No, no, Lula was not the most important president of the whole history of Brazil, which was the most unequal country in the most unequal continent of the world, but which has made an exit, for the first time, from the United Nations Map of Hunger, and has significantly decreased its inequalities, social exclusion, hunger, poverty and destitution. He has founded a party to assault the Brazilian State, which itself is not really a party, but a gang which practices generalized corruption.

Lula was not born in the poorest region of Brazil, nor was he the union leader who led the most important strike against the military dictatorship, nor the founder of the most important political party of Brazil. Even less was he the most successful and prestigious president in the history of the country.

 

Cristina (Fernández), in her time, along with Néstor (Kirchner), were not the ones who saved Argentina from the worst crisis of its history, without making the poorest bear the weight of this recuperation. Nor did she diminish the inequalities imposed by decades of anti-popular policies, nor did she save the Argentine State, dilapidated by so many oligarchical governments. She had simply put into practice populist policies, which had improved the lives of some, as they say.

Rafael Correa was not a great economist, who had led the citizens’ opposition to more than one neoliberal government in Ecuador. Nor had he substantially improved the conditions of life of Ecuadorians, nor rescued the legitimacy of a State destroyed after so many neoliberal governments. Nor was he the most popular and internationally prestigious president, for the government’s work in education, public infrastructure, and the processes of regional integration.

No, Lula, Cristina and Correa have been simply evildoers, who misappropriated the State with demagogic promises to a great number of people in the most unequal continent in the world. Those improvements could hardly resist a good fiscal adjustment that will plunder their rights, employment and hopes.

There is no way to compare their governments with those that followed, because their populism has remained in the consciousness and the memory of the people. The only way to put them in their place is to transform them into evil-doers, practitioners of administrative irregularities, for their personal gain, with judges that transform laws into instruments of political persecution, that judicialize politics, in an attempt to wipe out all that has been done by those governments, so that they disappear from the heads and the hearts of the people.

Lula is imprisoned and was condemned by a trial without a crime and without proof. They want to prevent him from being a candidate, for all the damage that he has supposedly done to the country and the Brazilian people. What’s more, he persists as the leading candidate in all the opinion surveys, showing how the “evils” that he has done to so many have left indelible traces in the conscience of so many people.

Cristina responds to trials for what she did in government and for what they say she did. They try to always maintain a shadow of suspicion, since the only way they believe they can defeat her is by maintaining levels of rejection, with accusations without proof, with calumnies without any basis.

In the case of Rafael Correa they have just ordered his preventive detention. He is criminalized because they cannot destroy his image in the memory of the people.

All these popular leaders are victims of the most crude campaigns of calumnies, seeking to destroy reputations built on popular, national, democratic policies, defending their countries and their peoples.

The goal is to wipe out everything that Latin American countries have lived through in this century and the only way to do it is to criminalize their leaders. Judges seek to deprive the people of the right to democratically decide the destiny of their countries. Imagine Lula as a candidate for the presidency of Brazil! Imagine the Argentine people deciding whether they prefer what Cristina’s government did or what is being done by the government of the IMF! Imagine the Ecuadorian people judging what Rafael Correa brought to Ecuador and what his crude accusers are doing!

Lula, Cristina, Rafael Correa are victims of political persecutions promoted by the media, by arbitrary judges, against the will of their people. To achieve their ends, their persecutors have to destroy democracy, judicializing it, since otherwise they know that the people of those countries will say that under the governments of these leaders they have lived the best moments of their lives and that they desire to retake this path of solidarity, justice and dignity.

04/07/2018

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop and Joan Remple Bishop)

-Emir Sader, Brazilian sociologist and political scientist, is Coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policy with the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).