Brazil's High Court Invalidates Lula's Convictions

March 10, 2021 5:36 AM

The decision by a Brazilian judge reverses Lula's unjust and politicized persecution. The corruption that led to this holds many lessons for the west.
posted by - (45 comments total)

When Western NGOs start making noises about 'corruption' you really gotta wonder wy they suddenly care when the world is awash in it but no one is proposing we coup the leaders of offshore tax shelters.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:40 AM on March 10, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is great. I'm so glad. I'd hoped all along that it was a put-up job and even though technically this leaves him facing another trial it seems likely that the whole thing was a sham.

My feeling is that in the US most of us don't know where to find good, reliable coverage of South American politics. Like, here we are with Greenwald, who isn't that great a guy but I tend to think is reliable on this issue, but while it's easy enough to find commentary, news is often NYT-level lies and imperialist whitewash.

It seems like mobilizing the language of reform, anti-corruption and social justice to advance a right-wing agenda is becoming the new thing. Greenwald himself has gone over to the TERFs, hasn't he? And that's a classic case of using "feminist" language to advance a right-wing agenda.

But anyway, this is great for Brazil and good for the people who hacked the Telegram accounts.
posted by Frowner at 6:02 AM on March 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted. I understand that some don't care for Greenwald, but he is not the post topic. If you don't want to read an article by him, best just to pass this one by. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:02 AM on March 10, 2021 [10 favorites]

Say what you will about Greenwald, but he has undertaken great personal risk for this result.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:00 AM on March 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

That was an interesting article about Lula and the machinations of the Brazilian right wing to bring him down. The part where Greenwald lost me, however, was when he made this comparison to Trump’s impeachments:

As the U.S. witnessed over the last five years, this is increasingly becoming the playbook for neoliberal elites who are angry that the population has defied them by voting for those they oppose. Thwarted by the democratic process, elites now resort instead to subversions of democracy in the name of upholding it.

That’s really fucking rich.

First, Trump was never democratically elected. He won office because of a quirk of the rules — not because he had a democratic mandate from the people.

Second, the evidence of Trump’s crimes are manifest. The GOP recognized their power was undemocratic and therefore completely contingent on Trump staying in office. Multiple members of the party have said as much. Trump didn’t escape accountability because he was innocent — he escaped because he was useful.

I get Greenwald’s dislike of neoliberalism but he has let it push him to some pretty daft places, intellectually.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:19 AM on March 10, 2021 [27 favorites]

I get Greenwald’s dislike of neoliberalism but he has let it push him to some pretty daft places, intellectually.

He's always been there - see his defense of Matthew Hale.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:27 AM on March 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

I get Greenwald’s dislike of neoliberalism but he has let it push him to some pretty daft places, intellectually.

I think it's because he's had some very personal close-calls with neoliberalism, like when his partner was detained in the UK simply because he was associated with Greenwald.

Also, he watched the Obama administration support the removal of Dilma Rousseff and replacing her with Michel Temer, which, in my humble opinion, is where the path towards Bolsanaro truly started. It's hard to state how hard the Obama administration pushed to replace a socialist with a corrupt fool. (Greenwald would publish an explosively damning phone call regarding Temer just months after he took power.)

So, as a Brazilian citizen, he has watched neoliberalism in the US do everything it can do to shut down dissent to the American hegemony internationally.

Trump is an authoritarian piece of shit, but he also undermined American hegemony by becoming isolationist, and the neoliberals didn't like that.

I'm, frankly, of the opinion that the neoliberals didn't want to remove Trump because he was explicitly authoritarian, but because they were worried about how it would impact their power internationally.

Which is very gross, but hey, neoliberals are gross, so I wouldn't put it past them that the only reason they disliked Trump was because he messed with the levers of power and caused instability, not because he is explicitly authoritarian.

To be clear, it doesn't really justify how far off the deep end Greenwald tends to go at times, but it at least helps explain it, in my opinion.
posted by deadaluspark at 8:28 AM on March 10, 2021 [24 favorites]

I think Greenwald has his comparison exactly backward: it was Trump who tried to use the U.S. courts to reinforce his power, and we all breathed multiple sighs of relief when even the judges he appointed rejected his absurd attempts to overthrow a lawful election here.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:36 AM on March 10, 2021 [11 favorites]

I think deadaluspark raises some good points. Alongside the horror and anger many of us felt throughout the Trump presidency, has there not been an element of absolute bewilderment, surreality, and confusion? I feel as though a lot of attention was focused on an individual and his family, and his appointments, all these visible signs of wrongness.. But I think there's a lot to the observation that Trump ruffled some feathers at the top, also, for creating unpredictable conditions.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:53 AM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Lula's unjust and politicized persecution

Hold on, what now? The editorializing aside, if Lula wasn't guilty, he was certainly acting in a way that a guilty person was acting getting himself into a position where he was immune from prosecution.

