President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Workers' Party candidate for reelection, said on Friday (18) that Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the PL party, his main rival in Brazil's presidential race, has ties to militias in Rio de Janeiro. He spoke in an interview with Rádio Tupi, a Rio de Janeiro radio station, during a campaign day in a state that is an electoral stronghold of the Bolsonaro family. Militias there are armed groups, often run by current and former police officers, that dominate poor neighborhoods of the city.
"There is a presidential candidate who is tied to the militias in Rio de Janeiro. When you start analyzing the situation in Rio de Janeiro, you realize that many people in the Bolsonaro family are mixed up with the militias of Rio," Lula said, according to the news website Metrópoles. "Politics and the police need to be cleaned up. I find it unthinkable that Rio lives the reality it lives," he added, according to G1.
The Master case
In the same interview, Lula said that Master, the financial group of businessman Daniel Vorcaro, "became a bank" under former president Jair Bolsonaro, and that Vorcaro became a prisoner under his own government. "The Master was not a bank. The Bolsonaro family turned it into a bank. And Vorcaro became a prisoner under my government," Lula said. According to Metrópoles, the president called it "the biggest financial corruption scandal in the history of Brazil" and said he has "pride in saying they created the banker and I turned him into a prisoner." Vorcaro, former owner of the now defunct Banco Master, is being held at a military police battalion in Brasília, the outlet reported. The scandal, which G1 describes as billions of reais in financial fraud, has thrown the Supreme Court into crisis.
Lula also described a meeting with Vorcaro at the Planalto presidential palace. "This Vorcaro came to me one day and said: 'Look, they are harming me.' And I said: 'If your bank is sound, it will not close...' And it closed because it was not sound," he recounted. The president also accused former Rio de Janeiro governor Cláudio Castro of the PL, who resigned in March, of being "buried up to his neck" in the relationship with Master, citing the contents of Vorcaro's phone.
Supreme Court crisis
Asked about the crisis at the Supreme Federal Tribunal, or STF, Brazil's top court, Lula said he sees the moment with "sadness." He repeated that the Bolsonaro government turned Vorcaro, a man he described as a nobody, into a banker, and said the businessman "corrupted everybody," involving "congressmen, senators, the Supreme Court, everybody." The president defended Justice Alexandre de Moraes and said Flávio Bolsonaro's quarrel with the justice stems from the imprisonment of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. "Moraes played an important role in the preservation of democracy. A general in prison, and a president imprisoned for a coup, they plotted my death and Alckmin's," Lula said.
Lula said that if reelected he will have to discuss "how to fix the Supreme Court" and defended a reform of the judiciary. The court, in his words, needs seriousness and ethics, and everything seems to be "rotting" inside it. The first round of the presidential election is scheduled for October 4. Lula spent Friday campaigning in Rio de Janeiro state, the electoral base of his rival.