Another US slow motion coup in Latin America: astonishing details on how the neoliberal-fascist complex destroyed Leftist leaders in Brazil and brought Jair Bolsonaro to power
Greg
Wilpert of the Real News, spoke with Brian Mier, editor for the website Brasil Wire,
about the recent developments after right-wing extremist Jair
Bolsonaro won the presidential election in Brazil.
Mier
revealed astonishing details on how the neoliberal-fascist complex in
Brazil (fully backed by the US), undermined and destroyed the most
popular leaders of the Workers' Party (PT), Lula da Silva, Dilma
Rousseff and even Fernando Haddad, in order to bring Jair Bolsonaro
to power.
The
purpose of this slow motion coup was what has been always for the US
empire, especially in Latin America: to secure and broaden the
absolute domination of the US and the Western corporate monopolies
and destroy any Leftist resistance against the neoliberal status quo.
As Mier
explained:
On the
eve of the Supreme Court decision - which ruled on whether Lula
should be imprisoned or not, exceptionally, in a moment when his
appeals were still going on, contrary to hundreds of other
politicians who remained free and allowed to run for office in
similar legal situations - he [General Villas Boas] made two
threatening tweets to the Supreme Court, reminding them of their
duties to not let impunity stand, and using kind of cloaked,
threatening language. And then, on the most popular news program in
Brazil, Journal National on TV Globo - which is one of the most
powerful media conglomerates in the world - the nightly newscaster
read the tweets over the air in this kind of somber voice as they
dimmed the lights at the end of the newscast.
So,
during the Supreme Court ruling the next day it was a split decision.
And Rosa Weber, a Supreme Court minister, she announced that she was
going to rule against her basic feeling and side with the majority,
who was going to go against what she really believed, and she was
visibly nervous. And so, she appeared like she was afraid. And so, in
a split decision, with a one-vote majority, Lula was sent off to
prison, and remained running for office, even from behind bars.
And
then, during this period when he announced he was going to run for
president, another judge issued a habeas corpus to release Lula. And
this guy, Sergio Moro, jumped out of his beach vacation, called up
the federal police, called up the court at Curitiba, and blocked Lula
from being freed.
And
then, one week before the election, he leaked incriminating evidence
- it wasn’t incriminating evidence, it was audio from a plea
bargain testimony that already been dismissed for not having any
incriminating evidence, against Fernando Haddad. He leaked that to
Globo one week before the presidential election. And Haddad’s
popularity immediately dropped like 5 or 6 points. And
apparently, according to Bolsonaro’s vice president-elect, General
Hamilton Mourao, Bolsonaro’s people already met with Mourao before
he leaked that incriminating audio to the television networks.
And so,
there’s a sequence of events from the moment when the General
Villas Boas threatened the Supreme Court. Last Sunday he gave an
interview to Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper admitting that he
threatened the Supreme Court. Since his threat, there have been a
series of actions that Sergio Moro has been in the middle of, which
hindered the PT party’s candidacy for the presidency, not least of
which was arresting the leading candidate.
Even
after Lula had been in jail for two and a half months, he still had
more than double the popularity in the polls as this neofascist, Jair
Bolsonaro. So he was removed from running for office, and then Moro
leaked information damaging Lula’s successor’s candidacy, who was
looking like he had a good chance of winning, at that point.
[The
slow motion coup] really started in 2013 with bus fare – the
transportation fare protests that were very quickly manipulated on
the social media by right-wing forces. And that this played into the
election in 2014, when David Axelrod’s former PR firm came down to
work on social media strategies for Aecio Neves, and they built this
platform promising to do the opposite of what the PT government was
doing. Then, when in 2015 economic sabotage started up against the
economy - to destabilize the economy in preparation for a coup in the
same way that the US government and ITT corporation destabilized the
economy of Chile in ’73 - we had Sergio Moro, as part of this
US-backed (Department of Justice-backed) Operation
Car Wash corruption investigation, freeze all
operations of the five largest engineering and construction companies
in the country, generating an immediate 500,000 direct job losses and
millions of indirect job losses on the eve of removing Dilma
[Rousseff] from office.
In
addition to that, the head of the conservative PSDB Party has
admitted that they deliberately tried to sabotage the economy when
Dilma was president. So, we saw the sabotage going on, causing
her popularity to drop. And then, this impeachment over a
non-impeachable offense called fiscal peddling, which was legalized
in the Senate one week after she left office, that she was
subsequently exonerated from. All of this time, the expanded
American state, meaning the media, academic
institutions, think tanks, driving away this whole point that Dilma
Rousseff was somehow involved in the petroleum company
- Petrobras petroleum corruption, which was proven to not be the case
at all.
So
she was removed, and then you look at who started benefiting from it.
The United States corporations immediately started benefiting from
Dilma’s removal, because they started heavily privatizing petroleum
to companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron at sub-market rates, much
below the actual market rate. Companies like Monsanto moved in, and
they relaxed pesticide laws to benefit pesticide companies. The new
coup president Michel Temer announced that he was going to get rid of
Linux, which is what Lula had implemented in the entire governmental
computer systems, and start using Microsoft again. So Microsoft
benefited. And you look at the government of Norway, their national
petroleum corporation purchased a lot of Brazilian offshore petroleum
reserves at sub-market rates, too, and other corporations from
England and Europe. So, when you look at a coup you look at who
benefits from this. Well, if you look at who benefited from it, it’s
mainly US, but also European corporations.
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