What is now described as the Banestado leaks and the CC5gate is straight out of vintage WikiLeaks: a list, published for the first time in full, naming names and detailing what is one of the biggest corruption and money laundering cases in the world for the past three decades.

This scandal allows for the healthy practice of what Michel Foucault characterized as the archeology of knowledge. Without understanding these leaks, it’s impossible to place in the proper context the sophisticated Hybrid War unleashed by Washington on Brazil initially via NSA spying on President Dilma Roussef’s first term (2010-2014), all the way to the subsequent Car Wash corruption investigation that jailed Lula and opened the way for the election of neofascist patsy Jair Bolsonaro as President.

The scoop on this George Orwell does Hybrid War plotline is due, once again, to independent media: the small website Duplo Expresso, led by young, daring Bern-based international lawyer Romulus Maya, which first published the list.

An epic 5-hour podcast assembled the three key protagonists who denounced the scandal in the first place, back in the late 1990s, and now are able to re-analyze it: then Governor of Parana state Roberto Requiao; federal prosecutor Celso Tres; and police superintendent, now retired, Jose Castilho Neto.

Previously, in another podcast, Maya and anthropologist Piero Leirner, Brazil’s foremost analyst of Hybrid War, briefed me on the myriad political intricacies of the leaks while we discussed geopolitics in the Global South.

The CC5 lists are here, here, and here. Let’s see what makes them so special.

The mechanism

Way back in 1969, the Brazilian Central Bank created what was described as a “CC5 account” to facilitate foreign companies and executives to legally wire assets overseas. For many years the cash flow in these accounts was not significant. Then everything changed in the 1990s – with the emergence of a massive, complex criminal racket centered on money laundering.

The original Banestado investigation started in 1997. Federal prosecutor Celso Tres was stunned to find that from 1991 to 1996 no less than $124 billion in Brazilian currency was wired overseas. Between 1991 and 2002 that ballooned to a whopping $219 billion – placing Banestado as one of the largest money laundering schemes in history.

Tres’s report led to a federal investigation focused in Foz do Iguacu in southern Brazil, strategically located right at the Tri-Border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, where local banks were laundering vast amounts of funds through their CC5 accounts.

This is how it worked. U.S. dollar dealers in the black market, linked to bank and government employees, used a vast network of bank accounts under the name of unsuspecting ”smurfs” and phantom companies to launder illegal funds from public corruption, tax fraud and organized crime, mainly through the Banco do Estado do Parana branch in Foz do Iguacu. Thus the Banestado case.

The federal investigation was going nowhere until 2001, when police superintendent Castilho ascertained that most of the funds were actually landing in accounts at the Banestado branch in New York. Castilho arrived in New York in January 2002 to turbo-charge the necessary international money tracking.

Through a court order, Castilho and his team reviewed 137 accounts at Banestado New York, tracking $14.9 billion. In quite a few cases, the beneficiaries had the same name of Brazilian politicians then serving in Congress, cabinet ministers and even former Presidents.

After a month in New York, Castilho was back in Brazil carrying a hefty 400-page report. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, he was dropped out of the investigation, which was then put on hold for at least a year. When the new Lula government took power in early 2003, Castilho was back in business.

In April 2003, Castilho identified a particularly interesting Chase Manhattan account named “Tucano” – the nickname of the PSDB party led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was in power before Lula and always kept very close ties to the Clinton and Blair political machines.

Castilho was instrumental in the set up of a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission over the Banestado case. But once again, this commission led to nowhere – not even voting a final report. Most companies involved negotiated a deal with the Brazilian Internal Revenue Service and thus ended any possibility of legal action in regard to tax evasion.

Banestado meets Car Wash

In a nutshell, the two largest political parties – Cardoso’s neoliberal PSDB and Lula’s Workers’ Party – which never really faced down imperial machinations and the Brazilian rentier class, actively buried an in-depth investigation. Moreover Lula, coming right after Cardoso, and mindful or preserving a minimum of governability, made a strategic decision of not investigating “tucano” corruption, including a slew of dodgy privatizations.