Corruptio Optimi Pessima. The corruption of the best is the worst. This phrase should be a fucking beacon for liberal democracy. The one truth that guides us in our political actions.

Just because someone has our values or is popular or inspires us doesn't mean they should be treated differently or excused. All that does is encourage the normalization of deviance and further launches society down a spiral of cynicism and disengagement from electoral politics.

Lula may have been targeted because he was a threat to the powerful but we shouldn't go to bat for leaders who are terrible people. It's not like he was pulled in for jaywalking and thrown in jail for a dime because he had a joint in his pocket. He literally was doing everything he could to try and legally get away with it and just because he's a left-wing folk hero doesn't mean he should be able to get away with it. All it means is that he became one of the very monsters he was trying to defeat.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:58 AM on March 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

1) Can y'all motherfuckers have your discussions about American politics in one of billion other threads? Plz thx.

2) Lula's unjust and politicized persecution

Now we'll never know, right? When a prosecution is *so* completely compromised, how do you ever find the truth? Sure, have another trial but what was the chain of custody for the evidence considering the people who were handling it? For all I know they were framing a guilty man, but once you've broken the system so completely you can never have a clean prosecution. If something like this happened in an English criminal trial there would be no do-over.
posted by atrazine at 9:12 AM on March 10, 2021 [12 favorites]

Does anyone have a link to an overview by someone more reliable than Greenwald? My impression from previous threads was that Lula had indeed done some hinky and likely illegal shit but that the prosecution was also politically motivated, but I'd love a good backgrounder.
posted by tavella at 9:31 AM on March 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

I think there may be some confusion in this thread about what Neoliberalism is, especially in relation to South America. The wiki article on Neoliberalism is a good place to start.
posted by Jernau at 10:20 AM on March 10, 2021 [5 favorites]

Was Lula's corruption really as bad as it was cracked up to be? Because inevitably these discussions of Latin American and in general Global South leaders just end up as dueling narratives where it's either a reformer/socialist/populist leader vs. CIA- and multinational-backed local reactionaries abusing legal systems and then engaging in blatant coup behavior to remove them, or the local populist turns out to be corrupt/authoritarian and is rightfully removed. The Allende vs. Mugabe model, perhaps.

I think there can be a substantiative conversation about the merits and flaws of Operation Car Wash, but inevitably it's going to boil down to everyone clutching their chosen media sources and set of footnotes without the establishment of any actual universally-agreed upon truth of What Happened.

In the meantime, history progresses. As we saw in Bolivia, the leader who was removed for accused authoritarianism saw his party win majorly in subsequent elections, including the presidency. Let's hope the elections in Brazil will be free and fair and the Brazilian people will make the best choice, whatever it may be.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:47 AM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm still not sure how people are confusing (Latin and South American) neoliberalism in this thread, I'm open to learning more but the Wikipedia entry cited upstream is not illuminating any obvious shortcomings in the present discussion.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:51 AM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Lula may have been targeted because he was a threat to the powerful but we shouldn't go to bat for leaders who are terrible people. It's not like he was pulled in for jaywalking and thrown in jail for a dime because he had a joint in his pocket. He literally was doing everything he could to try and legally get away with it and just because he's a left-wing folk hero doesn't mean he should be able to get away with it. All it means is that he became one of the very monsters he was trying to defeat.

Yeah but the thing is, in the "Global South" or "Developing World" or most of Asia, the corruption is just a fact of life in a way I think most Westerners do not understand. Someone truly and fully clean, and intolerant of any corruption, would have no political base, or they would be assassinated, or at the very least would be derided as a chump. Someday a Christlike figure might emerge but until then...

So this is the problem, any "anti-corruption" drive becomes inherently political. Do you think Xi Jinping's family and close allies get investigated for corruption? Do you think Timoshenko was especially evil and deserved life in prison, whereas Yanukovich was clean and pure and only wanted to see justice done in Ukraine? You know what the absolute best sinecure is in Tajikistan? A post on the Anti-Corruption Inspectorate - the very best juiciest bribes! I know this from direct experience, but it is too long a story to tell here.

