Nine Little-Known Facts About Brazil’s President Lula
Guest post by Paul Serran (paulserran.substack.com)
Love him or hate him, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is one of the most mature Brazilians of the 20-21st century. As he begins his third presidential mandate, Lula steps back into the world spotlight in a big way.
But what do people actually know about him? In most cases, not much. I’ve gathered here 9 little-known Lula facts that will go a long way to shining a revealing light on the man running the show in Brasilia.
An arbitrary number of facts related to Lula’s nine fingers – she lost the pinkie on her left hand in what was described as a work-related accident.
1 ‘child birth’: While Lula is now leading very The leftist administration, the fact remains, is that, left to its own devices, he is – and never was – an ideological leader. He was even called as a labor leader ‘birth’ (of a sheepskin or a doormat) by the far-left group.
Lula could be more adequately positioned KleptocracyHe took his family from abject poverty to the pinnacle of political and economic power within a generation.
2 Jailers guilty of attempted rape?: His recent stint in prison was not his first: Silva was arrested in the 1980s during the years of the military dictatorship. While the brief 30-day incarceration helped him win a lot of ‘street cred’ with the Left, it also left a grim story: ‘son of an MEP’ – A story about how Lula tried to rape a fellow inmate in prison.
This, or course, was denied by Lula – but not by Lula’s enemy, but by the journalist and professor Cesar Benjamin, one of the founders of Lula’s own Workers’ Party (PT). Benjamin wrote the following in 2009 in the mainstream, pro-Lula newspaper Foha de São Paulo – he was describing a meeting that took place in 1994.
“Lula – you were a prisoner, weren’t you?
Benjamin – I was.
Lula – What time?
Benjamin – A few years.
Lula – I couldn’t take it. I can’t live without pussy.
To prove this claim, [Lula] He eloquently describes how he tried [sexually] Another prisoner was detained within 30 days. (…) He was surprised by the resistance of ‘the boy’, who deflected the attack with elbows and punches.
3 losing three times: Lula lost 3 presidential campaigns: 89, 94, and 98 When it came time for the 2002 campaign, he gave the PT an ultimatum: he would do it again if they let him do it. his way.
He published a (relatively) moderate program of government and the fourth time proved to be the charm. A political marketer has rebranded him as ‘Lulinha Paz y Amar’ (Little Lula Peace and Love) and the veteran politician has exchanged his previous scathing scorn for constant comical behavior.
4 allegedly Forcing a girlfriend to have an abortion: During his first presidential defeat, in 89, one of his lovers, Miriam Cordeiro, went public and accused Lula of forcing her to have an abortion. The revelation came as a bombshell and derailed any chances he had in that election. What Mary also said, which many do not remember, That Lula was a racist.
While Ms. Cordero’s presence was a dirty political trick by Lula’s enemies, it was also a true story, another data point that explains why her administration would continue to push for abortion despite her constant denials during the campaign.
5 The Assassination of Celso Daniel: Before Lula took office in his first mandate, in 2003, he had to lose his right-hand man and elected economy minister, Celso Daniel.
Daniel was kidnapped, tortured and later shot dead on a country road. It turns out that Daniel Lula is known to have blown the whistle on corruption in the PT party.
Although the investigation – controlled by the PT – never focused on Lula, some members of Daniel’s family were consistently vocal in saying that his team had committed a cover-up in the investigation and that a convicted trafficker had officially accused Lula of ordering the hit, state witness Marcos Valerio.
6 A famous drunk: Lula has always been a notorious drunkard and at one time was operating at the same level of libations as Boris Yeltsin. Although it was common knowledge in Brazil, Lula wanted to control the spread of this information, and at one point he wanted to fire Larry Rohter of the New York Times for reporting on it.
7 Monthly Payola: Fed up with his party’s weak congressional rhetoric leading to defeat in key parliamentary votes and plagued by constant demands by deputies and senators for positions in government for their acolytes, Lula decided to bribe his entire support base with a fixed amount of money each month. Ensure smooth voting in Congress.
This scam is called ‘Mensalo’. The congressional inquiry captured the nation’s imagination, and while Lula was able to survive politically, it began the steady decline of Lula and the PT Party that would culminate in his imprisonment in Operation Lava-Jato in 2017.
8 His Love for Communist Criminals:
In 1998, Lula worked to free Chilean MIR communist militants, arrested for the kidnapping of businessman Abilio Diniz.
Father Francisco Antonio Cadena Collazos, aka “Priest Camilo”, a drug-trafficking FARC representative in Brazil, was arrested in August 2005. Collazos was wanted in Colombia for various crimes including kidnapping and terrorist attacks that nearly killed one person. Hundreds of Colombians sought the criminal’s extradition, but Lula granted him political asylum.
Italian left-wing terrorist Cesare Battisti had been living in Brazil for more than a decade. He became the target of a lengthy extradition process after being convicted in Italy of four murders committed in the late 70s. Arrested in Brazil in 2007, Batista was granted political refugee status. In December 2010, in his last act as president, Lula guaranteed the permanence of Italians in Brazil, saying it was a “question of national sovereignty”.
9 The Triplex: Operation Lava-Jato began as an investigation into money-laundering criminals through a chain of car washes, but federal police and prosecutors managed to pull a thread that led straight to the heart of Brazil’s political machine and uncovered a massive international bribery scheme run by it. Brazilian giant building contractor.
To give an idea of the scale of the corruption involved, Brazil’s Odebrecht and Braskem ‘pleaded guilty and agreed to pay at least $3.5 billion in global fines to resolve the largest foreign bribery case in history’.
In 2017, Lula was sentenced to nine years and six months in prison in a proceeding related to the purchase and renovation of a triplex in São Paulo by contractor OAS in exchange for favors for Brazilian oil giant Petrobras.
The conviction was upheld in 2018 by a high court, and the sentence was enhanced for passive corruption and money laundering.
April 2018: The Supreme Court rejects his request for habeas corpus and Judge Sergio Moro orders his arrest. Lula was imprisoned for a year and seven months.
But: nearly seven years after rejecting an appeal from Lula’s defense, the Supreme Court changed its ‘understanding’ in April 2021. It disqualified the federal judge from the state of Paraná, dismissed the cases and ordered that the process be restarted from scratch. In the first instance Lula was released and given a clean criminal sheet, allowing him to run in the 2022 elections. The rest is criminal history in the making.