New York prosecutors duly prepared a special Banestado list for Castilho with what really mattered for criminal prosecution to go though: the full circle of the money laundering scheme, with (i) funds first illegally remitted out of Brazil using the CC5 accounts, (ii) passing through the New York branches of the Brazilian banks involved, (iii) reaching offshore bank accounts and trusts in tax havens (e.g., Cayman, Jersey, Switzerland) and then finally (iv) going back to Brazil as – fully laundered – “foreign investment”, for the actual use and enjoyment of the final beneficiaries who first got the not accounted for money out of the country using the CC5 accounts.

But then Brazilian Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos, appointed by Lula, nixed it. As superintendent Castilho metaphorically puts it, “this, deliberately, prevented (him) from going back to Brazil with the murdered body”.

Well, whereas Castilho never got hold of this critical document, at least two Brazilian Congressmen, two Senators and two Federal Prosecutors – who would later on rise to fame as Car Wash investigation “stars”, Vladimir Aras and Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – did get it. Why and how the document – call it the “body bag” – never found its way into the criminal proceedings back in Brazil is an extra mystery wrapped up inside the whole enigma.

Meanwhile, there are “unconfirmed” reports (several sources would not go on record on this) that the document might have been used for outright extortion of the individuals, mostly billionaires, featured on the list.

Extra sauce in the judicial sphere comes from the fact that the provincial judge in charge of burying the Banestado case was none other than Sergio Moro, the self-serving Elliot Ness figure who in the next decade would rise to superstar status as the capo di tutti I capi of the massive Car Wash investigation and subsequent Justice Minister under Bolsonaro. Moro ended up resigning and is now de facto already campaigning for President in 2022.

And here we hit the toxic Banestado-Car Wash connection. Considering what is already public domain about Moro’s modus operandi on Car Wash, as he altered names in documents with the single-minded objective of sending Lula to jail, the challenge now would be to prove how Moro “sold” non-convictions related to Banestado. With a very convenient legal excuse: with no “body” found (or formally brought back to criminal proceedings in Brazil), no one could be found guilty of murder.

As we plunge into excruciating details, Banestado increasingly looks and feels like the Ariadne’s thread that may reveal the beginning of the destruction of Brazil’s sovereignty. A tale full of lessons to the learned by the whole Global South.

The Black Market Dollar King

Castilho, in that epic podcast, did ring alarm bells when he referred to $17 million that had transited in the Banestado branch in New York and then was sent, of all places, to Pakistan. Castilho and his team found that out only a few months after 9/11. I sent him some questions about it, and he answered, through Maya, that his investigators would dig it all up again, mentioning that a report did indicate the origin of these funds.

This is the first time such information has surfaced – and the ramifications may be explosive. We’re talking about dodgy funds, arguably from drugs and weapons operations, leaving the Triple Border – Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay – which happens historically to be a top site for CIA and Mossad black ops.

Financing may have been provided by the so-called King of The Black Market Dollars, Dario Messer, via CC5 accounts. It’s no secret that black market operators at the Tri-Border are all connected to cocaine trafficking via Paraguay – and also to evangelicals. That is the basis of what Maya, Leirner and myself have already described as Cocaine Evangelistan.

Messer is an indispensable cog in the recycling mechanism inbuilt in drug trafficking. Money travels to fiscal paradises under imperial protection, is duly laundered, and gloriously resurrects on Wall Street and the City of London, with the extra bonus of the U.S. easing some of its current account deficit. Cue to Wall Street’s “irrational exuberance”.

What really matters is free circulation of cocaine – why not hidden in the odd soya cargo, something that comes with the extra benefit of securing the well being of agro-business. That’s a mirror image of the CIA heroin ratline in Afghanistan I detailed here.

Most of all, politically, Messer is the notorious missing link to judge Moro. Even mainstream O Globo newspaper was forced to admit, last November, that Messer’s shadowy businesses were “monitored” nonstop for two decades by different U.S. agencies out of Asuncion and Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. Moro for his part is an asset for two different U.S. agencies – FBI and CIA – plus the Dept. of Justice.

