Brazil, the judge accepts defense request: Lula released from prison

• Brazil, the Prosecutor's Office is in favor of semi-liberty for Lula

• Brazil, against Lula there was a conspiracy: "Prosecutors maneuvered to exclude him from the elections"

• Brazil, the electoral court rejects Lula's candidacy

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08 November 2019 In Brazil, the federal justice of Paranà has authorized the release of the former Brazilian president, Inacio Lula da Silva, who has 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 decided to eliminate the rule that imposes imprisonment on convicts if they lose the first appeal, establishing that the handcuffs cannot be released before all the 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

The first thing Luiz Inacio Lula said he wanted to do, released from prison, is to remarry. Still beloved by Brazilians, Lula, 73, had made it known last May, when the Supreme Court ruling that establishes the indispensability of all levels of judgment to be able to keep a man in prison was still far away. "He is in love, and the first thing he intends to do is get married", Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, his former minister, wrote on Facebook, who visited him in the Curitiba penitentiary. The bride-to-be, according to a report in the online weekly Epoca, Rosangela da Silva, 40-year old sociologist, almost the same age as Maria Leticia, the 43-year old port that Lula 'first 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 years and the other at 12, were not enough to make Brazilians forget the years in which "Lula" led the greatest power in Latin America from 2003 to 2010. Leader undisputed member of the Workers' Party, which he co-founded, Lula (the nickname he used since he was a metallurgical unionist, from 1975 and for most of the Eighties, when, in full dictatorship, he challenged the military in power as head of the union organizing powerful strikes) wins the presidency with a social economy program which, according to official estimates, has freed 29 million people from poverty. When he leaves power he has a popularity rate of over 80%, which will benefit Dilma Roussef, the party mate who succeeded him as president.

The years of Roussef and of the latter's successor 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 lost the presidential election. Bolsonaro won, playing the right-wing populist wind that had brought Donald Trump to the White House a few years earlier, but many now suspect that game was rigged. Aware of the charismatic void he had left eight years earlier, although already in prison, Lula showed himself determined to compete in the elections, but was forced to give up by a verdict in which the Supreme Court, rejecting the appeal (habeas corpus) of the lawyers who asked for the 'exhaustion of all levels of trial, stated that "the presumption of innocence cannot lead to impunity", a completely different logic from that expressed in the last hours by the same court. Some time later, hints of an alleged conspiracy emerged, which the former president had always talked about. Lula was convicted in the second degree, among other things, of having received bribes from the construction company Oas for 3.7 million reais (about 800 thousand euros), which the company used to renovate a luxury apartment on Guaruja beach; in return, he favored the company in three contracts with the state-owned Petrobras oil company.

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 network the last June a mass of confidential documents, emails, discussions in private chats, photos, videos that indicated 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, run for the presidential elections of 2018. Moro, who before becoming a minister in the government of Jair Bolsonaro, had handled the investigation that led Lula to a first sentence in 2017, would have carried out, I explain '' intercept ", a series of" unethical behaviors and systematic deceptions "in the course of the investigation called" Car Wash "(Lava Jata), while privately affirming together with other magistrates" doubts about the indi zi to establish Lula's guilt. " In private conversations, among other things, there was concern for an interview that the former president could have given shortly before the elections while he was in prison: Fernando Haddad, his dolphin, who then lost the presidential elections to his advantage, could have benefited. by Bolsonaro. At that time and until September, when the Supreme Court rejected his candidacy presented in August, Lula remained the favorite in the polls.