[News] Brazil - World Statesman Lingers in Jail While a Clownish Thug is in Power

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52178.htm


  Opinion - World Statesman Lingers in Jail While a Clownish Thug is in
  Power

August 27, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Lula tells world he’s back in the game from jail*

*By Pepe Escobar, Brazil*

August 27, 2019 "Information Clearing House 
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/>" -//Brazil has always been a 
land of superlatives. Yet nothing beats the current, perverse 
configuration: a world statesman lingers in jail while a clownish thug 
is in power, his antics now considered a threat to the whole planet.

In a wide-ranging, two-hour, world exclusive interview out of a prison 
room at the Federal Police building in Curitiba, southern Brazil, former 
president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva not only made the case to global 
public opinion for his innocence in the whole Car Wash corruption saga, 
confirmed by the bombshell leaks 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/07/15/vazajato-as-provas-de-que-os-chats-sao-autenticos-agora-vem-de-diversos-veiculos-de-comunicacao-sao-definitivas-e-esmagadoras/> 
revealed by The Intercept, but also repositioned himself to resume his 
status as a global leader. Arguably sooner rather than later – depending 
on a fateful, upcoming decision by the Brazilian Supreme Court 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics-judge/brazil-supreme-court-judge-says-lula-deserves-retrial-idUSKCN1VG242>, 
for which Justice is not exactly blind.

The request for the interview was entered five months ago. Lula talked 
to journalists Mauro Lopes, Paulo Moreira Leite and myself, representing 
in all three cases the website Brasil247 and in my case Asia Times. A 
rough cut <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drJ6uVrt8dI>, with only one 
camera focusing on Lula, was released this past Thursday, the day of the 
interview. A full, edited version, with English subtitles, targeting 
global public opinion, should be released by the end of the week.

Lula is a visible embodiment of Nietzsche’s maxim: whatever doesn’t kill 
you makes you stronger. Fully fit (he hits the treadmill at least two 
hours a day), sharp, with plenty of time to read (his most recent was an 
essay on Alexander von Humboldt), he exhibited his trademark breadth, 
reach and command of multiple issues – sometimes rolled out as if part 
of a Garcia Marquez fantastic realism narrative.

The former president lives in a three-by-three-meter cell, with no bars, 
with the door open but always two Federal policemen outside, with no 
access to the internet or cable TV. One of his aides dutifully brings 
him a pen drive every day crammed with political news, and departs with 
myriad messages and letters.

The interview is even more astonishing when placed in the literally 
incendiary context of current Brazilian politics, actively flirting with 
a hybrid form of semi-dictatorship. While Lula talks essentials and is 
clearly recovering his voice, even in jail, President Jair Bolsonaro has 
framed himself as a target of global indignation, widely regarded as a 
threat to humanity that must be contained.


        It’s all about the Day of Fire

Cut to the G7 in Biarritz: at best a sideshow, a talk-shop where the 
presumably liberal West basks in its lavish impotence to deal with 
serious global issues without the presence of leaders from the Global South.

And that brings us to the literally burning issue of Amazon forest 
fires. In our interview, Lula went straight to the point: by noting the 
absolute responsibility of Bolsonaro’s voter base.

//

The G7 did nothing but echo Lula’s words, with French President Emmanuel 
Macron stressing how NGOs and multiple judicial actors, for years, have 
been raising the question of defining an international statute for the 
Amazon – which Bolsonaro’s policies, single-handedly, have propelled to 
the top of the global agenda.

Yet the G7’s offer of an immediate $20 million aid package to help 
Amazon nations to fight wildfires and then launch a global initiative to 
protect the giant forest barely amounts to a raindrop.

/[Brazil, after this article was written, rejected the proffered aid 
from G7 countries, with a top official telling France’s President Macron 
on Monday to take care of “his home and his colonies,” AFP reported. 
“Maybe those resources are more relevant to reforest Europe,” Onyx 
Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, told the G1 news website. “Macron 
cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a World 
Heritage site. What does he intend to teach our country?” He was 
referring to the fire in April that devastated the Notre-Dame Cathedral. 
“Brazil is a democratic, free nation that never had colonialist and 
imperialist practices, as perhaps is the objective of the Frenchman 
Macron,” Lorenzoni said. -eds.]/

Significantly, US President Donald Trump did not even attend the G7 
session that covered climate change, attacks on the biodiversity and 
oceans – and Amazon deforestation. No wonder Paris simply gave up 
issuing a joint statement at the end of the summit.