Messer may be the joker in this convoluted plot. But then there’s the Maltese Falcon: There’s only one Maltese Falcon, as the John Huston classic immortalized it. And it’s currently lying in a safe in Switzerland.

These happen to be the original, official documents submitted by construction giant Odebrecht to the Car Wash investigation which have been undisputedly “manipulated”, “allegedly” by the company itself. And “maybe”, in collusion with (then) judge Moro and the prosecution team led by Deltan Dallagnol. Not only, possibly, for the purpose of incriminating Lula and persons close to him, but also – crucially – deleting any mentions of individuals who should never be brought to light. Or Justice. And, yes, you guessed it right if you thought about the (U.S.-backed) Black Market Dollar King.

The first serious political impact after the release of the Banestado leaks is that Lula’s lawyers Cristiano and Valeska Zanin have finally, officially requested for Swiss authorities to hand over the originals.

Governor Requiao, by the way, was the only Brazilian politician to publicly ask Lula, back in February, to go for the documents in Switzerland. It is no surprise that Requiao was the first public figure in Brazil to now ask Lula to make all this content public once the former President gets hold of it.

The real, not adulterated Odebrecht list of people involved in corruption is crammed with big names – including the Judiciary elite. Confronting the two versions, Lula’s lawyers may finally be able to demonstrate the falsification of “evidence” that led to the jailing of Lula but also, among other developments, the exile of Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa, the imprisonment of his VP, Jorge Glas, the imprisonment of Peru’s former President Ollanta Humala and wife and, most dramatically, the suicide of Peru’s former two time President Alan Garcia.

The Brazilian Patriot Act

The big political question now is not to uncover the master manipulator who buried the Banestado scandal two decades ago.

As anthropologist Leirner detailed it, what matters is that the leaking of the CC5 accounts focuses on the mechanism of the corrupted Brazilian bourgeoisie, with the help of their political and judicial partners – national and foreign – to solidify itself as a rentier class, but still always submissive to and kept in check by “secret”, imperial files.

Banestado leaks and the CC5 accounts should be seen as a political opening for Lula to go for broke. This is all-out (Hybrid) War – and blinking is not an option. The geopolitical and geoeconomic project of destroying Brazilian sovereignty and turning it into an imperial sub-colony is winning – hands down.

A measure of the explosiveness of Banestado leaks and CC5 gate has been the reaction by assorted limited hangouts: thundering silence, and that encompasses Leftist parties and alternative, supposedly progressive media. Mainstream media, for whom judge Moro is a sacred cow, at best spins it as “old story”, “fake news” and even a “hoax”.

Lula is facing a fateful decision. With access to names so far shadowed by Car Wash, he may be able to unleash a neutron bomb and pull off a reset of the whole game – exposing a rash of Car Wash-linked Supreme Court judges, prosecutors, district attorneys, journalists and even Generals who received funds from Odebrecht overseas. Not to mention bring back Black Market Dollar King Messer – who controls the fate of Moro – to the frontline. This means directly pointing a finger at the U.S. Deep State. Not an easy decision to make.

It’s now clear that creditors of the Brazilian state were, originally, debtors. Confronting different accounts it’s possible to square the circle on Brazil’s legendary “fiscal imbalance” – exactly as this plague is brought up, once again, with the intent of decimating the assets of the ailing Brazilian state. Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a neo-Pinochetist and Milton Friedman cheerleader, has already warned he’ll keep selling state companies like there’s no tomorrow.

Lula’s plan B would be to clinch some sort of deal that would bury the whole dossier – just like the original Banestado investigation was buried two decades ago – to preserve the leadership of the Workers’ Party as domesticated opposition, and without touching on the absolutely essential issue: how Guedes is selling out Brazil.

That would be the line favored by Fernando Haddad, who lost the presidential election to Bolsonaro in 2018: a sort of Brazilian Bachelet (Chile’s former President), an ashamed neoliberal sacrificing everything to have yet another shot at power possibly in 2026.

