By Harold Emert
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In an exclusive interview with Brazil’s Folha de S.Paulo and Spain’s El Pais newspapers, Luiz Ignacio “Lula” da Silva says “Brazil is being governed by “a bunch of lunatics, or “crazy people,” (um bando de malucos).
The 73-year-old leftist had been forbidden from giving face-to-face interviews until Friday when two Brazilian journalists were allowed to visit him at his prison in southern Brazil following a lengthy legal battle.
The former President added that “Brazil today is going through the lowest level of foreign relations I have seen in my life” referring to Ernesto Araújo, Brazil’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Araújo was a relatively little known career bureaucrat under Lula’ s ex-Chancellor Celso Amorim.
Questioned whether he feared reprisals for his criticisms from his unrelentless right-wing adversary, Brazil’ s new President Jair Bolsonaro, leftist Lula responded: “I don’t fear spending the rest of my life in prison because at least I go to sleep every night with a clear conscience as opposed to those who (unfairly, he believes) prosecuted me, who don’t sleep.”
The former President predicted that his nemesis, former Lava Jato judge Sergio Moro, now Brazil’s Justice Minister, “won’t survive in politics.”
As for the ex-Army Captain, President Jair Messias Bolsonaro, Lula, as the former head of Brazil’ s one-time ruling Labor Party, advises “either he constructs a solid political party, or he won’t last.”
Lula believes that Brazil’s elite should undergo a period of self-reflection after Bolsonaro’s election.
It is not possible that Brazil can be ruled by a bunch of lunatics governing the nation. Brazil does not deserve this, and moreover its people do not deserve this,” Lula told the two reporters.
He compares the treatment that the media gave him the “reserve” it is treating the unorthodox Bolsonaro.
“Imagine if the militias of Bolsonaro were friends of my family” Lula said referring to recent Brazilian press reports. According to these reports, Bolsonaro’ s son Flavio had employed family members of a member of the Rio militia who fled police warrants when Flavio was a Rio state deputy.
The ex-President was viewed on a video included during the interview crying when a query was made about his beloved grandson Artur, who died of an infection last month at seven years of age.
The child visited his grandfather in jail a number of times.
“I sometimes think it would have been easier if I had died instead. I have lived 73 years and could have died allowing my grandson to live.”
Grateful to President Bolsonaro’s independent-minded Vice President General Hamilton Mourão for defending his temporary release from a Curitiba jail to attend his grandson’s wake in São Paulo.
Lula said: “If I ever get out of jail I would like to discuss with the military to understand why they hate my Workers Party when it was my government who recovered the budget for the Armed Forces.”
Release in September?
Lula has been in jail since April 2018 and his original sentence of 12 years and one month was reduced by a Brazilian high court on Tuesday, 23rd April, to eight years, ten months and 20 days.
By the intricacies of Brazilian law, the ex-President could be released in September under house arrest.