Destiny carries with it an ancient doubt that accompanies – like a shadow – those who wonder why we live, who we are and if we have a course to follow in life: “Any destiny, however long and complicated it may be, is valid only for a single moment: the one in which man understands once and for all who he is”. I think the sentence of Jorge Luis Borges – writer, poet, Argentinian who loved the atavistic human doubt linked to the existence of fate – could concern each of us and, perhaps, also Ignatius Lula da Silvaa man who rose from poverty, passed through countless hardships and has now reached his third presidential term in the Republic of Brazil.
Destiny, five years ago, gave a dirty trick to the leader who came from the Brazilian Northeast, who sadly recalls today, April 7, the bitter anniversary of the day when he was unjustly imprisoned for the second time in his singular life. The first political arrest occurred in 1980, when the former worker, who had become a union leader in the industrial region of São Paulo, was imprisoned by the Department of Political and Social Order, the dark political police of the military dictatorship established after the 1964 coup d’état.
In a new scenario of democratic instability, in 2018, 54 years after the coup, the scenario repeats itself: the president of Brazil once again became a political prisoner and locked up in the Superintendency of the Federal Police a Curitiba. Lula is imprisoned, after a summary, arbitrary trial, in which without evidence he was sentenced for corruption to 12 years in prison under the Lava Jatothe judicial investigation directed by the judge Sergio Moronow a senator for the conservative União Brasil party.
All the sentences – considered unjust and partial even by the UN – were totally cancelled by the Federal Supreme Court in 2021, after the president spent 580 days in custody. Lava Jato took shape in 2014 and not only prevented Lula’s candidacy for the 2018 presidential elections, but – even before his arrest – prepared the ground for a political tsunami: to try to eliminate the PT, the Workers’ Party and the 2016 dismissal of the president Dilma Rousseff with a coup, “democratically” called impeachment.
Destiny also pursues the life of the former fighter of the “Vanguarda armada revolucionária” group, an organization that fought the military regime, backed by the American government which, as in the Sixties – according to the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former analyst of the NSA, the American spy agency – spied on the president even during the years of her presidency. In a report published on March 11, 2022 on The world, journalists Gaspard Estrada and Nicolas Bourcier write that the US government influenced the creation of Operation Lava Jato, with a connection to former judge Sergio Moro, one of those responsible for adjudicating the cases. In the text, reporters say the task force has served “various interests, but not democracy”. Years later fate, or maybe not, wanted Rousseff to become the president of the Bank of BRICS today and Lula to beat the former captain Bolsonaro and his deputy, General Walter Braga Netto, in the November presidential ballot.
Whether we like it or not, the future and the past are linked to the present which, free, changes continuously, freeing itself from all the plans desired by men, including those of the Brazilians who continue to be divided, socially and politically, even with Lula as president. I am polarized also due to the insatiable pursuers of “likes”, youtubers, influencers and neuro-marketing experts, who exploit compulsive humanity, spoiled by dopamine and ephemeral sensations, maddeningly stimulated by cell phones that prevent it from being aware of itself .
The right and Bolsonarismo they conspire all the time against Lula, a man who continually surfs the waves of destiny, trying to control it, trying to avoid, like everyone else, the suffering of the past, as was also the case for Rousseff, the victim of conspiracies and betrayals in his coalition government. Who knows what will be behind the controversy that has recently hit the president, due to his comments that question the authenticity of the death threats allegedly made by the CCP – the powerful criminal organization with a Brazilian mafia character – to the former judge of Lava Jato. The Brazilian president is also beginning to be viewed with suspicion by the American president Joe Biden because of its rapprochement with China, with which it has entered into a monetary agreement to emancipate itself from the dollar; but also for not following the policy of the other allied countries of the Americans who blindly follow the dictates of the US president in the war against Russia in Ukraine.
The recent movements of the Brazilian right could suggest the search for a political space in which to act to discredit Lula: if the latter does not soon reach part of the objectives announced in the electoral campaign and does not strengthen his foreign policy, we will hardly know what he will need fate – after surviving so many storms in life. Fears of a new right-wing operation to discredit Lula and his party, the PT, There are and it was the topic of the debate that took place – according to the weekly capital letter – on March 31 in Brasilia, where the party discussed the possibility of a new Lava Jato operation or one scandal on the Mensalão model, to once again discredit the party.
The tone of the debate in Brasilia was one of criticism of the judiciary and the decisions of the party leadership which at various times removed party members on charges of corruption. The fears are well founded if, one day before the Brazilian debate, even Pope Francis commented on the Argentine television channel C5N on the dangers of handling of the judicial system which, in Brazil, sentenced President Lula without evidence. The pontiff added that Dilma is an exemplary woman and the lawfare (war fought through the manipulation of the laws to target a political enemy) opens its path among the media: “One must impede that a particular person comes to an office. Therefore, people disqualify him, attribute a crime to him and then a summary trial is carried out”, declared Francis, the Pope.
Perhaps the destiny of the Pope, Lula, of Rousseff, in short of human beings, repeats itself eternally, as happens in the myth of West? Is the astute mortal – condemned by Zeus to eternally carry the heavy boulder that falls inexorably downwards to the top of the mountain – perhaps the symbol of the alternation of joy and suffering that play with each other until death? Perhaps, also for this reason, as long as we live, it is necessary to break the spell of destiny and, as Borges states: “… it only applies to a single moment: the one in which man understands once and for all who he is”.