Were Plan B to happen it would galvanize the wrath of trade unions and social movements – the flesh and blood Brazilian working classes which are on the verge of being totally decimated by neoliberalism on steroids and the toxic collusion of the U.S.-inspired Brazilian version of the Patriot Act with the military schemes to profit from “Cocaine Evangelistan”.

And all that after Washington – successfully – nearly destroyed national champion Petrobras, an initial objective of NSA spying. Zanin, Lula’s lawyer, also adds – maybe too late – that the “informal cooperation” between Washington and the Car Wash op was in fact illegal, according to decree number 3.810/02.

What will Lula do?

As it stands, as a development of the Banestado leaks, a first Banestado “VIP list” was gathered. It includes the current President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, who also serves as a Supreme Court Justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, bankers, media tycoons and industrialists. Car Wash prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol happens to be very close to the neoliberal Supreme Court Justice in question.

The VIP list should be read as the road map for the money laundering practices of the Brazilian 0,01% – roughly estimated to be 20,000 families who own the close to one trillion dollar Brazilian internal debt. A great deal of those funds had been recycled back to Brazil as “foreign investment” through the CC5 scheme back in the 1990s. And that’s exactly how Brazil’s internal debt exploded.

Still no one knows where the Banestado-enabled torrent of dodgy money actually landed, in detail. The “body bag” was never formally acknowledged to have been brought back from New York and never made its way into the criminal proceedings. Yet money laundering is still in progress – and thus the limitation period does not apply – so somebody, anybody would have to be thrown in the slammer. It doesn’t seem that will be the case anytime soon, tough.

Meanwhile, enabled by the U.S. Deep State, transnational finance and local comprador elites, some in uniform, some in robes, the slow motion Hybrid War coup against Brazil keeps rambling on. And day by day inching closer to full spectrum dominance.

Which bring us to the key, final question: what will Lula do about it?

Pepe ESCOBAR

We were just beginning to hit cruising speed in our wide-ranging, 2 hour and 10 minute world exclusive interview with former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in his prison at the Federal Police building in Curitiba, in southern Brazil.

And then it hit us hard when he told us: “The US was very much afraid when I discussed a new currency and Obama called me, telling me, ‘Are you trying to create a new currency, a new euro?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just trying to get rid of the U.S. dollar. I’m just trying not to be dependent.’”

It was the foundation stone of what would build into a complex, rolling Hybrid War coup, from NSA spying on the Brazilian government and leading national companies, to the Car Wash corruption investigation (now demolished as a monster racket) to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the imprisonment of Lula, and the emergence of the Purveyor of Chaos, Jair Bolsonaro.

My journey started in Cambodia. I had spent hours wandering around Beng Mealea, the jungle squeezing the stony repose of the Angkorian ruins, meditating on the rise and fall of empires. The message popped up on my phone in the dead of night: the request for an interview with Lula, placed five months ago, had been approved. How soon could I get to Sao Paulo?

Angkor Wat, Cambodia (Wikimedia Commons)

From Southeast Asia to South America, via Qatar, to Sao Paulo late the following afternoon. As we landed in the city the sky was literally black. Later I found out why: the mini-Apocalypse Now was a direct consequence of the wild fires in the lower Amazon.

Surveying the World From a Tiny Cell

The next day the three of us (two other journalists) flew to operation Car Wash’s HQ, mockingly referred to by Brazilians as the Curitiba Republic. Our first Uber driver in Curitiba, a city of 1.8 million people, was a Muay Thai specialist cum underground homicide detective. Yes, he had killed people on the job.

Early in the evening, the day before the interview was scheduled, the Brazilian Feds suddenly started deploying stalling tactics. One of Lula’s lawyers, Manuel Caetano, engineered a silky counterpunch, with a twist: the interviews’ approval could go back to the Supreme Court again, and they would reconfirm the green light. The Feds relented.

