Meanwhile, fires rage in the
Amazon and Brazilian President Bolsonaro has become a target of global
indignation
PEPE ESCOBAR, BRAZIL
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 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, 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, 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.
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