So yeah, the Lulu thing was complete bullshit, and of course he tried his best to wriggle out of his enemies' political machinations against him. Duh.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:01 AM on March 10, 2021 [12 favorites]

Again the Paradise papers wasn't just a list of global South citizens. Corruption looks different in the global North because we dress it up nicer, that's all.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:04 AM on March 10, 2021 [11 favorites]

Yeah but the thing is, in the "Global South" or "Developing World" or most of Asia, the corruption is just a fact of life in a way I think most Westerners do not understand.

Ah those inscrutable foreigners! Brazil is my favorite part of Asia, by the way.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:21 AM on March 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

The corruption scandals and subsequent imprisonment of Taiwanese president Chen Shui-Bian came to my mind earlier. On one hand, he was clearly involved in graft and embezzlement. On the other, his pro-China establishment opponents most definitely made hay of the charges, even getting him sentenced to life imprisonment at one point. Taiwan has been first world status for decades, but its democracy, while stable, has had significant issues with political corruption, partially because of nearly fifty years of authoritarian one-party rule.

Corruption can be particularly heightened when a society transitions from non-democratic to democratic rule. And perhaps when an older democracy is declining and transitioning away from it; there are plenty of examples of trumped-up politically-motivated persecution done in the name of anti-corruption that are closer to home.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:32 AM on March 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

First, Trump was never democratically elected. He won office because of a quirk of the rules — not because he had a democratic mandate from the people.

Well if you’re going to frame it like that it seems like a lot of U.S. presidents aren’t democratically elected. Which - okay, maybe it checks out.
posted by atoxyl at 12:40 PM on March 10, 2021 [5 favorites]

> When Western NGOs start making noises about 'corruption' you really gotta wonder wy they suddenly care when the world is awash in it but no one is proposing we coup the leaders of offshore tax shelters.

Corruption is a liberal dog whistle.
posted by Bangaioh at 12:54 PM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ah those inscrutable foreigners! Brazil is my favorite part of Asia, by the way.

Umm, they seem entirely scrutable from where I am, among them these 25 years. My wife and kids are fascinating subjects of study, what with their mysterious Eastern ways! And sorry if my writing was not entirely clear but the "or" was functioning to denote different but potentially overlapping places.. But hey whatever, I was not here to piss anybody off so peace and I am out splitpeasoup!
posted by Meatbomb at 1:10 PM on March 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Meatbomb: "Yeah but the thing is, in the "Global South" or "Developing World" or most of Asia, the corruption is just a fact of life in a way I think most Westerners do not understand. Someone truly and fully clean, and intolerant of any corruption, would have no political base, or they would be assassinated, or at the very least would be derided as a chump."

Hi, this is bullshit.
Racist, xenophobic, orientalist, bullshit.
posted by signal at 2:09 PM on March 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

There were cheers and shouts of joy in the street when this was announced.
Brazil now has a respected voice of opposition to the facist, authoritarian, covid denier in power.
This is fucking huge.
Forget your USA centricism and all of your preconceived notions about what should or should not happen. This is Brazil and it is different. Unexplained fatal accidents still happen.
It cannot be emphasised enough how much part of the present problems here today are a direct result of American intervention.
In 2013, the Rousseff government famously canceled a state visit with then-President Barack Obama, after documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the National Security Agency had been spying on Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy.
The U.S. government, in other words, might have an interest in bringing down certain Brazilian corporations that went beyond pure motives to stamp out corruption.
The impeachment of Dilma, the connivance of Temer, the rise of the Military and now this arsehole who is perfectly happy to have the population drop like flies, mocking news media coverage of the dead as “it’s like Funeral Home TV.”
The politics of death is deliberate and not an accident.

