Solon Brochado: Obviously, the Workers’ Party national president, Ricardo Berzoini, didn’t have good things to say about Veja’s story Cisco mentioned on the last post. But while his PSDB and PFL conspiracy theory is what you would expect from someone in his position, it must be said that, ever since Lula took office, Veja has been practicing the worst kind of partisan journalism you could expect from such a renowned magazine.
Did Lula receive Castro’s dollars?
Cisco Costa: Veja, Brazil’s main weekly news mag, has quite a scoop this week: Lula’s campaign received money from Cuba. According to the story, three million dollars were sent in 2002 and transported around the country in whisky boxes. The story is too large, so I will only translate the final paragraph and, after the jump, a short account of it by Folha de São Paulo.
This is the last paragraph, and it explains why the news, if confirmed, is even more important than it sounds:
Law 9096, approved in 1995, says that a political party is forbidden from receiving resources from overseas. If this occurs, the party is subject to having its register canceled by the Electoral Justice, meaning the party will have to close down. The candidate of this party — in this case, president Lula — cannot be legally blamed, since he has been certified as elected for a long time. Receiving foreign money, however, is not that simple. “This is the most serious thing there is”, says professor Walter Costa Porto, a specialist in electoral law and former minister of the Supreme Electoral Court [in Portuguese, Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, or “TSE”]. “It’s so serious, so incredibly serious, that it’s the first of the four cases the law says will lead to the discharge of a political party’s register. It’s an assault to the country’s sovereignty. It’s lethal”, says the former minister. If official investigations confirm that the PT received Cuban money, and the political party has its register canceled, the Brazilian political scenery will be wiped out by a Katrina: this is because PT members, without party, would not be able to run for anything in the 2006 election. Not even president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
This last bit needs a bit of explaining. Because Brazilian politicians would often change political affiliations, frequently after being bribed to do so, the electoral law forbids someone to run for anything if he has changed political parties during a certain period before the election. 2006’s cutoff date was September 2005. Since, in Brazil, one cannot run for anything if he is not registered in a political party — there are no write-ins or independent candidates — if the ruling Workers’ Party’s register was canceled, every single one of its members would be legally forbidden from running for next year’s general elections for President, Governor, Federal and State representatives and 1/3 of the Senate.
Needless to say, as unlikely as it is that this would happen, the very possibility that it can happen is a very big deal.
