It is the corruption probe that has left politicians around the world looking over their shoulders.
Prosecutors in a dozen countries are untangling a massive web of corruption that ran across a continent and further afield.
Illegal payments may have sloshed through presidential campaigns, boosted the careers of political top brass in country after country, and oiled the wheels of worldwide construction projects including motorways, gas pipelines and hydroelectric dams.
If you have never heard of a company called Odebrecht, you probably do not live in Latin America.
It is a Brazilian construction giant behind venues for the 2016 Olympics, infrastructure for the 2014 World Cup and the metro system in Caracas, plus dams and airport terminals further afield.
But anti-corruption investigators caught up with the company, and it admitted paying bribes in more than half of the countries in Latin America, as well as in Angola and Mozambique in Africa.
How high up did bribery go?
Odebrecht played a game of quid pro quo: I will help you pay for your election campaign if you make sure I get that building contract.
In country after country, it is alleged that Odebrecht employees made connections with those in power and those who looked like they would be getting into power soon. They did not restrict themselves to those of any particular political hue.
Further north, Colombia has already charged a former vice-minister for transport and a former senator. The man who ran the election campaign of the current president, Juan Manuel Santos, has alleged it was financed with irregular Odebrecht payments. Mr Santos, who is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said he did not authorise any payments or know about them.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionColombia's President Santos, left, who negotiated a peace deal ending 60 years of conflict with Farc rebels, has denied authorising Odebrecht to pay for his presidential campaign
Next door in Venezuela, former chief prosecutor Luisa Ortega has fled the country after being sacked. She alleges that President Nicolás Maduro is implicated and that a top court is blocking an investigation. Odebrecht has denied her other allegation - that they paid $100m (£76.5m) to the socialist party's vice-president, Diosdado Cabello. Venezuela has taken unfinished projects away from Odebrecht and blocked the company's bank accounts.
In Peru, two ex-presidents are under investigation. Ollanta Humala and his wife Nadine Heredia have been put in pre-trial detention for 18 months while charges are prepared against them for allegedly receiving payments to fund his presidential campaigns in 2006 and 2011.
Former President Alejandro Toledo, accused of taking $20m in bribes, is thought to be living in the US and the Peruvian government has put up a $30,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
Staying with Peru, opposition leader Keiko Fujimori has come under preliminary investigation. The attorney general says a note found on Marcelo Odebrecht's mobile phone implicates her. She denied receiving money from the company.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionKeiko Fujimori, who ran for president last year in Peru, denies accusations she took Odebrecht bribery
In neighbouring Ecuador, a judge has banned Vice-President Jorge Glas from leaving the country, due to suspicions he took bribes. Mr Glas - who has also been stripped of his functions - denies corruption.
Panama has charged 17 people including government officials, and charged Odebrecht $59m in compensation. A lawyer from Mossack Fonseca - the firm at the centre of the Panama Papers leak - accused President Juan Carlos Varela of receiving Odebrecht donations. Mr Varela denies all wrongdoing.
Antigua and Barbuda's Prime Minister Gaston Browne has adamantly denied an allegation he accepted payment to stay quiet about Odebrecht's banking activities in the Caribbean nation.
Mexico has summoned a former director of state oil company Pemex and other employees to give evidence over alleged Odebrecht bribes, while the Dominican Republic has asked Odebrecht for $184m compensation over the next eight years.
Chile has started an investigation and seized documents from the company's offices, while Guatemala's investigation is supported by a UN anti-corruption commission. Argentina and Brazil are co-operating but prosecutors have said their governments are "presenting obstacles".
And Brazilian newspaper O Globo reports (in Portuguese) that 29 countries, including Sweden, the US, France and the UK have asked Brazil for help with their own Odebrecht investigations.
Who is serving jail time?
The biggest scalp so far is former CEO Marcelo Odebrecht. He started a 19-year jail term last year after being convicted of paying more than $30m (£21m) in bribes to officials in Brazil's state oil company in exchange for contracts and influence.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionBrazil's Supreme Court released a video last year showing Marcelo Odebrecht testifying
More than 70 other Odebrecht executives were jailed but have agreed to plea deals, that is they agreed to provide information in exchange for more lenient sentences. Some are already out of jail and serving their sentences at home.
How they did it: The bribery department
The epicentre of the operation had a much more run-of-the-mill name, the Division of Structured Operations, but it was essentially the bribery department. Employees spent their time bribing government officials and political parties at home and abroad, to win business.
The company has admitted this to US, Brazilian and Swiss prosecutors. Money went through as many as four bank accounts in countries with good banking secrecy laws before getting to a recipient, usually an intermediary to someone with political power.
When the department's employees wanted to communicate, they used a system unconnected to the main computer systems, to avoid detection.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage caption"Dracula" was the nickname given to Senator Humberto Costa
And they gave their recipients flippant codenames: Dracula, Sauerkraut, Decrepit, Totally Ugly. One politician, whose wife was 40 years younger than him, got the codename Viagra.
What effect has the scandal had?
Protesters have hit the streets over the Odebrecht case in country after country, and the chain of events has brought corruption to the top of news agendas and prosecutors' agendas.
They are "clamouring for justice", political analyst Geovanny Vicente Romero told the BBC.
"Protesters are demanding people be held responsible for the negligence and corruption that are part and parcel of the historic inequalities in many of the region's countries," he said.
"Overall, people hope that the Odebrecht case will set a precedent so that these situations can be avoided in the future."
Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionThis protester in the Dominican Republic held a sign calling for corrupt people to go to jail
What has happened to Odebrecht since?
Before the scandal, Odebrecht had more than 180,000 employees in 21 countries and revenues of more than $40bn.
By 2016 revenues had dropped to $26bn and staffing numbers had dropped to less than 80,000.
The value of Odebrecht bonds was sliced. The downturn in construction that went alongside this contributed to a downturn in the Brazilian economy and the credit ratings agency Standard and Poor's cut the company to the lowest grading. It has recovered somewhat but is still far from excellent.
The investigations have even contributed to economic downturn in Brazil, and Peru shaved almost a point off its growth forecasts for 2017, which the government blamed on "the Odebrecht effect".
The company's latest annual report is full of commitments to grow back more ethically - literally, it uses water and seeds and fertilisation as metaphors.
And there have been two CEOs since Marcelo Odebrecht was jailed but tellingly, neither has had the surname Odebrecht.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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