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.

Now, the Folha story, with a comment from me in itallics:

Lula’s campaign received money from Cuba, says magazine

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign received, between August and September of 2002, three million U.S. dollars from Cuba, according to a story in Veja magazine.

After arriving in Brasilia, according to the magazine, the money was under the care of Sérgio Cervantes, a representative of the Cuban Embassy in Brazil.

[Veja’s story implies Cervantes is a Cuban spy, and details his friendship with Fidel Castro, president Lula and former Chief of Staff José Dirceu, who is at the epicenter of the corruption scandal rocking Brazil.]

From Brasilia, the money would be taken to Campinas by Vladimir Poleto, ex-aide to Treasury Minister Antonio Palocci, at the Ribeirão Preto city hall, stored in three liquor boxes.

In Campinas, the money would be received at Viracopos Airport by Ralf Barquete — who is already dead — also a former Palocci aide in Ribeirão. From there, Barquete would take the money to Lula’s committee in Vila Mariana, in São Paulo city, to the then treasurer Delúbio Soares.

The story has statements by lawyer Rogério Buratti, former aide to the Treasury minister, who confirms this version of the story.

He says he was asked by Barquete, under Palocci’s request, about how to bring three million dollars from Cuba.

Buratti, then, would have suggested bringing it through dollar dealers. The lawyer, according to the magazine, did not have further contact with the subject, but learned that the money did come.

Vladimir Poleto confessed to the magazine that he transported the money from Brasilia to Campinas himself, but said that, at the time, he did not know it was money he was carrying.

According to the Veja story, he thought it was liquor and learned only later, through Barquete, that he was carrying money.