Janine Jackson interviewed BrasilWire‘s Brian Mier about the Brazilian election for the November 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In the run-up to Brazil’s fateful October presidential election, elite US news media coverage was dominated by the theme that Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, a la Trump, might not accept election results.
In the immediate wake of the remarkable victory of much-maligned progressive candidate Lula da Silva, elite US media coverage was dominated by the theme that Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters, a la Trump, might not accept election results.
Palpably less interesting to these media is how and why Lula won against multiple odds, including the power of incumbency, a sea storm of targeted misinformation and the amplified threats of disruption.
Those priorities, that focus, represent lost opportunities for US citizens to learn, not a gloss about a savior, but to learn about the deep, complex, coalitional work that goes into defeating a neofascist at the polls. And that focus will surely shape coverage of what comes next.
We’re joined now by Brian Mier. He’s co-editor at BrasilWire and correspondent for TeleSur’s news program From the South, author/co-editor of the book Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil, as well as a freelance writer and producer. He joins us now by phone from Recife. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Brian Mier.
Brian Mier: Hi. Thanks for having me back.
(New York Times, 11/10/22—updated headline)
JJ: I see a number of tells in elite US coverage of Lula’s victory. And let’s just start with election integrity. So many words, so many words, like these from the New York Times’ Jack Nicas, their guy on this: “Brazil Election Report Finds No Sign of Fraud, yet Fuels Disbelief.” And the story goes:
Brazil finds itself in a tricky situation. Security experts say its electronic voting system is reliable, efficient and, like any digital system, not 100% secure. Now politically motivated actors are using that kernel of truth as reason to question the results of a vote in which there is no evidence of fraud.
So the current is: Fraud? There was no fraud, but people think there was fraud. It’s a problem how much fraud people think there was. Now to be clear, there’s no evidence of any. But did we mention fraud?
I’m thinking that things are going to change going forward, but right now, while declaring it a non-issue, US media have made the predominant topic, in the immediate wake of the election, the idea that there are a lot of people that think that the election was not legitimate.
Now, not that those denialists aren’t a story, but what the heck?
BM: Yeah. It kind of plays into the entire “Stop the steal,” which American business elites, and the people like Steve Bannon and other far-right actors, Jason Miller, are trying to export to Brazil, have been exporting.
I mean, Bolsonaro started announcing preemptively that there was going to be fraud a year and a half ago. He set up a military commission with cronies in the army to try and do a parallel audit of the election to the work being done by the Brazilian electoral court system, which has been around since 1932.
Even though their job was to find fraud, they found no fraud. And then when they finally released the report after the second-round election, after a couple days of protests on the street that were financed by wealthy truck company owners and things like that, their report also said there was no evidence of fraud, but there could be in the future, maybe, but there wasn’t in this election.
So that’s all. It’s a non-story, as you say. So why do they keep talking about it?
Today (10/31/22)
JJ: Yeah. And keep it in front of people.
Let’s talk about another thing that is very much hidden in plain sight. This is NBC‘s Today show talking about a “stunning political comeback in Brazil”:
Da Silva was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010. He is credited with building an extensive social welfare program and helped lift tens of millions into the middle class. But in 2017, he was convicted of corruption and money-laundering charges. He spent 19 months in prison.
The next thing from NBC‘s Today show is “back here to the NFL.”
The New York Times called him “once-imprisoned former President Lula,” just matter of factly, a person whose “history of scandals has divided voters.”
(New York Times, 10/30/22)
And at their most expansive discussion of this, the New York Times said:
Years after he left office, the authorities revealed a vast government kickback scheme that had flourished during his administration. He was convicted on corruption charges and spent 580 days in prison. Last year, the Supreme Court threw out those convictions, ruling that the judge in his cases was biased, though he was never cleared of any wrongdoing.
And they went on to say that the “scandal” made Lula “a flawed candidate.”
So, I would refer listeners, for the long version, to previous interviews we’ve done on Lava Jato, but for the short version, when I read “Lula was in prison and he was never cleared,” what do I need to know?