That evening, we visited the Free Lula Vigil outside the Federal Police building. It has been going on uninterrupted for over 500 days, since April 7, 2018, the day Lula arrived in the prison. The vigil, impeccably managed, has everything from a library to a soup kitchen to an education center. Everyday, hundreds, sometimes thousands of militants and wanderers from all over the nation gather to sing “Good Morning, President Lula”, “Good Afternoon, President Lula”, and “Good Evening, President Lula”. And he listens through the tiny window in his cell that is barely open.

The extra day in this improbable, austere place impersonating an American Midwest city, proud of its green credentials and peopled with Polish and Ukrainian offspring, allowed us to devise a careful division of labor. We were representing the website/You Tube, channel Brasil 247, and in my case Asia Times and Consortium News. Mauro Lopes of Brasil 247 would concentrate on Lula, the man, and how the prison experience had changed him. Paulo Moreira Leite would focus on Brazilian politics. And I would hit on geopolitics and international relations.

The author greets Lula in prison. (Felipe L. Gonçalves/Brasil247)

Caetano, the lawyer, already informed us the man was in high spirits and ready to talk. This was confirmed by master photojournalist Ricardo Stuckert, who’s documented Lula all over the world since the early 2000s and briefed us on technical issues. The three of us had fine-tuned a list of interlocking questions. After less than an hour, we exchanged glances: let him roll. And roll he did.

Plotting With the Generals

Here was a man who had used his season in captivity – like monks in Himalayan meditation caves – to retrace the arc of his extraordinary life journey, plunge deep into himself, and now reclaim his status as one of the (very few) top statesmen of the 21^stcentury. The contrast with the incendiary nullity in Brasilia couldn’t be starker. The three of us instinctively recognized that our conversation was historic in more ways than one, as the whole world, in utter perplexity, tries to understand how a Top Ten economy, and until recently major leader of the Global South, falls prey to proto-fascist brutalism, intolerance, degree zero of the post-politics of hate, and a plunge to the status of a mere neo-colony.

We flew back to Sao Paulo in a hurry with our interview. The online broadcast was scheduled for 9 pm. People all over the country were hangin’ on with their notebooks and smartphones. There was no time for editing. Yet the file was so huge nerves frayed with the considerable delay it took to upload it to YouTube. The rough cut was out only late at night – one camera only (Stuckert’s) focusing on Lula, and  it had dodgy sound (an edited version would be released a few days later.)

The next day I flew to Brasilia – memories of its ultimate 1960s modernist dream long gone — for an event on Saturday featuring the leadership of Lula’s Workers’ Party. But my mind was focused on a nearby meeting in the vice presidential palace going on between Bolsonaro and all the top generals. They were debating the road map ahead. But no leaks whatsoever emerged.

Night brought a private dinner with former President Dilma Rousseff. In a relaxed setting, surrounded by friends, it was  rare to listen to her unplugged: a woman of honor and integrity, drinking a glass of wine or two, cracking jokes. She had learned to “laugh at herself.”

Diplomatically, President Dilma made sure to stress the “decisive contribution by elements from the U.S. judicial-federal police complex” leading to her impeachment. And it was imperative to conduct “at least an investigation of relations between the U.S. Justice Department and the Car Wash operation,” she said.

Amid the bonhomie, something she said stuck out, ominously: “They [the NSA] had a lot of work bugging my own cabinet and Petrobras.”

The impeached Brazilian president. (Anticapatalista.net)

The Hybrid War Lab

Early the next morning, under the fabulous cerrado light which reminds me of the Central Asian plains, I took a moment of reflection staring at the Supreme Court building (“all judges bought and paid for,” as reconfirmed by various sources) and at a Congress prostrated before the lobbyists’ BBB altar (“Bible, Beef, Bullet”). But after passing through Rio, my aim was to hit Macriland in Buenos Aires to see how a businesslike Argentine Bolsonaro – with better manners – had destroyed a nation.

Four years of hardcore neoliberalism worked like a (poisoned) charm, much as Bolsonaro in the Amazon: it set everything in Argentina on fire. No less than 35 percent of the Argentine population is now downright poor. The usual suspects win: banks, shareholders of privatized companies, the El Clarin group – the king of “officialist” media. To eradicate hunger has become the number one electoral promise of the Alberto Fernandez/Cristina Kirchner ticket, poised to win the upcoming October elections. I was unable to talk to former President Cristina – a close friend of Dilma’s – as she was campaigning in Patagonia.

