Condemnation of Former Socialist President for Corruption in a Traditionally Corrupt Brazil

By Julio Severo

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been condemned on corruption charges. His condemnation carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Lula

Lula, who served two terms in office (2003-2010), had campaigned on a platform of honesty, in a nation plagued, since its birth 500 years ago, by corruption.

There is a culture of corruption in Brazil that is evident not only in politics, but also in people’s behavior. When a truck capsizes in a crash, often the reaction of the local population is to loot it.

Lula promised to bring into earth a paradise of honesty in Brazil, but what he did was to capsize the Brazilian State in a greater moral and ethical disaster. He eventually brought into a spotlight his own corruption. He was condemned because he received millions of illegal dollars for personal use.

He was the man whom former U.S. socialist Barack Obama called “the most popular politician on Earth.” He was featured in Time’s 2010 The 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Yet, his socialist politics threw Brazil into a quagmire of moral and economic corruption. Not that Brazil had no corruption before. Brazil was essentially colonized by criminals from Portugal, which chastised the colonial Brazil with excruciating taxes, which continue an excruciating chastisement on Brazil even today.

Lula’s socialist politics, even though mocking U.S. imperialism (the conservative aspects of America), accelerated the Brazilian cultural and legal importation and assimilation of many left-wing items from the American culture, including on abortion and the homosexual agenda. In fact, the Lula administration was one of the strongest allies of the Obama administration at the United Nations on the defense of abortion and the homosexual agenda.

In 2006 the late Calvinist theologian Harold O. J. Brown invited me to write an extensive feature report in his The Religion & Society Report. The report, titled “Behind the homosexual tsunami in Brazil,” dealt with Lula administration’s obsessive politics advocating the homosexual agenda. Brown wanted my report to show to the conservative world the Lula that the mainstream media did not show. I disclosed then to the American conservative public who Lula actually was.

Besides, the Lula administration was hostile to Israel. Such hostility is not new in Brazil, where the Catholic culture traditionally does not sympathize with Israel. All the Catholic Latin America does not sympathize with Israel. So it is no surprise the first Latin American nation to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is a country that is trying to leave Catholicism behind: Guatemala, which has an evangelical president and whose population is 50 percent Protestant (especially Pentecostal and charismatic).

Lula, who founded the Workers’ Party, with the kind assistance of Catholic bishops, has seen his party shipwreck in corruption. Several of the most prominent leaders of his party are in jail.

All of them deserve their fate. Socialism and corruption are inseparable.

Yet, in the context of the Brazilian culture, corruption, which exists long before socialism, is an epidemic problem in the behavior of politicians and the people, probably also fueled by the traditional heavy taxes and a Christian culture based on mostly nominal Catholic values.

Corruption is rampant in Brazil.

The successor of Lula in the Brazilian government was socialist Dilma Rousseff, a leading member of Workers’ Party. Her administration (2010-2016) was plagued by corruption and she was impeached in 2016.

Her impeachment was made possible because Congressman Eduardo Cunha, a Pentecostal, fought against her agenda and her corruption. While she was pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality, he was pro-life and pro-family.

She fell. And next, he also fell, and today he is jailed on minor corruption charges — which are vastly lesser than the charges against Lula and Rousseff. Yet, he was arrested as soon as he was accused, while Rousseff remains free, and Lula is not jailed, even though he has been very tardily condemned by a court.

Even Sergio Moro, the judge who has condemned Lula and Cunha, does not have escaped the blemish of “corruption.” Brazilian judges who have no house or apartment receive a housing aid from the government that, in Moro’s case, amounted to thousands of dollars. The problem is: He had a house during all the years he received the housing aid.

Lula cannot accuse Moro of corruption because during his two terms as Brazil’s president, he could have terminated the immoral house aid for judges, but he did not so. Besides, Moro’s moral “corruption” pales in comparison to Lula’s corruption.

Moro’s case perfectly exemplifies the Brazilian quagmire: Corruption in the Brazilian culture touches everybody and everything.

A perfectly honest judge would never accept a housing aid when he already has a house.

A perfectly honest people would never elect Lula.

Of course, as a Pentecostal, Eduardo Cunha also knew that corruption is wrong. His activism as a congressman was so fundamental for Rousseff’s impeachment and the promotion of pro-life values that the Workers’ Party labeled him in 2015 as the most dangerous man in Brazil! He was the only conservative leader mentioned nine times in a strategic guide of Workers’ Party on how to fight right-wingers, while Jair Bolsonaro was mentioned just one time.

Corruption is in the Brazilian DNA since Brazil’s birth. Even evangelical politicians do not escape its tentacles. In the traditional survival efforts to avoid excruciating taxes inherited from a Portugal that exploited and abused Brazil, Brazilians continue perfecting their survival efforts and the government continues exploiting and abusing Brazilians through excruciating taxes.

