilha’s films, including the remake of “RoboCop,” have focused on the related issues of crime, justice and violence.Credit...Kerry Hayes/Columbia Pictures

“For the state to sustain itself, there must be some repressive force that it manages and controls,” he explained. “So the police are not a detail, they are an essential feature of any complex society. They offer a glimpse into all kinds of social systems, because they are very, very much on the edge, the fringe of society, where institutions meet.”

In “7 Days in Entebbe,” a new feature film that opened March 16, Mr. Padilha offers a variation on some themes he first raised in “Bus 174,” this time with a hijacked airplane instead of a bus. In the new film he shows not only the workings of the Israeli army and political establishment, but also the motivations of the terrorists who in 1976 seized an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris with 248 passengers aboard, nearly half of them Israelis or Jews of other nationalities, and had it flown to Idi Amin’s Uganda.

The Entebbe crisis ended violently, with soldiers of the Israel Defense Force storming an airport terminal and rescuing more than 100 of the hostages: All of the German and Palestinian terrorists were killed, as well as the leader of the Israeli commandos (the older brother of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu), four of the hostages and 45 Ugandan soldiers. Though the Entebbe raid is often described as one of the most spectacular military missions of modern times, Mr. Padilha sees it as an ultimately Pyrrhic victory.

“As soon as the operation succeeded,” he said, “it played into the hands of people who thought that everything can be solved by violence,” which in turn contributed to the persistence of conflict in the Middle East.

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In his new film, “7 Days in Entebbe,” which stars Rosamund Pike, Mr. Padilha shows not only the workings of the Israeli army and political establishment but also the motivations of the terrorists who in 1976 hijacked an Air France flight with 248 passengers aboard.Credit...Liam Daniel/Focus Features

“The Mechanism” tells a much less familiar story, but Mr. Padilha and his collaborators are convinced that the series, which contains an optional voice-over in English and minimal violence, will travel well. As if to prove his point, during an interview in the lounge of a New York hotel last month, an American guest who had been eavesdropping and was fascinated by what she was hearing interrupted the conversation to ask Mr. Padilha the name of his series and when she would be able to watch it. “I can’t wait to see it,” she told him.

“Corruption is a universal theme, and that is going to generate empathy everywhere,” said Caroline Abras, who plays the police investigator Verena Cardoni. “People the world over, in all of the countries this is going to be seen, will understand what is going on.”

Of course, since Mr. Padilha wrapped the first eight episodes of “The Mechanism,” the Car Wash scandal has taken even more unexpected turns, which he recognizes would be ideal fodder for future seasons. The generalized disgust with the political class, for instance, already seems to be having an effect on a presidential election scheduled for October. Possible candidates include a former army parachutist famous for his stridently alt-right views and the host of a weekend TV variety show who has never held public office but has 13 million Twitter followers.

“Nobody knows how this is going to turn out,” Mr. Padilha said. “Brazil is at a crossroads, and everything is up for grabs. It’s a crazy situation, but it’s my role as a political filmmaker to tackle these issues.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Straight Out of Brazil, and Scandalous. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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