BM: That they’re just lying. That’s what you need to know. He was cleared.
And the thing that he was imprisoned over didn’t happen while he was president. It was a trumped-up, fake charge that he had received a free upgrade to a slightly nicer apartment in a building that his wife had been paying installments for for years; it was her purchase. He’d never actually visited the apartment in question. They never came up with any paper trail showing he’d ever received this apartment.
But even so, if it had happened, which there’s no evidence that it did, it was after he left office, so it was impossible to prove conflict of interest.
Money laundering was not a charge that he was ever convicted of. That’s just total disinformation.
Now what happened is that, over the course of the time he was in jail, it was revealed that the prosecution team had been illegally collaborating with agents of a foreign government, the US Department of Justice, using informal communications, bypassing Brazil’s sovereignty laws, in which low-level public prosecutors were supposed to channel all of their communications with foreign governments through the Justice Ministry, but they were just talking one on one.
They had a group of 18 FBI agents meeting with them every 15 days for years, coaching them through how to use different media tactics, and things like that, to smear Lula. What the Supreme Court ruled was that the case had been illegally forum-shopped to a friendly jurisdiction in a state where the alleged crime did not take place. So it was just out of jurisdiction.
The courts also ruled that the evidence that they had presented was tarnished through judicial bias. The only evidence they actually had on Lula to arrest him was one coerced plea bargain testimony from a corrupt businessman who had massive sentence reduction, and was allowed to retain millions of dollars in illicit assets, in exchange for the story he gave. He changed the story three times before he got out of jail. And the court ruled that that was invalid.
And so what it then ruled was that any Lava Jato conviction of Lula would have to be reopened, any charges would have to be reopened, in the proper jurisdiction in Brasilia.
What the New York Times and these other papers are not mentioning is that when all of those charges were attempted to be filed against Lula in the Brasilia court, they were immediately dismissed by the judge, because there was no evidence, and ruled that they could never be opened again.
(Intercept, 6/9/19)
So he wasn’t just released on a technicality. He has been fully exonerated from every charge related to the Lava Jato operation. And we know subsequently from the leaked Telegram conversations that Glenn Greenwald initially revealed in the Intercept, a small portion of them, we know that the judge [Sergio Moro] was bizarrely allowed to oversee the investigation and the trial.
He rejected over a hundred defense witnesses for Lula during the trial. He had been collaborating illegally with the prosecutors, coaching them on how to smear Lula and his family, how to deal with the media, and all of these things, the entire time.
And then immediately after the 2018 presidential election—he illegally leaked information smearing Lula’s replacement candidate, Fernando Haddad, on the eve of the election—immediately after that election, he was awarded a ministry in Jair Bolsanaro’s government. There’s leaked conversations of the prosecuting team from Lava Jato, saying they were “praying to Jesus” that the Workers’ Party would lose that election and that Bolsonaro would be elected.
He’s under investigation for a series of crimes right now, including conflict of interest, accepting a cabinet ministry in a government that he helped put in power using illegal tactics.
So it’s really slanderous to pretend that Lula was convicted and that he just got out on a technicality. That’s slander. If someone said that during the election in Brazil, they would be guilty of electoral crime.
Even the most hostile media groups like Global TV, which cheerled for Lava Jato for years, they had to announce on the air that Lula was totally innocent, there was no charges against him, everything that he’d been accused of was fraudulent, and he was completely free of any kind of involvement in corruption.
So the fact that American papers are still repeating this bogus narrative, with all kinds of disinformation inserted into it, like money laundering? He was never charged with money laundering, or convicted of money laundering, or anything.
What happened was during the week that they launched the charges against Lula, in order to justify transferring the case out of its proper jurisdiction into this friendly court, run by US Department of Justice asset Sergio Moro, in Curitiba, they invented a charge of money laundering, related to Petrobras petroleum company.
(ABC World News Tonight, 10/30/22)
One week after the case was transferred in 2016, they removed it from the charges. And in Lula’s actual conviction, the judge specifically states that there was no money laundering.