Walking the streets of Palermo Soho, I preferred to talk to people instead of officialdom about the myriad declinations of Macri’s “economic terrorism” – which culminated in a massive, humiliating, unpayable, $57 billion IMF loan. Punctuating my wandering were all those bookshops: Buenos Aires has the highest number of bookshops per resident in the world. I snapped up priceless literature, inevitable reprints of the the Argentine poet Jorg Luis Borges and everything from a history of Peronism to collected interviews by Axel Kiciloff, Cristina’s former economy minister and favorite to become the next governor of the province of Buenos Aires.

And then, it hit me. To borrow from Keats, as re-read by Borges : Was it a vision, or a waking dream? It was instead a living nightmare. I had been transported from the ruins of Angkor to an urban Borgesian labyrinth of despair.

I returned to Sao Paulo for a geopolitical debate with Lula’s former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, the Brazilian Sergey Lavrov (they are close friends, on top of having “invented” the BRICS). We had a fabulous lunch at Nino’s, in the same neighborhood where I grew up in the 1960s – complete with a cacio e pepe that beats anything to be found in Rome. At night I had to be trippin’ again – Go ask Alice!– South America morphing back into Southeast Asia.

I finally got my answer to that secret meeting – poetic justice – back in the Buddhist East, from the brilliant anthropologist Piero Leirner, which went a long way to explain what the military were up to in Brasilia. For them it’s about geosecurity, not geoeconomics and geopolitics. Bolsonaro has been on the record extolling the opening up of the burning Amazon rainforest to U.S. mining giants. The military – constitutionally responsible for Brazil’s sovereignty – wouldn’t mind, as long as they oversee the proceedings.

As Sao Paulo academics were heartily debating, Brazil now seems to be configured as the ultimate global lab for new exhibits of authoritarian neoliberalism. It’s actually nastier: with Western liberal democracy reduced to a mere shell, I see it as the ultimate Hybrid War lab. A Lula in the process of Mandelazation may be even “allowed” to be set free, or placed under house arrest. Because in the end sub-imperial militarism as well as His Masters’ Voice in Washington would have had their way.

What if this is really nothing but a bad dream? As Borges wrote: “We dreamed [the world] resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we consented in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of non-reason to know it is false.”

Watch Pepe Escobar speak about his interview with Lula on CN Live!

consortiumnews.com

The recent executive order signed by US President Donald Trump encompasses all entities that do business with Venezuela, thus creating an embargo that will further isolate the nation, even as the US moves to open a “Venezuela Affairs Unit” unit in its embassy in Bogota, Colombia. The unit would engage in diplomacy with the US-backed Juan Guaido, who is recognised by the Trump administration and its allies as the purported interim Venezuelan president. Its aim, according to US Special Representative to Venezuela Elliot Abrams, is in anticipation of “the day this regime falls”.

In a report titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela”, it is estimated that 40,000 people have died as a result of the US-imposed sanctions from 2017 to 2018. According to the US, Venezuela poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to its national security – unfounded claims as Trump continues with overt attempts to bring down Maduro’s democratically-elected presidency.

Political pressure against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is instigated by the US, yet there is a backdrop of support from its allies in the region and, globally, from countries that spout the democracy line, even if there is nothing democratic about foreign interference.  While mostly in the background in comparison to the US, Canada has facilitated support for the Venezuelan opposition. In Europe, countries which have not explicitly backed Guaido have assumed an allegedly neutral stance which constitutes tacit agreement in terms of opposition support. The EU criticised US sanctions on Venezuela but has also threatened the country with similar punitive measures, as the European Parliament expressed its support for Guaido.

The international community is dominated by discourse that promotes foreign intervention according to the undemocratic agendas of the so-called democratic countries. Venezuela is urgently in need of a unified political strategy that stands in political solidarity against imperialist interests.

