Dilma Rousseff: "We are removing Brazil from the map of hunger and misery, it hurts me to come back now"

The former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, participated in the launching of the committee "Lula Libre and Justice x Marielle"during his visit to Argentina, where he claimed that the former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva "is a political prisoner".

About his dismissal, he said: "I have no doubt that the dismissal was not made simply because I was a woman, but its form was designed to take into account all the prejudices and hatred caused by a woman. " He added, "If it had been against a man, it would have been different."

Regarding Lula's procedural situation, he said that it "represented a democratic struggle that wanted to end the persecutory mania of turning political opponents into enemies and making them, from there on , an enemy justice ". And he explained that he "uses the law as a weapon of destruction of an adversary against whom they are trying to demoralize first".

– How does this continue and when does the campaign you are advancing to make Lula's situation internationally visible?

– In several countries of the world, such as Spain, France, Portugal and England, a Free Lula and Justice campaign for Marielle is underway, which is very important because they represent both a clear manifestation of what is happening in Brazil. Lula is a political prisoner. Lula lately, since the 2016 indictment, no offense of responsibility, after this indictment, has begun to be persecuted and they have systematically increased the level of persecution. The first phase of the persecution was an arbitrary prison that was called driving with restraint.

-It is necessary to take someone who at one point refused to testify at an interrogation. Only that Lula has never been called to testify, so he never refused. And they took it to create the climate of scandal and therefore badumed that it would compromise its popularity. And since he did not compromise her, they raised the level of persecution. They accused him, and then they tried him. Then they took this trial to the second instance. Before reaching the second instance, they amended the agreement on a constitutional clause that a person can only be detained if all the proceedings have been exhausted.

-Instance that has been modified.

– They changed this understanding and the person was tried by a collective court, not just by a judge. This led to Lula's arrest before the elections in order to prevent him from becoming president, since he had 40% of the intention to vote in the last polls. They realize that they can still be jailed and they have changed the rules of the game so that they can not run for a month before the elections. Since it was not enough to prevent him from standing, because he had the opportunity to transfer votes for the candidate of the Workers Party, Fernando Haddad, they forbade him to speak, he can not grant interviews to any means of communication.

– He could write, he could not divulge his writings during the election period, while, despite that, he transfers many votes, Fernando Haddad develops to the point of having the opportunity to go to the second round. It reaches 47 million votes, accounting for 45% of the electorate. But throughout the post-election period until today, Lula was banned from speaking.

-They came out as a candidate and they came out of the countryside.

-They were forbidden to speak after the elections because it represents a threat. The Supreme Court is censoring two right-wing media outlets, and the press is mobilizing against censorship of the press and suspending censorship against the two far-right bodies. And it is very strange that the organs of the far right can not be censored but that Lula can be censored, so they suspend the censorship of Lula, and he speaks today to Folha do San Pablo and The country Brazil.

– Do you think Lula will be released?

– The idea that follows is that Lula is not free because this reduction of sentence, according to our vision, concerns a certain evaluation. The day after this decision, the second trial against Lula increased her sentence from 9 to 11 years and their sentence fell to 8 years. Their idea is to pretend that justice works for Lula, normalize the situation and, on the other hand, set the stage. to a kind of perpetual prison which is the multiple condemnation of Lula in very strange processes. Very similar to Triplex, in which there is no act that explains why a bribe was paid. The judge said that what Lula had done was an indefinite act. Have you ever seen a crime characterized by an indeterminate act?

-The department (of Lula) to which they refer was given as collateral by the company to obtain a loan. After a year or two, they put that floor in an auction. I have never heard that a bank receives as collateral a department about which it has a doubt, that the one who will get the loan does not own the property of the collateral. Only this one, and it seems like they say that. Lula has been condemned for this and can have no doubt about the manipulation of her processes. They manipulated by speeding up the process, or they would delay it, because they knew they would lose certain decisions and they did not put them on the court's agenda.

-Why do you think that justice has applied this manipulation in the case of the former president?

– There is a situation of extreme gravity in Brazil with regard to Lula. It represents a democratic struggle to end the persecution mania of turning political opponents into enemies and making enemies justice, using the law as a weapon of destruction for an adversary they are trying to first to demoralize. If they do not succeed, they condemn it. This mechanism that many people call tariff of the lawthe use of the law as a weapon of political destruction represents a kind of decrease of democracy in a country. Lula also represents another possible world in which Brazilians had access for the first time to income, health, education and development.

