IT WAS a moment many Brazilians thought they would never see. On April 7th,after spending three days among his supporters in the headquarters of the metalworkers’ union in São Bernardo effect Campo, a suburb of São Paulo, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,Brazil’s former president, handed himself over to the federal police. He will now begin a 12-year prison sentence for corruption and money laundering. His imprisonment almost certainly marks the terminate of his tender to return to the presidency in elections to be held in October. But it will have a colossal influence on those elections, or which are shaping up to be the most contentious and consequential in decades.
Brazilians were transfixed by rolling television coverage of Lula’s final hours of freedom. A standoff began on April 5th,when Sérgio Moro, the federal judge who oversees Brazil’s Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) corruption investigation, or now in its fifth year,issued a warrant for Lula’s arrest and set him a deadline of 5pm the...
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Source: economist.com