So they’re still repeating this fake narrative from 2016 that was used to justify the illegal forum-shopping of the case. It’s irresponsible, because it’s a way of undermining Lula’s victory, which is one of the most impressive political comebacks, I think maybe rivaled only by Nelson Mandela, of the last hundred years.
JJ: Let’s start right there, because we have seen matter-of-fact references to an amazing political comeback from Lula, but somehow it’s still not, yet anyway, the center of the story, that comeback, in the way that one can’t help but imagine that it would be, if Lula were someone that US elites liked.
So we read frequent references to “fifth-grade education,” or in the New York Times, Lula is described as a “former shoeshine boy,” and that all lands very different when we know that they’re talking about somebody that they don’t like, you know?
I mean, ABC News had “Bolsonaro Loses Brazilian Election, Leftist Former President Wins by Narrow Margin.” He doesn’t even have a name.
And I have to wonder why it’s so much more interesting for US corporate media to talk about a monster, you know, than it is for them to explore coalitional, bottom-up work of marginalized people, even when that work is remarkably, historically successful.
Brian Mier: “None of them would ever want a former labor union leader to become president of the US. That’s pretty obvious, right?””
BM: First of all, it’s because none of them would ever want a former labor union leader to become president of the US. That’s pretty obvious, right? I mean, they really downplay the labor union angle here.
Not only did [Lula] lead wildcat strikes in the late ’70s that helped bring down the US-backed neofascist military dictatorship, that was so beloved to Jair Bolsanaro, but he and the people he was working with in the unions, they created a new kind of labor organization, which academics have created a term to describe it, “social movement unionism.”
The other big union federation they used, besides the CUT, which Lula founded, to describe this phenomenon is COSATU in South Africa during the ’80s and ’90s. It’s a concept of labor unionism in which the union doesn’t just fight for wage increases and benefits for its workers, it fights for the betterment of society as a whole, for ending economic injustice as a whole.
So they’ll fight for raising the minimum wage, they’ll go on strike for raising the minimum salary for everyone. That always gets left out of the picture.
He’s one of the greatest union organizers, anywhere in the world, of the last 50 or a hundred years, and he’s a legendary union organizer, but it’s better for them to say he’s a former shoeshine boy, because that makes it easier for them to label him as a “populist,” and not a social democrat, or democratic socialist, who’s read thousands of books, he has this incredible ability to explain concepts from, like, Marx’s Capital in everyday language that poor, illiterate people can understand, concepts like alienation, exploitation and things like that.
They leave that out to make it look like he’s just this ignorant person with a lot of charisma.
JJ: Yeah. And also that he was simply a backlash candidate. You know, the references that I saw to Lula being able to build a broad coalition, the New York Times, I guess it was, said, “The strong opposition to Mr. Bolsonaro and his far-right movement was enough to carry Mr. da Silva back to the presidency.”
PBS NewsHour (10/27/22)
So it’s only being defined negatively and not positively, in terms of people voting for something.
Now, there was one exception to that in terms of US news media coverage, and that was climate. That was one area where media carved out some space to say, you know, “Hey, in terms of humanity, Lula is obviously better.”
And that spurred some of the more humane and better journalism; Jane Ferguson at PBS NewsHour, for example, was one of the few places where you heard actual Indigenous people talk about the meaning of the election for them. Hey, Indigenous people have voices—you wouldn’t know it from US elite media, but NewsHour had some things.
CNN turned the importance of the votes of poor people, the importance of the votes for poor people, and particularly Indigenous people, into the idea that—this just killed me—“the poor and destitute could become Brazil’s kingmakers.”
BM: Great.
JJ: I don’t even know what to say to that, but it’s bizarre, the idea that because people get a vote, and that because there are a lot of poor people, somehow poor people are running the show? To me, that’s just reporters engaging the shadows on the cave wall, just talking about demographics and not talking about human beings.
