Yesterday, just four months before the start of the 2016 Olympics, Brazil's sports minister resigned.
Hours later, it was reported that the commander of a Brazilian security force involved in preparations for the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro stepped down amid scandal.
The day before that, Brazil’s Minister of Tourism resigned.
Taken together this might raise concerns for the status of the Olympic games.

However, these resignations were hardly even noticed due to a political scandal that will likely soon see the impeachment of President Rousseff, as well as the criminal prosecutions of the former president, the current vice president, the Senate president, the House president, and over half of Brazil's Congress.

Brazil is currently experiencing one of the worst political crisis in it's history, while at the same time it is being hit by it's worst economic crisis in modern history, and it appears that both crisis are about to peak with the start of the largest sports spectacle in the world.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how the political and economic chaos could jeopardize the Olympic games.

And it's all because of a money exchange at a suburban Posto da Torre (Tower Gas Station) in Brazilia.

In 2008, a businessman named Hermes Magnus approached the police and told them that a criminal gang was attempting to launder money through his company (Dunel Indústria e Comércio), a manufacturer of electronic components. The police investigated, but instead of finding a criminal gang, they found four criminal gangs.
From there the investigation led to Brazil’s national oil company, Petróleo Brasileiro, one of Latin America’s largest companies.

The Workers’ Party (PT) and its coalition partners appointed their own candidates to Petrobras’ most important executive positions. These figures, led by Paulo Roberto Costa, a former director, secretly diverted funds valued at up to 3 per cent of all contracts to the PT and its coalition partners. This amounted to billions of dollars because of the huge investment in the pre-salt and an accompanying refinery programme.
The corrupt directors collaborated with Petrobras’ contractors, including some of Brazil’s largest construction companies, to line their own pockets. Some of the directors accumulated funds of more than $100m in Swiss bank accounts while others put the money into extravagant art collections. They were assisted by a ring of black market money dealers, led by convicted criminal Alberto Youssef, who was in charge of laundering the funds. Investigators suspect the scheme was part of a “project of power” to keep the PT and its allies in government by using funds from Petrobras to pay off the ruling coalition and fund election campaigns.

In April 2015 Petrobras would announce that it would book almost $17 billion in write-downs due to graft and overvalued assets.
Since then the investigation has uncovered bribery in connection with the Olympics.

Police and prosecutors are investigating if the Brazilian building giant Odebrecht paid bribes to secure work on a new subway line, which will connect the city’s beach zone to a station close to the Olympic Park, and the on redevelopment of the city’s port area....“The level of organization revealed by these documents is shocking. It would appear that all major public works were commissioned in this way and every major political party seems to have been involved,” says Sylvio Costa, the founder of the Brasilia-based watchdog Congress in Focus, which reports on corruption.

Last week President Rousseff got caught trying to protect former president Lulu from prosecution.

Earlier in the day, Lula was appointed cabinet chief in a controversial move that Rousseff said would strengthen her government, but which critics argued was an attempt to shield the former president, who is under investigation for corruption and money-laundering, from prosecution.
Under Brazilian law, government ministers can be tried only in the “privileged forum” of the supreme court.

Lulu has been indicted just days before. The move didn't work because the phone conversations were being recorded.

Judge Sergio Moro, the lead prosecutor in Operation Lava-jato, a two-year investigation into corruption at the state-run oil company, Petrobras, released nearly 50 audio recordings to the media on Wednesday evening, prompting chaotic scenes in congress as opposition deputies demanded Rousseff’s resignation.
In the most damaging conversation, recorded on Wednesday afternoon, Rousseff tells Lula that she is sending him over his ministerial papers “in case of necessity”.

This caused the governing political coalition to essentially collapse.
Literally millions of Brazilians have turned out to protest this corrupt government.

At this point its hard to say where the scandal might end. It's also hard to comprehend just how far it has already come.

Since then, investigators have uncovered R$6.2bn in bribes paid and total losses to the state estimated at between R$29bn and R$42bn. They have charged 179 people with criminal offences and secured 93 convictions. Added together, the sentences equal nearly 1,000 years in jail.

The political crisis alone is enough, but the economic crisis is a doozy as well.

The latest numbers coming out of Brazil confirm what Goldman Sachs said last December: “What started as a recession ... is now mutating into an outright economic depression, given the deep contraction of domestic demand.”
In Rio de Janeiro alone, 1,200 small businesses have already closed thanks to rising costs and slowing sales. Unemployment is now at 16.5 percent and the real, Brazil’s currency, has lost a quarter of its value against the dollar just in the last 12 months...
In the last nine years, debt has tripled not only for the government but for consumers and private companies as well. The government’s deficits are now so large that it is being forced to borrow just to make the interest payments. This is reflected by the junk rating given to the country’s sovereign debt by agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and Fitch.

Brazil's economy shrank 3.8% last year and is expected to shrink another 3.5% this year.
Inflation is threatening to get out of control and the currency is unstable.

To put it simply, Brazil is positioned to be hit by a perfect storm of both a political and an economic crisis just as the eyes of the world are turning toward it.
The action outside of the sports arenas might be a lot more interesting than the games inside the arenas.