“They tried to bury me alive and here I am,” Lula da Silva told the giant crowd gathered in São Paulo, Sunday night, Oct. 30, after it was officially announced that he had defeated incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, 50.9% to 49.1%, in yesterday’s second and final round of Brazil’s presidential election. The former two-term President (2003-2010) had been framed and jailed in 2018 on blatantly fraudulent corruption charges by the Anglo-American interests running Brazilian judge Sergio Moro’s “Lava Jato” operation. He was released in March 2021, when the Supreme Court threw out the corruption charges.
Lula’s victory has big implications for Brazil’s role in the world at this historic moment, both as a member of the five-nation BRICS grouping, now a strategic factor in the fight to found a new international economic architecture, and for Ibero-American regional integration within the developing new paradigm. While Bolsonaro did not formally pull Brazil out of the BRICS, he downgraded its significance. But he did withdraw Brazil from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), thereby sinking the latter entirely.
By contrast, President-elect Lula met immediately on Monday morning, Oct. 31, with Argentine President Alberto Fernández in São Paulo. “We spoke more of the future than the past,” Fernández reported afterwards. He said integration was high on their agenda, including Argentina’s intent to join the BRICS, and how to advance his efforts with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to reunify the continent. They met alone for 90 minutes, and continued talking during a working lunch held with key officials and advisors from both countries. Most interesting, Argentina’s Infobae reported that the possible creation of a single currency for trade between the South American nations was to be discussed during the luncheon.
The closeness of the election, however, has created the opportunity for the Anglo-American axis to unleash an operation to destabilize Brazil at this crucial juncture, with the hope of pinning down this BRICS member and making it impossible for Lula to govern a polarized and divided country.
While Lula received congratulations from the heads of state of India, Russia, China, France, the U.K. and the U.S., and many of the Ibero-American nations, as of Oct. 31 outgoing President Bolsonaro had not conceded the election. His Minister of Communications announced late in the day that Bolsonaro will address the nation on Tuesday, Nov. 1, but said nothing about what he would say.
Meanwhile, early Monday morning, charging election fraud, truckers and agricultural interests backing Bolsonaro launched an operation to “shut down Brazil” by blocking highways. By the evening, key highways and roads in at least 17 of Brazil’s 26 states had been blocked, with protestors and many social media sites backing Bolsonaro calling for military intervention to stop the “fraud.” Perhaps most telling as to the intentions of London’s “let’s create chaos” crowd, the intellectually mediocre Steve Bannon, who has a long-standing and close relationship with one of Bolsonaro’s sons, said after the first round of the elections on Oct. 2, that a Bolsonaro defeat was “mathematically impossible.” After Sunday’s elections, he told a Gettr podcast that “Bolsonaro can’t concede.”
