More than 1.1 million people tuned into the live broadcast of the Brazilian podcast Flow on Tuesday to listen to far-left socialist presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took time to, among other things, describe conservative President Jair Bolsonaro as a “pedophile” and accuse soccer star Neymar of cutting a deal with Bolsonaro to avoid prison.
Lula da Silva served as president of Brazil between 2003 and 2011, presiding over a massive nationwide corruption scheme now known by its police name, “Operation Car Wash.” Lula himself was arrested and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for using bribe money to buy a luxury property, but the nation’s top court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), overturned the conviction last year, allowing him to run for president again.
The 76-year-old won the first round of voting in the Brazilian election on October 2, but by 48 percent of the vote – just shy of the 50 percent threshold needed to secure the presidency. As a result, he is moving on to a runoff election to determine the president, set for October 30, against Bolsonaro, the second place finisher. Bolsonaro dramatically outperformed establishment polls in the first round of voting, narrowing the estimated 14 percent difference between the two to just 5 percent.
Since the first round of voting, the Lula campaign has turned aggressively negative towards Bolsonaro, accusing him last week of cannibalism and now generating accusations of pedophilia through the candidate himself.
Speaking to host Igor Coelho, Lula made his pedophilia accusations in response to comments Bolsonaro had made regarding a visit to Brasilia in which he encountered a group of Venezuelan teens.
“I was in Brasilia. … I stopped the motorcycle on a corner, took off my helmet, and looked at some little girls. … Three, four, beautiful, 14, 15 years old, tidy,” Bolsonaro narrated. “It created an atmosphere, [so] I turned around. ‘Can I come into your house?'”
Bolsonaro claimed the girls let him into their home, where another 15 to 20 Venezuelan girls were “getting ready … to make a living,” implying child prostitution. The remarks were made in the context of what he described was a lamentable situation for Venezuelan refugees, fleeing the socialism of their home country. He also made the remarks while condemning Chinese coronavirus lockdowns – which he has long opposed but as president cannot prevent individual states from implementing – for causing needless economic devastation.
Lula supporters have seized on the phrase “it created an atmosphere” (pintou um clima) to claim that Bolsonaro was describing romantic chemistry between himself and the children. Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) has called for a criminal investigation against Bolsonaro for pedophilia.
“His behavior now, in the case of the Venezuelan girls, is the behavior of a pedophile,” Lula said on the Flow podcast. “That is why he was terrified and tried to explain himself as quickly as possible.”
Lula’s sudden outrage towards pedophilia has been notably absent in the case of one of his closest political allies while president, former Bolivian President Evo Morales, who appeared as the father on the birth certificate of a child born to a 16-year-old in 2016.
“All that stuff about rape and pedophilia, everybody knew about that when Evo Morales was president,” Rubén Costas, the governor of Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department, said after a short-lived conservative government announced the finding of the birth certificate in 2020. “We knew and it was all covered up.”
Lula has yet to condemn Morales and recently met with socialist Bolivian President Luis Arce, a protege of Morales’s, without expressing any outrage over the scandal.
Elsewhere on Flow, Lula also falsely accused Bolsonaro of stating, “I have to lie. It is necessary to lie.”
“I was watching a video of Bozo [Bolsonaro] one of these days, he, in that video where he is talking about the Venezuelan girls, he says, verbatim: ‘I have to lie. It is necessary to lie. Politicians must lie,'” Lula claimed. “My mother always said, a lie – she flies. The truth crawls. It is always this way.”
In reality, the quote that Lula was referring to was of Bolsonaro paraphrasing advice that he claimed to receive when he entered politics – which Bolsonaro rejected and condemned in the same statements.
Coelho also asked Lula about Neymar, arguably Brazil’s biggest soccer star currently, and the fact that he officially endorsed Bolsonaro. The ex-president appeared to threaten to prosecute the athlete.
“I wasn’t mad at Neymar. He has the right to choose whoever he wants to be president,” Lula said, before adding, “I think he’s afraid that if I win the election, everyone will know that Bolsonaro forgave his income tax debt. Obviously, Bolsonaro struck a deal with him and now he has a problem with income tax in Spain, but that’s not the president’s problem. It’s the IRS, not mine.”
Neymar reportedly received a $45 million fine for tax evasion in Brazil last year, while Bolsonaro was president:
The Bolsonaro campaign has largely mocked Lula’s Flow interview as showcasing an unhinged, unelectable far-leftist.
“What to say that Lula on Flow yesterday?” Bolsonaro’s special adviser for international affairs, Filipe Martins, said on Twitter. “[He] attacked Brazilians for supposedly not knowing how to vote; said that whoever doesn’t vote needs to shut up; threatened Neymar; affirmed that ‘gender transitions’ are a farce; and defended ‘reeducation’ for those who say something that he doesn’t like.”
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