Like eight of the last ten Brazilian presidents, our president is not fluent in English. Yet this is the government with the strongest alliance with the United States in decades. Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a conservative and an assumed Christian and it changes everything! It is worth clarifying to the foreign reader that in the last 24 years Brazil had been governed by different shades of left with different MDB and PSDB parties – which we could classify as center-left and left-wing radicals of the PT (Workers Party) for the last 16 years.
Perhaps you know the most popular of these socialists who ruled Brazil, former President Lula da Silva, he was able to elect his successor Ms. Dilma Roussef who spent six years in power until being impeached on August 31, 2016.
Lula was a union leader who only managed to get elected president on his fourth attempt. He was an extremely popular president – although there was always a cloud of suspicion over him, he managed to elect his successor easily.
But after he left office these suspicions turned into clues and was revealed to the world a gigantic corruption scheme that moved something between twenty and sixty billion dollars, that's right billions with "b". A scheme so large that it has caused shockwaves in other countries such as Switzerland, Singapore, USA, Dominican Republic, Colombia and the most affected: Peru.
The main Brazilian ramifications in this corruption scheme were the contractors Odebrecht – the largest in Brazil – and O.A.S. both deeply linked to the PT (the Brazilian workers party). In Peru, this evil scheme caused the resignation of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in March 2018, later sentenced to three years in prison. In July 2019 another former Peruvian president, Toledo, was arrested in the United States, also for involvement with Brazilian construction company Odebrecht. A third former Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, committed suicide on April 17, 2019 upon learning that an arrest warrant had been issued against him. In Colombia alone, Odebrecht was ordered to pay $250 million for bribery.
Eduardo Negrão
Consultor político e autor de "Terrorismo Global" e "México pecado ao sul do Rio Grande" ambos pela Scortecci Editora.
