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<h1 class="reader-title">Opinion - World Statesman Lingers in
Jail While a Clownish Thug is in Power</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time">August 27, 2019<br>
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<font size="+2"><b>Lula tells world he’s back in the game
from jail</b></font>
<p> <b>By Pepe Escobar, Brazil</b></p>
<p> August 27, 2019 "<a
href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/"><span
size="5" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Information
Clearing House</span></a>" -<em> </em><span
size="5"> </span> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="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/">
leaks</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics-judge/brazil-supreme-court-judge-says-lula-deserves-retrial-idUSKCN1VG242">
Brazilian Supreme Court</a>, for which Justice is not
exactly blind.</p>
<p>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
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drJ6uVrt8dI">
rough cut</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4><span size="5">It’s all about the Day of Fire</span></h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<em> </em>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>[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.]</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Heleno, incidentally, is on record defending a life
sentence for Lula.</p>
<p>Still, that does not tell the whole story – even as
Bolsonaro himself also kept blaming “NGOs” for the
fires.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h4><span size="5">On the road with the Pope</span></h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Now compare a true statesman in jail with an incendiary
thug roaming his own labyrinth.</p>
<p>
<a
href="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"><span
size="5"><em>Pepe Escobar</em></span></a><span
size="5"><em> is correspondent-at-large at </em></span><a
href="http://www.atimes.com/"><i>Asia Times</i></a><i>.
His latest book is </i>
<a
href="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"><i>2030</i></a><i>.
Follow him on </i>
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pepe.escobar.77377"><i>Facebook</i></a><i>.</i></p>
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