Brasil: He's Back

BRAZIL

He’s Back

The Brazilian army has taken over security in the crime-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

“Police are unable to handle the situation,” Felicya Oliveira, a 31-year-old restaurant worker who often misses shifts because of gunfights outside her door, told Bloomberg. “So let’s see if the military can bring order.”

The government of President Michel Temer, who took office in August 2016 after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff on corruption charges, has given up on reforming Brazil’s overspending pension system, Voice of America reported.

The Beija-Flor samba school won this year’s carnival dance competition with an arrangement that lamented corruption, the Economist wrote. Gang fights and other violence marred the carnival this year, noted Agence France-Presse.

It’s little wonder, then, the Worker’s Party is supporting former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s bid for a third term in office in Brazil’s October presidential election.

Lula presided over what now looks like a golden age in Brazil, when the economy was strong and the government expanded a range of social programs that lifted millions out of poverty.

The fact that Lula’s programs set the stage for much of the country’s misery today – Rousseff was his protégé and Temer is struggling to trim the weighty budget deficits he inherited – matters little to voters who want things to improve.

Writing in the online magazine Jacobin, James N. Green, a professor of Latin American studies at Brown University, noted that around 37 percent of voters still thought the 72-year-old politician should run for office even though a court recently upheldhis graft conviction. He’s been sentenced to 12 years in jail.

Claiming the charges are politically motivated, Lula remains free as he appeals the ruling. He’s launched a series of election “caravans” to take his message to the people. Earlier this month, a judge allowed him to reclaim his passport so he could attend a conference in Ethiopia.

“The word ‘flee’ doesn’t exist in my life,” he told a Brazilian radio station, according to TeleSur, a Venezuela-based, multi-state-funded news outlet with a leftist tilt that favors Lula’s politics. “I believe that I will be a (presidential) candidate because I believe the truth will prevail in the end.”

The next-most popular candidate has a 21-percent popularity rating, Green wrote. Temer, who is not running for reelection, has a 2-percent approval rate. Temer escaped bribery charges, the Guardian explained – arguably a remarkable achievement, given how police have charged and convicted scores of politicians in a series of corruption scandals in recent years.

It’s not clear whether Lula will appear on the ballot or, if he wins, if he could assume office if he’s in jail. But it is clear that Brazilians prefer to go back to the future rather than dwell on the present.