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<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13760">https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13760</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Venezuela Stands by Brazil’s Lula
Following His Imprisonment</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Paul Dobson - April 9,
2018<br>
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<p>Merida, April 9, 2018, (<a
href="http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/">venezuelanalysis.com</a>)
– President Nicolas Maduro led a multitude of
Venezuelan voices who spoke out this weekend in
solidarity with the Brazilian people following the
imprisonment of the presidential candidate Luis Inacio
“Lula” da Silva.</p>
<p>“What is going on in Brazil is a coup d’état,” Maduro
declared during a ceremony broadcast on state
television Saturday.</p>
<p>Widely viewed as a favorite to win Brazil’s October
presidential elections, Lula turned himself in to
police Saturday, accompanied by tens of thousands of
supporters, following a two-day stand-off in the metal
workers union headquarters in Sao Paolo, where the
ex-president got his start as a grassroots union
organizer.</p>
<p>“First [the Brazilian right-wing] ousted the
constitutional President Dilma Rousseff with a
parliamentary coup and now they want to imprison Lula
da Silva because he is leading in the polls,” Maduro
added, referring to the controversial impeachment
proceeding that removed elected President Rousseff
from office in 2016.</p>
<p>A warrant was issued for Lula’s arrest after Brazil’s
Supreme Court issued a controversial ruling Thursday
that the leftist presidential hopeful could be jailed
despite constitutional guarantees stipulating that the
accused have the right to exhaust their appeals in
freedom. The ruling was preceded by a highly
publicized <a
href="https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Military-Chief-Accused-of-Intimidating-Judges-into-Ruling-Against-Lula-20180404-0006.html">warning</a>
against “impunity” by the Brazilian military, which
was widely condemned as an attempt to influence the
verdict.</p>
<p>Lula was sentenced to ten years last August for
allegedly accepting a US$1 million renovation to a
luxury beachfront apartment that he does own and never
visited, a sentence which was upheld and extended to
twelve years in January. There is <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/opinion/brazil-lula-democracy-corruption.html">no
material evidence</a> linking Lula to the apartment,
and Lavo Jato chief prosecutor Sergio Mora has been
accused of pursuing politically motivated
anti-corruption investigations against leftist
Brazilian leaders <a
href="http://www.brasilwire.com/us-admits-role-operation-lava-jato/">in
coordination with the US Justice Department</a>.
Lula has proclaimed his innocence and is appealing the
conviction.</p>
<p>The former president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010,
Lula is a candidate for the center-left Workers Party
(PT), which he helped found in the 1980s in opposition
to the country’s military dictatorship. He is
currently leading polls, but it is unclear how is
imprisonment will affect his candidacy.</p>
<p>The current government of Michel Temer, which assumed
control of the country following the 2016 ouster of
Rousseff, is highly unpopular due to the imposition of
a series of neoliberal economic measures, including a
<a
href="http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/amendment-of-death-brazils-government-passes-20-year-social-spending-freeze/">constitutional
amendment</a> freezing social spending for twenty
years. Many of the cabinet are currently being
investigated for corruption.</p>
<p>Following Lula’s surrender to police, ex-bus driver
Maduro took to Twitter in defense of the Brazilian
leftist leader.</p>
<p>“Lula is an honest man who comes from the factories…
a democratic and moral leader who is committed to the
people,” he declared.</p>
<p>The imprisonment of Lula is “a criminal persecution
by the neo-fascist oligarch elite” and “an oppressive
and dirty trick,” added Maduro. “This injustice hurts
us in our soul."</p>
<div>
<blockquote data-partner="tweetdeck">
<p>We are all Lula. They can't deal with the hopes
and convictions of the rebels. Nothing will stop
the march for justice and dignity of Brazil. To
speak the truth and the heart, we are invincible.
