• Brazil, the prosecutor's office is in favor of semi-freedom for Lula
  • Brazil, against Lula there was a plot: "Prosecutors maneuvered to exclude him from the elections"
  • Brazil, the electoral court rejects Lula's candidacy

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November 08, 2019 In Brazil, the federal justice of Paranà authorized the release of the former Brazilian president, Inacio Lula da Silva, who had been serving a sentence of 8 years and 10 months for corruption since April 2018. The sentence follows the decision of the Supreme Court, which has decided to eliminate the rule that requires prisoners if they lose their first appeal, stating that the handcuffs cannot be triggered before all degrees of judgment have been expressed.

#Lula returns to freedom. A great president who fought against poverty and for the redemption of the Brazilian people.

- Paolo Gentiloni (@PaoloGentiloni) November 8, 2019

Lula, icon of the left and Bolsonaro's nightmare
The first thing that Luiz Inacio Lula said he wanted to do, released from prison, is to remarry. Still beloved by the Brazilians, Lula, 73, had made it known last May, when the sentence of the Supreme Court that establishes the indispensability of all levels of judgment to be able to keep a man in prison was still far off. "He's in love, and the first thing he's going to do is get married," his former minister, Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, wrote on Facebook and visited him in the Curitiba penitentiary. According to the weekly online magazine Epoca, the future bride would be Rosangela da Silva, a 40-year-old sociologist, almost the same age as Maria Leticia, the 43-year-old Lula brought first on the altar and died in February 2017.

The former Brazilian president is today an icon of the left in the country led by Jair Bolsonaro, and perhaps the man most feared by the current head of state. The two convictions for corruption and money laundering, one at 8 and the other at 12, were not enough to make the Brazilians forget the years in which "Lula" led the largest power in Latin America from 2003 to 2010. Leader undisputed of the Workers 'Party, which he co-founded, Lula (he used the nickname since he was a metalworkers' unionist, since 1975 and for almost all the Eighties, when, in full dictatorship, he challenged the ruling military from head of the union organizing powerful strikes) wins the presidency with a social economy program that, according to official estimates, has taken 29 million people out of poverty. When he leaves power he has a popularity rate of over 80%, which will benefit Dilma Roussef, the party companion who succeeded him as president.

The years of Roussef and the successor of the latter Michel Temer, both overwhelmed by scandals, devastated the image of the Workers' Party, which realized only too late, and in vain, to have its historical leaders in prison or involved in legal proceedings and missed the presidential elections. Bolsonaro won, playing the populist right-wing wind that Donald Trump had brought to the White House a few years earlier, but many suspect today that the match was rigged. Aware of the charismatic emptiness he had left eight years earlier, although already in prison, Lula was determined to compete in the elections, but was forced to renounce a verdict in which the Supreme Court, rejecting the appeal (habeas corpus) of the lawyers asking for 'exhaustion of all levels of judgment, he affirmed that "the presumption of innocence cannot lead to impunity", a logic completely different from that expressed in the last hours by the same court. Some time later the clues to an alleged plot emerged, of which the former president had always spoken. Lula had been sentenced in the second degree, among other things, for having received from the construction company Oas bribes for 3.7 million reais (about 800 thousand euros), which the company used to renovate a luxury apartment on the beach of Guaruja; in exchange he favored the company in three contracts with the state-owned oil company Petrobras.

The plot to knock him out
It was "The Intercept", the news site founded by Glenn Greenwald, the man who helped Edward Snowden unveil the global surveillance system set up by US intelligence, to put up a massive network last June of confidential documents, emails, discussions in private chats, photos, videos indicating the Minister of Justice of Brazil, Sergio Moro, and several prosecutors as architects of a strategy to ensure that Lula ended up in prison and could not, consequently, candidate for the 2018 presidential election. Moro, who before handing over to Jair Bolsonaro's government, handled the inquiry that led Lula to a first conviction in 2017, he would put in place, I explain "The intercept", a series of "unethical behavior and systematic deception" during the investigation called "Autolavaggio" (Lava Jata), while privately affirming with other magistrates "doubts about the clues to establish the guilt of Lula ". In private conversations, among other things, there was concern about an interview that the former president could have released just before the elections while he was in prison: he could have benefited Fernando Haddad, his dolphin, who then lost the presidential election to the advantage of Bolsonaro. At that time and until September, when the Supreme Court rejected the nomination presented in August, Lula remained the favorite in the polls.