Cunha was quickly condemned because he had secret accounts in Swish banks — to protect his money from excruciating taxes. There are no Brazilians who do not want to be free from such oppressive taxes, which are also corruption. High taxes are a powerful enemy of the Brazilian economy, of the Brazilian people and free enterprise. Brazil is always in poor economic condition because of high taxes.

An American once asked me how to vote in this context, as corruption is rampant. I answered that there is no option: Or you elect a pro-abortion corrupt candidate or a pro-life corrupt candidate.

Corruption is in the DNA of the Brazilian politics, culture, society and, above all, the excruciating taxes.

Lula and his socialist comrades fully deserve their condemnations because they amplified the exploitation of an exploitative political system inherited from Portugal 500 years ago.

Do Moro and Cunha deserve a condemnation? I do not think so, because they just exemplify that corruption is so rampant in the Brazilian history and culture that no one goes untouched. They should be given an opportunity to correct themselves.

In comparison to Lula, whose corruption involved millions of dollars and sank Brazil in greater corruptions that deprived the Brazilian economy from billions of dollars, Moro and Cunha are saints.

Brazil, the largest Catholic nation in the world, colonized by criminals, needs to know the liberating power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to make Brazil free of spiritual and moral slavery among its people and politicians. Without Jesus, there is no solution.

About 500 years ago, the first Protestant service in the Americans was held — exactly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a privilege. But Catholics led by Jesuits and its machine of the Inquisition were quick to torture and kill the first Protestant missionaries to Brazil. They had been sent by Calvin.

About 400 years ago, the Netherlands formed its first Protestant colony in Northeast Brazil. In this colony, Catholics, Protestants and Jews enjoyed the first system of religious freedom in Brazil. But again Catholics, led by Jesuits and its machine of the Inquisition, were quick to kill and expel the Dutch “heretics,” and Brazil returned to its routine of corruption, excruciating taxes, Inquisition, persecution of the Jews and no religious freedom. The surviving Brazilian Jews, transported by the Dutch Protestants, headed to New York, where they established a flourishing Jewish community and the first robust financial system in New York.

Brazilian Catholics, oppressed by the Catholic Portugal, could have given these Jews and the Dutch Protestants freedom, and they would have established in Brazil, not New York, their financial system. The opportunity the Catholic Brazil rejected, the Protestant America welcomed and was blessed. Northeast is today one of the most cursed and poorest regions in Brazil.

Brazil could have become what America became: powerful. But Catholic corruption hindered Brazil from prospering.

In the Dutch Protestant colony in Northeast Brazil, the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, erected in 1636, was the first synagogue built in the Americas, which was eventually closed, because the Brazilian Jews had to flee to New York to save their lives from the Jesuits and their Inquisition.

Even today, historians recognize that the most important progress Brazil had in culture, architecture, religious freedom and non-persecution of the Jews was during the Protestant Dutch administration in Northeast Brazil.

All that is left is a sad memory. Brazil has today the Museum of the Inquisition to remind Brazilians of the horrors Brazilian Jews suffered from Jesuits, and Pernambuco, a state in Northeast Brazil, has a Memorial Day of Jewish Victims of the Inquisition.

The Gospel brings transformation, but Brazil preferred corruption, excruciating taxes, Inquisition, persecution of the Jews and no religious freedom.

Who can say that Brazil does not deserve what it is suffering?

Corrupt Lula is a result of the Brazilian DNA.

Moro’s opportunism comes also from this DNA.

Cunha’s minor involvement in corruption has also the same cause.

In fact, Jair Bolsonaro, who is today a candidate for the Brazilian presidency representing right-wingers, said years ago: “I evade all taxes that I can.” He said that he did it for survival and also because politicians use taxes for corruption, and he advised the public to evade too. Cunha seems to have followed his advice.

My worry about Bolsonaro is not tax evasion, but the Inquisition and its horrible marks against the Jews in the Brazilian history. Bolsonaro has praised a revisionist of the Inquisition. This is very worrying because there is an increasing Brazilian movement of pro-Inquisition right-wing Catholics.

In the past, Bolsonaro praised Lula as an honest politician!

Bolsonaro was not arrested for his tax-evasion comment. But Cunha is jailed for it.

While Lula and Rousseff are not jailed for his big crimes, Cunha is. It seems that Cunha’s real “crime” — opposition to abortion and the homosexual agenda in a corrupt and politically correct Brazilian culture and be the number 1 enemy of Brazilian left-wingers — was worse than all Lula’s socialist crimes.

Portuguese version of this article: Condenação do ex-presidente Lula por corrupção num Brasil tradicionalmente corrupto

Source: Last Days Watchman

Recommended Reading:

Lula, the Ugliest Face of “the Brazilian Way of Doing Things”

Amid Crisis in Brazil, Evangelicals Emerge as the Main Conservative Power