We are with you. <a
href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LulaValeALuta?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#LulaValeALuta</a>
<a href="https://t.co/kr7pfwHlpw">pic.twitter.com/kr7pfwHlpw</a></p>
<p>— Nicolás Maduro (@maduro_en) <a
href="https://twitter.com/maduro_en/status/982131499502743553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April
6, 2018</a></p>
</blockquote>
</div>
<p>But Maduro was just one voice of a growing chorus of
Venezuelan popular movements expressing solidarity
with Lula.</p>
<p>On Friday, more than fifty Venezuelan grassroots
organizations signed a manifesto of support with Lula,
the Brazilian people, and the country’s popular mass
movements who back him.</p>
<p>The declaration calls for “support[ing] the
resistance of the Brazilian workers and social
movements” and condemns “the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie which has been installed in Brazil… which
looks to extinguish the insurgent and unified national
flame of the Brazilian people.”</p>
<p>It was signed following a demonstration in Caracas in
front of the Brazilian embassy by a range of popular
organisations, including community TV station ALBA TV,
the Clara Zetkin women’s movement, the Bolivar and
Zamora Revolutionary Current, numerous trade unions,
ecological collectives, student groups, and
anti-imperialist organisations.</p>
<p>Venezuela’s United Socialist Party (PSUV) also
released a<a
href="https://laradiodelsur.com.ve/2018/04/partido-socialista-unido-de-venezuela-se-solidariza-con-lula-da-silva/">
communique</a> articulating its “complete solidarity
with our companion Lula,” as well as denouncing the
unpopular economic measures of de facto President
Michel Temer.</p>
<p>“Temer isn’t just deploying a neoliberal plan which
is doing away with the social conquests achieved
during the democratic governments of Lula and Dilma,
but he is also part of a plan which looks to take
Brazil back to the [dictatorial] times which seemed to
be over,” it claimed.</p>
<p>The Communist Party of Venezuela also voiced its
solidarity with the “Brazilian revolutionary movement”
in light of the events in Sao Paolo.</p>
<p>In its weekly press conference, the party stressed
that Lula’s imprisonment “should be a wakeup call for
the revolutionary movement in our country of what may
happen should the right win the upcoming elections.”</p>
<p>Trade unions in Venezuela, including the Bolivarian
Centre of Workers (CBST) confederation, have also made
their voices heard, stressing Lula’s origins as a
metalworker’s union leader.</p>
<p>“We add our voice to the rest of the political
organisations of the working class and popular
movements of the continent in defence of sovereignty
and self-determination and against exploitation and
imperialism,” reads a<a
href="https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n323289.html">
press release</a> from the Venezuelan government
workers’ union SINTRASDE.</p>
<p>“We declare ourselves to be on combative and
proletarian alert alongside the Workers Party of
Brazil,” the union added.</p>
<p>Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry likewise issued a formal<a
href="http://minci.gob.ve/2018/04/venezuela-en-absoluta-solidaridad-con-lula-da-silva/">
statement</a> expressing the Maduro’s government’s
“absolute solidarity” with Lula on Sunday.</p>
<h2>Full text of the "Manifesto of Popular Movements
against the Unjust Decision of the Brazilian Coup
which Imprisoned Lula"</h2>
<p>We, the below signed popular and social movements of
the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, express our
deepest rejection of the ruthless attack against our
comrade Lula Inacio da Silva by the extreme right of
Brazil, who look to impede his imminent election as
president and to extinguish the insurgent and unified
national flame of the Brazilian people.</p>
<p>Likewise, we express our absolute and resolute
solidarity with Lula and with the popular and social
movements and organisations which continue to be on
the streets in Brazil in defence of the sovereignty of
the people. The events which they are living through
in our South American sister republic is an example of
the continued anti-democratic incursion into Brazil
which looks to coerce the progress of the popular
sectors, not just in Brazil, but in the whole
continent.</p>
<p>We denounce the rupture of the democratic order in
Brazil. The will of the people was pushed aside when
[President] Dilma Rousseff was unconstitutionally
removed [from office], and today justice and human
rights suffer a mortal blow with the imprisonment of
Lula, impeding that he be chosen the next president of
the Federal Republic of Brazil.</p>
<p>Bearing all this in mind and considering the decision
of the anti-democratic sectors of Brazil to imprison
Lula, we call on all the Venezuelan social and popular
movements to support the resistance of the Brazilian
workers and social movements and to condemn the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which has been
installed in Brazil with the complicity of the
Organisation of American States, which has made no
declarations about this obvious rupture of the
democratic order.</p>
<p>Today we have the duty to make ourselves heard in all
possible areas, on the streets and on social media, we
must cry out with dignity that the Venezuelan people
join the Brazilian people in their fight against
imperialism and for their sovereignty, as a people,
and for the Great Nation of Bolivar, Chavez, and
Fidel.</p>
<p><em>Edited and with additional reporting by Lucas
Koerner from Caracas. </em></p>
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