“For decades, we had this clear narrative that in the 1980s, we transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, and made a clean break with that past,” Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas university in São Paulo, told me. “Lava Jato revealed just how imperfect this transition was, that at the heart of our democracy, corrupt practices endemic to authoritarian regimes are still very pervasive—and, now, the tragic irony of it all is we learn that a very small group of activist bureaucratic entrepreneurs [such as Moro and chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol] themselves used features of this dirty system to propel themselves into politics.”

Read: Can Brazil’s democracy withstand Jair Bolsonaro?

The Lava Jato investigation started out of a small office in 2014 in the small city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, and exposed a transnational network of bribes, especially in the energy and infrastructure sectors. Illicit transfers totaled billions of dollars, as large companies routinely paid politicians bribes while procuring government contracts. The investigation made its way to Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. (In the most dramatic result, former Peruvian President Alan Garcia killed himself this year rather than face imprisonment by prosecutors working with Lava Jato.) All of these countries are watching what happens in Brazil.

The leaked messages seemed to have reversed the dynamic between Bolsonaro, a former military officer who was an outspoken supporter of Brazil’s dictatorship as a congressman from Rio de Janeiro, and Moro. The judge, often depicted heroically by national and international media during his meteoric rise, might have been powerful enough to rival the president, but is now a hostage to radical Bolsonarismo, best understood as a violent obsession with destroying the left combined with contempt for democratic institutions. Weakened, he serves at the pleasure of the president, whose own family now appears to be linked to the dirtiest and darkest elements of Brazilian politics, including the violent paramilitary milicias that control much of Rio. Egregious violations apparently committed by Flávio Bolsonaro, one of the president’s three adult sons, have not led to any arrests or serious investigation.

This isn’t the strongest moment for South American institutions. Support for democracy has dropped in recent years, as the end of a commodity boom led to economic slowdown; crime levels remain shockingly high in many countries; and voters watched many of their elected leaders hauled off to jail. In 2018, 71 percent of Latin Americans told the Latinobarómetro polling service they were somehow dissatisfied with democracy—up from 51 percent in 2008. According to the latest Pew “Global Attitudes” survey, only 8 percent of Brazilians say that democracy is a “very good” system—the lowest among the surveyed residents of more than 30 countries. In Argentina, that number was 32 percent; it is 22 percent in Chile, and 9 percent in Mexico.