Reuters (11/16/22)
Finally, on climate, before I ask you, I’m already worried when I see things like Reuters from yesterday, November 16, saying, at COP27, Lula was “greeted like a rock star.”
To me, that’s already the beginning of a kind of diminishment. He’s just about “popularity.” He can’t really do anything. People think of him as a “celebrity” and not quite a politician. And yet, the point is, climate is one area where media seem willing to acknowledge that Bolsonaro was a problem, and Lula is better.
BM: At some point, even the elites have to realize that if they burn down the entire Amazon forest, everyone’s going to die, you know? That’s like 20% of the world’s oxygen supply.
I think FAIR’s pointed this out in the past in multiple articles, like, the one area that the flack machine, or whatever Chomsky and Herman would call it, the manufactured consensus, allows some kind of breathing room for left opinion is in the environment these days.
And you see newspapers like Guardian, which is now more popular in the US than it is in England I think, they’re economically 100% neoliberal. They ran like 35 articles normalizing Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018, between the first and second round elections. They gave him headline space to compare himself to Winston Churchill, and say that the real fascists were the leftists.
They’re not progressive at all economically, but the thing that makes their reputation as being progressive is that they have this emphasis on environmentalism, you know? So you see that in the US as well.
But I think what really happens here, Janine, is that having a clown in power isn’t good for anybody, really, not even for elites. At some point, even US business interests get disturbed by instability generated by this kind of clown in power.
And the idea that there could be this Bill Clinton-style neoliberal candidate that had a chance of taking power from Bolsonaro was just laughable. I mean, the neoliberal parties ended up with 1% and 0% in the first-round elections.
Nobody in Brazil buys that “we need more austerity and privatization” line anymore; it’s dead. So the only person capable of beating Bolsonaro at this time was Lula.
So they begrudgingly accept Lula’s victory, and they have to celebrate his environmental stance, like promising to stop cutting down trees and all of that, which he had a good record on the first time around.
But they’re going to do everything they can, I think—I mean elites, but through the media—to try and undermine and belittle his presidency, so that nobody like him can ever come to power again in the future.
Because in his acceptance speech, the first thing he said is that, “I’m going to eliminate hunger. My No. 1 goal of this administration is that every child, every person in Brazil can eat three meals a day again, because there’s 30 million people passing in hunger right now.”
And imagine any precedents around the world of this: He’s not even in power yet, he’s taking power on January 1. He’s already pushing through a constitutional amendment to remove the neoliberal spending caps on health and education that were pushed through after the coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2017, with a lot of support from the US at that time.
I’ve seen left analysts in the US media saying, “Well, how is he going to govern? How could he possibly govern?”
He’s already almost got a majority in Congress. He’s not even in office yet.
All the stuff they’ve talked about in BBC and in other places about the power of the evangelicals, how the evangelical Christians were going to keep Lula out of office—Bolsonaro’s biggest evangelical supporters are now lining up to align with Lula. The leaders of the biggest evangelical churches, they’re all switching their game. They’re going to end up siding with him.
One thing that people don’t understand in the US about countries that have lots of different political parties and things; there’s 23 parties represented in congress. Imagine if, like in the US, let’s say Biden wins the election, and 50% of the Republican senators and congressmen switch parties to the Democrats.
This is what happens every time someone takes power in Brazil. Half of the opposition politicians switch parties and join up with the person who just took office, because they know that the president is charged with the budget, and they all want more money for their jurisdictions, for their districts, and stuff like that.
So it is always like this. This idea that there would be these huge problems for Lula to govern because the country’s so polarized and blah, blah, blah, it’s all just melting away now.
(France 24, 10/31/22)
JJ: Yeah. The “razor thin” margin of victory, right?
BM: Yeah. Razor thin. It was the first time in history, since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship, that an incumbent has lost reelection. Bolsonaro outspent Lula. In personal donations, he had over 30 times more.