In our interview, Lula stressed his landmark role at the Conference of 
Parties (COP-15) climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Not only 
that, he told the inside story of how the negotiations proceeded, and 
how he intervened to defend China from US accusations of being the 
world’s largest polluter.

At the time Lula said: “It’s not necessary to fell a single tree in the 
Amazon to grow soybeans or for cattle grazing. If anyone is doing it, 
that is a crime – and a crime against the Brazilian economy.”

COP-15 was supposed to advance the targets established by the Kyoto 
Protocol, which were expiring in 2010. But the summit failed after the 
US – and the EU – refused to raise their projections of CO2 reduction 
while blaming Global South actors.

In a sharp contrast with Lula, Bolsonaro’s project actually amounts to a 
non-creative destruction of Brazilian assets such as the Amazon for the 
interests he represents.

Now the Bolsonaro clan is blaming the government’s own Cabinet of 
Institutional Security (GSI, in Portuguese) – the equivalent of the 
National Security Council – led by General Augusto Heleno, for failing 
to evaluate the scope and gravity of the current Amazon forest fires.

Heleno, incidentally, is on record defending a life sentence for Lula.

Still, that does not tell the whole story – even as Bolsonaro himself 
also kept blaming “NGOs” for the fires.

The real story confirms what Lula said in the interview. On August 10, a 
group of 70 wealthy farmers, all Bolsonaro voters, organized on WhatsApp 
a “Day of Fire” in the Altamira region in the vast state of Pará.

This happens to be the region with the highest number of wildfires in 
Brazil – infested with aggressive rural developers who are devoted to 
massive, hardcore deforestation; they’re invested in land occupation and 
a no-quarter war against landless peasants and small agricultural 
producers. “Day of Fire” was supposed to support Bolsonaro’s drive to 
finish off with official monitoring and erase fines over one of the “Bs” 
of the BBB lobby that elected him (Beef, Bullet, Bible).

Lula was evidently well informed: “You just need to look at the 
satellite photos, know who’s the landowner and go after him to know 
who’s burning. If the landowner did not complain, did not go to the 
police to tell them his land was burning, that’s because he’s responsible.”


        On the road with the Pope

A vicious, post-truth, hybrid-war strategy may be at play in Brazil. Two 
days after the Lula interview, a fateful paella took place in Brasilia 
at the vice-presidential palace, with Bolsonaro meeting all the top 
generals including Vice President Hamilton Mourao. Independent analysts 
are seriously considering a working hypothesis of the sell-out of Brazil 
using global concern about the Amazon, the whole process veiled by fake 
nationalist rhetoric.

That would fit the recent pattern of selling the national aviation 
champion Embraer, privatizing large blocks of pre-salt reserves and 
leasing the Alcantara satellite-launching base to the United States. 
Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon is definitely hanging in the balance.

Considering the wealth of information in Lula’s interview, not to 
mention his storytelling of how the corridors of power really work, Asia 
Times will publish further specific stories featuring Pope Francis, the 
BRICS, Bush and Obama, Iran, the UN and global governance. This was 
Lula’s first interview in jail where he has felt relaxed enough to 
relish telling stories about international relations.

What was clear is that Lula is Brazil’s only possible factor of 
stability. He’s ready, has an agenda not only for the nation but the 
world. He said that as soon as he leaves, he’ll hit the streets – and 
cash in frequent flyer miles: he wants to embark alongside Pope Francis 
on a global campaign against hunger, neoliberal destruction and the rise 
of neo-fascism.

Now compare a true statesman in jail with an incendiary thug roaming his 
own labyrinth.

/Pepe Escobar/ 
<https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=010732926337524982427%3Ava4-o-6opiq&ie=UTF-8&siteurl=www.google.com%2Fcse%2Fhome%3Fcx%3D010732926337524982427%3Ava4-o-6opiq&q=Pepe+Escobar&sa=Search&siteurl=%2FE%3A%2FICH%2520Website%2Findex.html&ref=&ss=#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Pepe%20Escobar&gsc.page=1>/is 
correspondent-at-large at //Asia Times/ <http://www.atimes.com/>/. His 
latest book is / /2030/ 
<https://www.amazon.com/2030-Letter-Grandson-Pepe-Escobar-ebook/dp/B0186FC99U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535385000&sr=8-1&keywords=2030+Pepe+Escobar>/. 
Follow him on / /Facebook/ <https://www.facebook.com/pepe.escobar.77377>/./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20190828/639187b3/attachment.htm>