New Laws, Old Habits: Intelligence Reform Failure in Brazil

Abstract

Third-wave democracies have adopted the standard toolkit of intelligence reform—new legal frameworks, meritocratic recruitment, and parliamentary oversight—yet domestic surveillance and political instrumentalization persist. We advance an underexplored variable to explain this gap: professionalization without credible deterrence, which transforms technical capacity into a low-cost resource for misconduct, regardless of personnel cohort. We examine the argument through the Brazilian case, combining documentary analysis of the parliamentary oversight committee (CCAI, 2007–2025) with process tracing of the Parallel ABIN scandal. Of the 53 civil servants implicated, 48 were recruited after re-democratization through competitive examinations—ruling out authoritarian-legacy explanations as sufficient, and showing how formally reformed institutions socialize new cohorts into anachronistic practices when accountability cannot impose costs. The findings carry implications for intelligence reform trajectories across third-wave democracies, particularly in Latin America and Eastern Europe.