BRICS has positioned itself as one such alternative in terms of economic prospects, international security and stability. Russia and China have repeatedly affirmed their support for Maduro. South Africa and India have likewise followed suit. On the other hand, Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro is preventing BRICS from promoting a political discourse that fully repudiates US interference in Venezuela.

Contrary to the rest of the BRICS countries, Brazil recognised Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president and it has expressed support for the international community to pay heed to “Venezuela’s cries for freedom”. Brazil has also adopting measures in line with the Lima Group, as well as prohibited Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials from entering Brazil.

At the G20 summit in Japan, BRICS stated it supported dialogue between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition to reach a solution. Yet the call is marred by the political divide between Brazil and the other BRICS members. This lack of consensus, including the divergence in terms of recognition of who is Venezuela’s legitimate leader, weakens its political diplomacy in the international arena. As Brazil aligns with the US, although reportedly holding back from endorsing military intervention in Venezuela, It is moving away from one of the organisation’s main aims, which is to establish itself in opposition to capitalist and imperialist exploitation.

In a recent interview, former Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva expressed his disappointment at BRICS not moving further politically. “BRICS was not created to be an instrument of defence, but to be an instrument of attack.” If this momentum is to be built, BRICS needs to find equilibrium in its politics, rather than allow itself to be swayed into a seemingly neutral position due to the US allegiances of Brazil under Bolsonaro. It is not enough to preach dialogue like the rest of the international community have done while weakening Venezuela’s autonomy. BRICS must evaluate its relevance, especially when it comes to one of its members demonstrating political opportunism that is contrary to the group’s aims.

Pepe ESCOBAR

Brazil has always been a land of superlatives. Yet nothing beats the current, perverse configuration: a world statesman lingers in jail while a clownish thug is in power, his antics now considered a threat to the whole planet.

In a wide-ranging, two-hour, world exclusive interview out of a prison room at the Federal Police building in Curitiba, southern Brazil, former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva not only made the case to global public opinion for his innocence in the whole Car Wash corruption saga, confirmed by the bombshell leaks revealed by The Intercept, but also repositioned himself to resume his status as a global leader. Arguably sooner rather than later – depending on a fateful, upcoming decision by the Brazilian Supreme Court, for which Justice is not exactly blind.

The request for the interview was entered five months ago. Lula talked to journalists Mauro Lopes, Paulo Moreira Leite and myself, representing in all three cases the website Brasil247 and in my case Asia Times. A rough cut, with only one camera focusing on Lula, was released this past Thursday, the day of the interview. A full, edited version, with English subtitles, targeting global public opinion, should be released by the end of the week.

Asia Times writer Pepe Escobar, front left with scarf, meets Lula in prison. Photo: Editora Brazil 247

Lula is a visible embodiment of Nietzsche’s maxim: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Fully fit (he hits the treadmill at least two hours a day), sharp, with plenty of time to read (his most recent was an essay on Alexander von Humboldt), he exhibited his trademark breadth, reach and command of multiple issues – sometimes rolled out as if part of a Garcia Marquez fantastic realism narrative.

The former president lives in a three-by-three-meter cell, with no bars, with the door open but always two Federal policemen outside, with no access to the internet or cable TV. One of his aides dutifully brings him a pen drive every day crammed with political news, and departs with myriad messages and letters.

The interview is even more astonishing when placed in the literally incendiary context of current Brazilian politics, actively flirting with a hybrid form of semi-dictatorship. While Lula talks essentials and is clearly recovering his voice, even in jail, President Jair Bolsonaro has framed himself as a target of global indignation, widely regarded as a threat to humanity that must be contained.

It’s all about the Day of Fire

Cut to the G7 in Biarritz: at best a sideshow, a talk-shop where the presumably liberal West basks in its lavish impotence to deal with serious global issues without the presence of leaders from the Global South.

And that brings us to the literally burning issue of Amazon forest fires. In our interview, Lula went straight to the point: by noting the absolute responsibility of Bolsonaro’s voter base.

