Brazil: Lula Attends Waste Collector Conference

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva participated, as he customarily did during his eight-year presidency, in the opening of Expocatadores, the national conference of waste collectors and recyclable materials held in Brasilia. Speaking to attendees, he pointed out that if re-elected in next year's presidential election, he'll “do much more,” Brasil 24/7 reported.

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The former head of state, who left office with a record approval rating of 83 percent, according to Datafolha, said he's “proud to be the first president” of Brazil to have “welcomed waste collectors into the Planalto Palace,” the official presidential workplace.

“You're not just waste collectors. You're proud men and women who contribute much more to Brazil than those who simply bad-mouth the country and go on shopping sprees to Miami.”

Lula went on to criticize corporate media and Brazil's elite class, reiterating that “they're trying to mount a campaign of destruction. First they pack the people with anesthesia, positioning them against Dilma and now condemning me every single day on television.”

Brazil's Fourth Regional Federal Court, TRF-4, has scheduled Lula's appeal trial on passive corruption charges to start, in a loathsome twist of planning, some argue, on Jan. 24, 2018. It's exactly one year to the date in which his former wife, Marisa Leticia, suffered a stroke and passed away days later.

His defense lawyers, Cristiano Zanin Martins and Valeska Teixeira Zanin Martins, charged judge Sergio Moro with handing the former president a sentence void of “credible evidence of guilt being produced” and the “overwhelming proof of his innocence being brazenly ignored.”

They've since described Lula's legal woes as being a clear cut case of lawfare, otherwise, use of the legal system to delegitimize or damage political foes.

Over the past few months, polls undertaken by Vox Populi, Datafolha, Data Poder 360, Instituto Parana, the National Confederation of Transportation/MDA and Ipsos have all shown that Lula enjoys a comfortable lead in Brazil's 2018 presidential election.

The seeds of his mass popularity began to spawn back in 1968, in broad daylight of the military dictatorship, when he joined the Sao Bernardo Metal Workers Union. Elected president of the organization, Lula went about advocating for workers' rights, improving communication between workers and calling for a return to democracy.

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Having experienced, during his childhood, drought, famine, plagues and abject poverty in Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco, a place where two out of every 10 infants died before celebrating their first birthday, Lula would never forget his less than humble beginnings when he was elected president in 2003.

His term in office was marked by a slew of social programs, which lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty and removed the country from the UN World Hunger Map.

One of his most ambitious and successful programs was the Family Allowance (Bolsa Familia). Launched in 2003, the program provides stipends to families living below the poverty line. In turn, those families must prove that their children are attending school and have been vaccinated.

Now, at a healthy 72 years of age, he's called out his judicial, political and media mogul accusers saying, “if they don't want me to be a (presidential) candidate, go to the polls and vote against me. Don't create artifices and tricks to prevent my candidacy.”