Lula is not perfect but he is not the devil incarnate as painted by the capitalist right. His years as a Union leader taught him how to negotiate and how to achieve compromise. That is what a politician does. He has empathy.
He started his speech today by asking a doctor if it was ok to take off his mask, was it safe?
He also stated that he knowns the earth is round, a direct jibe at some of the Bolsonazi's flat earthers.
That may be theatre but in a country where there is a complete break down in the health services, poverty on the rise and falling markets due to presidential intervention; this is engaging with the people.
Brazil has no government

2,800 people died today. The highest number yet taking the death toll to more than 270,000. All but two states are on Red alert. Doctors who go public are physically threatened.
Lula can't turn this tragedy around but people both inside and outside the country listen to him. He has power.
Power to pressure international organizations and governments in turn to pressurise the powers that be in Brazil to stop the genocide which is being directed purely for the economic benefit of the few.
posted by adamvasco at 2:54 PM on March 10, 2021 [18 favorites]

I think there may be some confusion in this thread about what Neoliberalism is, especially in relation to South America.

It's very easy to define, on the internet neoliberalism = "anything I don't like".
posted by Anonymous at 10:34 PM on March 10, 2021

So it's come to fighting corruption with corruption basically?

Really great news about Lula and it's very unlikely that whatever he may have done is remotely comparable. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a brazilian recovery. Just ugh though at the forced comparisons with Clinton and especially Trump.

As for the meaning of neoliberalism, I'm sure it's being deliberately obfuscated to provide a smokescreen.
posted by blue shadows at 10:42 PM on March 10, 2021

> It's very easy to define, on the internet neoliberalism = "anything I don't like".

Funny you say that, buddy, judging by MeFi threads alone one would be forgiven to believe that neoliberalism is something that doesn't actually exist at all anywhere, a bogeyman dreamt up by naive ideologues that need to paternalistically be reminded how the "real world" works.

Thank you for your guidance on this issue!
posted by Bangaioh at 4:07 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

schroedinger: "It's very easy to define, on the internet neoliberalism = "anything I don't like"."

In the real world, which is at least adjacent to the internet, neoliberalism is a real ideology, which my country for example is in the grip of, with actual effects, lives destroyed, deaths, etc.
posted by signal at 4:53 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

I am not denying that neoliberalism exists in a form and that it has caused harm, but it is frequently used to explain all harms, everywhere, about everything, leading to my comment that on the Internet neoliberalism = "anything I don't like".
posted by Anonymous at 5:43 AM on March 11, 2021

In the comments now we've had a person suggest that people commenting here do not understand the sort of neoliberalism specific to Latin and South America, and we've had someone suggest it's a word people on the internet use to describe anything they don't like. I am genuinely interested: if you want to tell us what it is, in a sentence, that is great. I'm just wondering about the effort in a drive-by comment vs. the effort in sharing information (beyond a Wikipedia link).

From my relative ignorance, I do get the impression that people sometimes use 'neoconservatism' and 'neoliberalism' interchangeably and that actually sums up the issue rather perfectly. In my experience, I would describe the period leading to the establishment and broadening of NAFTA as an expression of neoliberalism among the northern countries (Mexico, US, Canada). I'm not sure neoconservatism truly exists, it seems to be a word we might use when we actually mean something else. Sorry for the derail, this is an interesting topic as I've sat at a friend's kitchen table as they described why they left Brazil in the early 2000s and that was my introduction to the politics of that country.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:04 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

elkevelvet: " if you want to tell us what it is, in a sentence, that is great."

Here you go: Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with economic liberalism and free-market capitalism. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society
posted by signal at 7:30 AM on March 11, 2021

^ Thank you. I do read the comments and I did click the link posted upstream to the Wikipedia entry. For what it's worth, I was hoping the question of neoliberalism specifically in Brazil would be addressed. If we are not getting the point in our comments, is there something we should know? I appreciate the link earlier, and you've pasted the opening sentence from the definition, and I guess we are all on the same page after all.

FWIW I pretty much bought into the Lula phenomenon and the trial seemed like reprisal. I'm reading about early Western Canada right now, when perhaps corruption was a little more blatant than it is now (debatable) but a person can draw parallels. The idea that Lula is somehow pure is about as laughable as the notion he merits the treatment we've seen leading to his arrest. If we want to be overly simplistic, 'neoliberalism' represents the forces that would like to make an example of a figure like Lula and that is to say: shut him (and what he stands for) down.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:47 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

More of Lulas speech has now been reported in English.
“I was called ‘conciliatory’ when I governed,” he said. “I’m open to talking with everyone.”
“They call me radical because I want to create a more just world, a more humane world,” Lula da Silva said, criticising the free market economic agenda of the Bolsonaro administration, in particular plans to privatise state-owned companies.

