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

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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.