Brazil’s da Silva calls demonstrations the work of fascists

Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva defended his record and called protests against him the work of fascists Wednesday, a day after an attack on his campaign caravan underlined Brazil’s deep divisions ahead of heated elections.

His left-leaning Workers’ Party said gunshots hit two buses in the caravan Tuesday. No one was hurt and da Silva was not on either bus. Police are investigating.

The incident comes at a moment of intense division in Brazil after a tumultuous few years that have seen the impeachment and removal from office of one president and the implication of dozens of politicians, including da Silva, in a mammoth corruption investigation.

Protests have repeatedly rocked Brazil, and current President Michel Temer warned Wednesday that the violence against da Silva’s caravan threatened to destabilize Latin America’s largest country. But divisiveness looks likely to increase as Brazil prepares to elect a new president in October.

Despite a conviction on corruption charges that could see him barred from running, da Silva is the front runner in that race. Yet he is no longer the universally beloved figure he once was after two terms as president.

Demonstrations have dogged his 10-day campaign tour through southern Brazil, which tends to be wealthier and more conservative than his political heartland in the northeast.

At a rally in the southern city of Curitiba on Wednesday night, da Silva described the protesters who sometimes threw rocks and eggs at the caravan and into crowds.

“I don’t know who they were and I don’t care,” he told a crowd of a few thousand people. “I just know they were not democrats. They are more like fascists and Nazis; they are more for anything else than for democracy.”

The investigation is, in many ways, at the heart of Brazil’s tumult.

Prosecutors have alleged that Brazil’s government has effectively been run like a cartel for years, with politicians doling out favors, state contracts and plum positions in exchange for bribes and campaign contributions. The probe initially focused on da Silva’s Workers’ Party, but it has implicated other parties, including Temer’s. Temer himself has been accused of corruption, but Congress twice voted to spare him a trial while he remains in office and he denies the charges.

While many have cheered the investigation as heroic for its unflinching pursuit of those in the upper echelons of Brazilian politics, some, especially on the left, think it has unfairly targeted the Workers’ Party for political reasons.

Da Silva himself has said the charges against him are invented and meant to keep him from regaining the presidency.

“They know that I know how to fix the country because when I took over Brazil … this country was in a worse state” than it is now, he told the crowd in Curitiba.  MDT/AP