Beatriz Buarque writes in Democracy Now about how the biggest challenge by the populist far-right in Brazil today is that it has learned to disseminate ideas through social media.
How Brazil’s far-Right ‘active knowledge’ industry supports Jair Bolsonaro.
Like many right-wing populist leaders, Bolsonaro has encouraged people to question experts – inciting a wave of 'Cultural Marxism' conspiracies.
In Brazil, rather than starting from the grassroots and slowly spreading to the centre of power, this conspiracy theory came from above.
posted by adamvasco at 8:25 AM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think a more relevent wikipedia article on neoliberalism in latin america is the washington consensus. For decades, the US has , through various means, worked to impose destructive neoliberal reforms that have allowed entire countries to be looted by American capital. If you find 'neoliberalism' to be a nebulous term, my guess is that you do not live in latin america, because it refers to a set of policies that people in latin america are painfully well acquainted with.
posted by thedamnbees at 8:40 AM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'm happy Lula was cleared. I like him, and I like Rousseff. That doesn't change the fact that Greenwald is so contrarian that he's actively gone over to the right. He's been tying himself in knots for the last four years to be soft on Trump while still hating Bolsonaro, despite the fact that they represent essentially the same far-right political ideology. Add to that that he's a gay man who's gone full TERF, and it seems maybe Greenwald is ok with fascists and bigots as long as they don't affect him personally.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:53 AM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]

So maybe next time when we have this neverending debate on the meaning of neoliberalism we can just link to this thread to save some time? I would have thought that in a place like this with many smart, knowledgeable people who are also generally progressive this would not be such a hard thing. I get that for the few people who might never have heard the term before it could be a little confusing at first, but can we just acknowledge that it broadly stands for the many times proven to have failed policies of austerity, privatization, and deregulation? It would save a lot of derails.
posted by blue shadows at 12:03 PM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

They're not failed policies, they achieve exactly what the people enacting them want.

Reminder that The Markets™ were ecstatic when Bolsonaro won.
posted by Bangaioh at 3:08 AM on March 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

You're absolutely right Bangaioh, that was failed from the point of view of what they are promised to do.
posted by blue shadows at 12:57 PM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oliver Stuenkel : Yet while winning on points so far, it would be too early to confirm that Brazil’s democracy will emerge victorious from its confrontation with the first openly authoritarian-minded president since the end of the military dictatorship. After all, even when institutions react to anti-democratic moves ...they might not necessarily strengthen their “democratic muscle,” but instead contribute to the corrosion of the democratic system.
Meanwhile the normal chaos continues:
Reuters: A major franchisee in the state of Rio de Janeiro, has been indicted by state prosecutors at least 12 times for fuel-related crimes over the past 15 years and is currently on trial for his alleged participation in a sprawling fuel-smuggling ring. He has not been convicted in any of the court cases examined by the news agency.
Gas station graft is lucrative. Ill-gotten gains at Brazil’s pumps amount to 23 billion reais ($4.15 billion).
posted by adamvasco at 11:56 AM on March 13, 2021

Financial Press Fears Brazilians Will Be Allowed to Elect President of Their Choice
posted by adamvasco at 9:02 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

Police in Brazil are starting to employ a dictatorship-era national security law against critics of President Jair Bolsonaro.
posted by adamvasco at 5:30 PM on March 20, 2021

Lava Jato: The CIA’s Poisoned Gift to Brazil.
Recently leaked conversations show shocking levels of US involvement in Brazil’s Lava Jato corruption case against former president Lula da Silva.
posted by adamvasco at 5:25 PM on March 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

tbf it would only be shocking if the USA were not involved somehow
posted by Bangaioh at 4:30 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Its been quite the week.
The Bolsonazi fired his Defense Minister and so the heads of Army, Navy and Airforce all resigned.
Brazilian military historian Manuel Domingos Neto sees the episode of the past three days as a calculated manoeuvre by the Army to rid itself of any responsibility for the catastrophe Brazil is suffering. “It was an operation aimed at saving the army’s image,” With the army distancing itself, at least publicly, from Bolsonaro, the president is now a cornered beast, says Neto. “He has lost respect, fell in the polls, terrified of having to face an opponent [Lula] who has great popular support. He is a lost man as bodies pile up across the country,”
posted by adamvasco at 10:55 AM on April 2, 2021

Except can't he now appoint (legally or no) new military sycophants to potentially carry out whatever coup he wants?
posted by Rhaomi at 2:49 PM on April 2, 2021