There’s no corporate donations in Brazil, which really helps the elections stay a lot fairer, you know? But from rich individuals, Bolsanaro got 30 times more campaign donations than Lula, mostly from a handful of these big right-wing truck-company owners, and agri-business people who are making money cutting down the Amazon.
And according to Reuters, which is hardly a sympathetic voice to the Latin American left, even Reuters noted that Bolsonaro had channeled 273 billion reais, that’s about $53 billion, of federal funding into strengthening his reelection campaign.
He did that by artificially lowering gasoline and food prices, by lowering that tax; he rerouted money from cancer prevention and treatment into lowering gasoline prices. Fifty percent increase on welfare checks that kicked in two months before the elections, which, cynically, a lot of people thought that was going to throw the election to Bolsonaro, and as it turns out, the poor people didn’t change their votes because of that.
JJ: I think we are going to see US media compartmentalize Lula’s climate efforts, and, given their economic views, say, “Oh, isn’t that a pretty idea? Too bad he’s not going to be able to do it.” That feeds into this whole thing that you’re talking about, about, isn’t it going to be really tough for him to govern?
BM: They’re going to say it’s bad for the economy, probably.
(New York Times, 10/30/22)
JJ: Yeah. Well, let me just say, the more honest talk about what Lula “means” for the US and Latin America, that’s probably going to come later. But there is some writing on the wall.
There was a New York Times piece titled, “What Does Brazil’s Election Mean for the United States?” And it started with, Bolsonaro made baseless claims about the election. But while Bolsanaro’s whole anti-democracy thing was a snag:
Still, the two countries have found common ground in trade policy, with Washington pushing to accelerate Brazil’s bid for membership in the OECD, a 38-member bloc that includes some of the world’s largest economies.
“This process will continue if Bolsonaro is re-elected,” said this source, a professor at a Brazilian university, “But it’s not clear if it will be a priority for Lula.”
I think this is starting to tell us what we can maybe expect to hear more from as Lula’s presidency goes forward, that, “umm, you know, ultimately Bolsonaro was a bad egg, but he did have some geopolitical ideas that align more closely with the US.”
BM: In fact, he was the biggest bootlicker to the United States government of any president in Brazilian history. So there’s a lot of ways they’re going to reframe that, I’m sure.
There is the new Cold War starting up, already in full swing, obviously, and the fact that Lula is going to refuse to take sides on the Ukraine/Russia conflict, and he’s going to maintain good ties with China and refuse to demonize Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, that’s going to annoy a lot of people in Washington.
But I think, for now, the Democrats are just happy that Bolsonaro is gone, because of his relationship with Steve Bannon. I think they’re going to put up with some of Lula’s insistence on maintaining sovereignty, and linking up with other Southern Hemisphere governments, South/South collaboration and things like that, because they’re just so happy that Steve Bannon and his movement have lost a toehold in the Americas.
And I think that US Democrats should study how the Brazilian electoral court system worked and how they defeated these kinds of tactics, because it will help them defeat the right—I’m not saying that Democrats aren’t right, but, you know, to defeat fascists in the upcoming presidential election in two years.
I think they could learn from that, instead of just labeling people and labeling things and saying what went wrong, what Lula’s doing wrong and stuff, why not stop and look and see, what were the tactics that were employed that worked? How is the Lula administration now going to systematically dismantle this fascism? Because it’s already crumbling.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Brian Mier. He’s co-editor at BrasilWire, correspondent for TeleSur’s From the South, author/co-editor of the book Year of Lead. He’s been speaking with us from Recife. Thank you so much, Brian Mier for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
BM: Thanks for having me.
The post ‘Lula’s Victory Is One of the Most Impressive Political Comebacks of the Last 100 Years’ appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2022-11-22T22:45:46+00:00) ‘Lula’s Victory Is One of the Most Impressive Political Comebacks of the Last 100 Years’ – CounterSpin interview with Brian Mier on Brazilian election. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/22/lulas-victory-is-one-of-the-most-impressive-political-comebacks-of-the-last-100-years-counterspin-interview-with-brian-mier-on-brazilian-election/
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