-And what do you think of the situation of PetroBras?

– Petrobras discovered the pre-salt. He wants to attack Petrobras to gain access to his technologies. So much so that those who sentenced him to Lula have negotiated with the US Justice Department a fine of $ 2.5 billion for Petrobras, which would go to the Lava Jato Foundation, the body of justice instructed to investigate Lula. In order for them to use two billion resources to fight corruption, a lot of money has to be used by a private foundation and at the same time to send information about Petrobras to the US Department of Justice.

– What is the connection with the case of Lula?

-Lula also states that it is possible to grow, develop and do social justice by reducing inequalities, and that it is also possible to be an international partner of several countries without being subject to no other nation, and that we have given importance to Latin America, Africa and the G20. and the Brics. Lula represents an independent foreign policy that does not submit to any power.

-As a former president, what is hurting you the most in Brazil with the Bolsonaro presidency?

What hurts us the most is getting Brazil out of the UN hunger map for countries, which indicates the number of people who are hungry and in extreme poverty or poverty. misery. The Lula government and mine, with systematic policies in 2014, allowed us to get Brazil out of the UN hunger map. And it hurts me, because now we are coming back to this map because we are moving back to overcome extreme poverty. It hurts me a lot: all social policies are down.

-Add with the distribution of remedies for chronic diseases. What is absurd, is that it is more serious and more expensive to treat a pressure spike in a hospital when the person does not have the resources to buy remedies implementing subsidy policies allowing the person to access it. In addition to being more humane, it is more effective because it spends less and puts less pressure on the care it is necessary to provide at the hospital level when free remedies for hypertension and diabetes are given to patients. people with chronic diseases, which represents a range of services. older and poorer people.

-How do you badess the current context of Petrobras?

-I am extremely worried because I think that they will privatize Petrobras. I do not think it's an easy task, because it's a Brazilian resource that was lost here, because there was one company, YPF, and two others, Gas del Sur and Gas del Norte, that would be big corporations oil and gas. I am frozen when I see that Argentina has supply problems because it has no oil or gas, since I remember perfectly, because that's my professional field, far bigger than Petrobras was YPF.

– Would you like to be president of Brazil again?

-No, it's not in my diary. Because there are things that are done that are not necessary to continue to do. I am no longer the right candidate to be President of Brazil at this historic moment. There is no esoteric reason.

– Being a woman makes a similar accusation more difficult?

Being a woman is always more difficult because we are still living in a paternalistic, macho and often misogynistic society. And there are very clear features of this process. I remember perfectly well that one of the uses they used to try to destroy my image was to say that I was a "very tough" woman. Men are called "very firm". Yes, I am very hard because I am surrounded by many gentle men, kind and gentle, very calm in politics. Unless you believe in fairy tales and you can believe in a story of them.

-What else do you remember in this sense?

– They said that she was a woman who loved to work, who was obsessed with work and who forced everyone to work. If he was a man, they would say that he was very hardworking, very creative, very inventive. It's a game that has to do with how this story of women is told. In my case, a person evaluated these messages with a very misogynistic meaning and, at the same time, a double meaning. This treatment is cultural. I have no doubt that the dismissal was not done simply because I was a woman, but its form was designed to take into account all the prejudices and hatred aroused by a woman. If it had been against a man, it would have been different.

-Because it was neither a man nor a woman, it was a question of breaking with what was happening. Brazil was a country that, unlike all the rest of Latin America, had instruments to develop autonomously. It had an investment bank with more funds than the World Bank, which is the BNDS, a state-owned company the size of Petrobras, another the size of Eletrobras and recently sold to Boeing, which was Embraer.

– Do you maintain that your impeachmet had to do with decisions in this sense?

-They knew we would never allow a sale of these. The interest in getting me out of government was because they had lost four elections and thought they had no chance on a fifth. As he told Pinochet Friedman, the pope of neoliberalism, "he has to face a crisis, wait for the crisis and make it an opportunity, create the conditions for a project to change the situation".

– The current political process was a neoliberal plan?

– They made a project of privatization, destruction of labor rights, labor rights. They are now trying to complete this process by privatizing pensions, ending the distribution system and moving to the capitalization system, which has plunged Chilean pensioners into a state of extreme poverty. We find ourselves in a situation where Brazil has also tried to change geopolitically, not as an ally, but subject to Trump's policy.