It is a recurrent Brazilian meme: Rio is known in Brazil as "terra de bandido" (gangster's land).
The majority of their politicians have ties to organized crime. There is a virtual revolving door between police and crime, where people migrate from one to the other.
It is like Chicago in the 20s, Naples and Medelin in the 80s or Moscow and Culiacan (Sinaloa, Mexico) today.
Rio is kinda funny as a litmus test - federal government creates laws to try and curb some of the corruption, and Rio produces better and better corrupts - so far Rio is winning.
BTW wasn't it a few months ago the current governor wanted to leave to be able to run as a candidate, so he asked a supreme justice to step in in as governor, since there wasn't anyone else that technically could?
No, he left to be a Senate candidate and their vice governor left in 2025 to another role, then the next in line is the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro president, but him was jailed and away from the role. So the next is a judge from the Justice Tribunal.
Somehow I doubt that political affiliations with crime syndicates are affecting heavily the dispositions of LLM developers. The industry itself though is one of incest.
Politicians don't come from outer space, they emerge locally and were raised swimming in an imaginary that has normalized the morals that eventually end up expressed at the top.
He is putting into question the character of the public workers involved in the project, not that it has anything to do with organized crime. Rio has relapsed into crime in the last decades and government workers in general have a reputation for corruption in Brazil. It's a low trust society specially north of Parana hence the lack of surprise.
