For Brazil to have a future again
Michel Temer’s government, born from a parliamentary coup, is a growing threat to national sovereignty. The political and economic forces that support it, tied to foreign interests, brake with the Constitution and democracy to impose an agenda that squanders Brazilian wealth, disintegrates the state and interrupts Latin American integration. The discovery of pre-salt reserves sparked intense geopolitical movements, including espionage and sabotage operations, whose primary purpose is to vie for control of this immense source of development. As usual in our history, an expressive part of our elites has associated itself with such spurious interests. A strategy of destabilization of the constitutional order was therefore put into operation.
Defeated in four consecutive presidential elections, it was clear to the conservative bloc that the odds of its unpatriotic and anti-popular agenda being legitimated by voting were minimal. In order for national sovereignty to be subdued, it was necessary to belittle democracy. It was not just a question of overthrowing a legitimate president and imposing a puppet government. It became indispensable to manipulate the justice system in order to criminalize the Workers’ Party, creating severe obstacles to their political participation and even interdicting it through unjust sentences and impugning measures. For the nation to kneel, democracy had to be marked to die. What we have today is an increasingly aggressive exception regime.
My arrest and the persecution of which I am targeted are part of this process of national submission. It is not enough that I am imprisoned for crimes I have never committed. They also want to exclude me from the electoral contest and silence my voice, trying to intimidate and silence the Brazilian people while their assets are plundered in the open. Temer’s government and its supporters are dedicated to the destruction of historical developmental achievements from our country.
They attacked the pre-salt-sharing regime, weakening Petrobras and nullifying the national content policy that generated jobs in Brazil, and trying to give foreign companies, at low costs, prosperous oil fields and refineries that constitute our passport to the future. This true crime against the country was reinforced by the recent approval by the Chamber of Deputies of a law authorizing the transfer, by Petrobras to private oil companies, of 70% of the state’s exploration rights in pre-salt areas. The sale of the control of Embraer to the American company Boeing composes this same policy of delivery, abdicating one of the most advanced areas of our industry and one of the pillars of our defense strategy, by renouncing the perspective of aeronautical production sovereignty.
The privatization of Eletrobras is another serious example of the policy of national destruction. Butchered and dilapidated, if the plans of the government bloc led by the PMDB and the PSDB is carried out, this historic enterprise will be transformed into a pasture for private greed, while the public power will lose its most important tool for the generation and distribution of electricity. Other attacks organized against the country by the groups that took over the government are the liberation of the sale of land to foreigners and the financing to multinationals with credits from public banks.
It is a question of dismantling the foundations of national development established or rescued during my government and that of President Dilma Rousseff. They do everything to reverse the fundamental structures of independence and sovereignty, opening doors to a neocolonialism that multiplies the wealth of a few from here and abroad, giving only suffering to the working class, the poor of the city and the countryside, the men and women of our people.
This anti-national alliance is composed also by sectors from the Federal Police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary. Sooner or later, we will know the ways in which some State employees have actively participated in the disruption of the oil, infrastructure and nuclear energy industry, causing breakdown and unemployment in sectors so strategic to the country. Under the pretext of fighting corruption, the rich are given a way to get away with plea bargaining, keeping their fortunes, while companies are shattered by the justice system, liquidating their technological, human and financial capital, making ways on our borders, and beyond, to foreign conglomerates.
The foreign policy of the coup also bowed to subservience. The diplomacy we practiced, active and haughty, so brilliantly synthesized by the musician and writer Chico Buarque de Holanda, when he stated that the PT government “did not speak thinly with the United States or coarse with Bolivia”. The Itamaraty (Ministery of Foreign Affairs), commanded by PSDB, became a branch of the State Department, the US Chancellery, abandoning the main programs and institutions of Latin American integration, shattering our tradition in defending the right of peoples to self-determination and ridiculing Brazil as an international actor.
The coup, globally, only brought shame and dishonor to the Brazilians, subjected to the vexation of a government that behaves like refuge for ambitions of other countries. This dramatic and dangerous scenario is one of the factors that led me to restate my name to the Presidency of the Republic. I have the historical obligation, no matter the personal conditions in which I find myself, to lead our country to a return to democracy and sovereignty, with the clear commitment to repeal – by means of a popular referendum – all the measures that are harmful to our independence.
I want to be president again so Brazil can retake its role at the international system and regain respect from the people of the entire planet, returning to the commitment to construct a new international order that is democratic and multipolar, based on the right to self-determination and peace between the nations. I will fight with all my energy, until the last of my days, in these upcoming elections and in all the next battles, to defeat the submissive that have undermined our constitutional and sovereign order.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Former President of Brazil