Yet the G7’s offer of an immediate $20 million aid package to help Amazon nations to fight wildfires and then launch a global initiative to protect the giant forest barely amounts to a raindrop.

[Brazil, after this article was written, rejected the proffered aid from G7 countries, with a top official telling France’s President Macron on Monday to take care of “his home and his colonies,” AFP reported. “Maybe those resources are more relevant to reforest Europe,” Onyx Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, told the G1 news website. “Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a World Heritage site. What does he intend to teach our country?” He was referring to the fire in April that devastated the Notre-Dame Cathedral. “Brazil is a democratic, free nation that never had colonialist and imperialist practices, as perhaps is the objective of the Frenchman Macron,” Lorenzoni said. -eds.]

A fire burns out of control after spreading onto a farm in Nova Santa Helena in northern Mato Grosso State, in the southern Amazon basin in Brazil, on August 23, 2019. Photo: Joao Laet / AFP

Significantly, US President Donald Trump did not even attend the G7 session that covered climate change, attacks on the biodiversity and oceans – and Amazon deforestation. No wonder Paris simply gave up issuing a joint statement at the end of the summit.

In our interview, Lula stressed his landmark role at the Conference of Parties (COP-15) climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Not only that, he told the inside story of how the negotiations proceeded, and how he intervened to defend China from US accusations of being the world’s largest polluter.

At the time Lula said: “It’s not necessary to fell a single tree in the Amazon to grow soybeans or for cattle grazing. If anyone is doing it, that is a crime – and a crime against the Brazilian economy.”

In a sharp contrast with Lula, Bolsonaro’s project actually amounts to a non-creative destruction of Brazilian assets such as the Amazon for the interests he represents.

Now the Bolsonaro clan is blaming the government’s own Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI, in Portuguese) – the equivalent of the National Security Council – led by General Augusto Heleno, for failing to evaluate the scope and gravity of the current Amazon forest fires.

Heleno, incidentally, is on record defending a life sentence for Lula.

A Brazilian protests in Curitiba on August 23, 2019, against the spate of forest fires in the Amazon, with images of the people he blames: US President Trump and Brazilian President Bolsonaro. Photo: Henry Milleo / dpa

Still, that does not tell the whole story – even as Bolsonaro himself also kept blaming “NGOs” for the fires.

The real story confirms what Lula said in the interview. On August 10, a group of 70 wealthy farmers, all Bolsonaro voters, organized on WhatsApp a “Day of Fire” in the Altamira region in the vast state of Pará.

Lula was evidently well informed: “You just need to look at the satellite photos, know who’s the landowner and go after him to know who’s burning. If the landowner did not complain, did not go to the police to tell them his land was burning, that’s because he’s responsible.”

On the road with the Pope

A vicious, post-truth, hybrid-war strategy may be at play in Brazil. Two days after the Lula interview, a fateful paella took place in Brasilia at the vice-presidential palace, with Bolsonaro meeting all the top generals including Vice President Hamilton Mourao. Independent analysts are seriously considering a working hypothesis of the sell-out of Brazil using global concern about the Amazon, the whole process veiled by fake nationalist rhetoric.

That would fit the recent pattern of selling the national aviation champion Embraer, privatizing large blocks of pre-salt reserves and leasing the Alcantara satellite-launching base to the United States. Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon is definitely hanging in the balance.

Considering the wealth of information in Lula’s interview, not to mention his storytelling of how the corridors of power really work, Asia Times will publish further specific stories featuring Pope Francis, the BRICS, Bush and Obama, Iran, the UN and global governance. This was Lula’s first interview in jail where he has felt relaxed enough to relish telling stories about international relations.

What was clear is that Lula is Brazil’s only possible factor of stability. He’s ready, has an agenda not only for the nation but the world. He said that as soon as he leaves, he’ll hit the streets – and cash in frequent flyer miles: he wants to embark alongside Pope Francis on a global campaign against hunger, neoliberal destruction and the rise of neo-fascism.

Now compare a true statesman in jail with an incendiary thug roaming his own labyrinth.

asiatimes.com