May 13, 2020
“Brazil is completely ungoverned. There is no health policy, no economic policy, Brazil is a ship without a course,” said former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who criticized current President Jair Bolsonaro for his decision to push for economic openness instead of quarantine schemes, which has led to 13,500 deaths from the coronavirus so far. In this regard, he highlighted the policy faced by President Alberto Fernández. “I agree with him 100 percent when he says “the economy we can recover; a human life we cannot”.
Lula pointed to “the lack of leadership” in confronting the pandemic, harshly criticized Donald Trump, and stressed that in the Americas “only Alberto Fernández and our friend the president of Mexico (Andrés López Obrador) are taking care of their people.”
“I dream that we will change the world,” he said when asked what he expects when the pandemic passes. He accused the Latin American elites of having the soul of a “lapdog” and the international powers as only being concerned that their states are able to sell everything and in doing so they are digging their own grave. “There was no other government in all of Brazil’s history that treated businessmen better than us, in which they made more money but still they didn’t defend Dilma, they voted for Bolsonaro because he told them he was going to sell all the state-owned companies,” he claimed.
“Europe and the United States want us to buy all industrialized products from them and sell them only commodities, but we have to industrialize our countries, strengthen the place of the State. Alberto Fernández is right when he says that the first thing is to save the Argentine people,” the former president said.
In the interview with the program Brotes Verdes, Lula that “the only weapon to confront the coronavirus is isolation; it is not possible that people continue to see people die every day because of the pandemic. The only one who was resurrected was Jesus Christ! People do not reappear but the economy does”.
In that sense, he asked himself, “why if we all know that we are at war with an invisible enemy he puts the magnifying glass on the expenses and economic damages, which never happens in warlike conflicts”.
The leader of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) also said that “there is an organized social movement here that believes that Bolsonaro has no competence to continue governing Brazil. And he highlighted that “public opinion polls are showing a large growth in dissatisfaction with Bolsonaro”
He stressed that the current president of the South American giant faces a political crisis of significant proportions for his confrontation with the state governors who do promote policies of confinement in the face of the Covid-19. “I am 74 years old and I have been in politics for 50 of them, I lost three presidential elections and, with the PT, we won four, but I have never seen someone so incompetent at being the head of a country. Someone so rude. Bolsonaro insults women, insults blacks, insults children, insults the UN, insults Argentina, insults Venezuela, insults the media, insults the workers. He does not speak to anyone. Only to the paramilitary bands that surround his children and to his fanatics. Brazil cannot exist like this,” Lula emphasized.
In reviewing the corruption allegations that led him to jail, the former president said he always asked Sergio Moro and the other judges who convicted him to show him “just one piece of evidence of what they claim. I do not ask for two, only one, but they cannot do it because the only objective they had was to prevent me from running for president at all cost because they knew I would have won the election, just as they know I would win if I run in 2022”.
“And are you going to run?”, asked Alejandro Bercovich. “I’m going to be 77 at the time so I don’t think so. The only possibility would be that the political forces of my country desperately need him,” concluded the former president.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latino Americano, North America bureau