Brazilian Citizens March Against Baseless Lula Sentence

The Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) convened for Thursday demonstrations - in Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, Cuiaba, and other cities across the country - in favor of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was, without grounds, condemned by Judge Gabriela Hardt to 12 years and 11 months in prison.

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"Once again Lula is condemned with no evidence. The president, who did the most for the Brazilian people, is now a political prisoner," the PT affirmed in a manifesto published on social networks.

The PT also called for militancy to concentrate on Curitiba, where Lula has been serving a sentence of 12 years and one month in jail for another case, since April 2018.

Professor Fernando Haddad, who was Lula's replacement in the presidential race held in Oct. 2018, highlighted that both the struggle for Lula's liberation and the worker's fight against the setbacks of democracy in Brazil are part of the same political process.

"We want fairness, we want justice. We want every decision of a judge to be based on evidence, not on conviction," Haddad said outside the PT headquarters in Sao Paulo, and added that "I speak here, not as Lula's friend or as a PT member. I speak as a citizen who is concerned with the destiny of our country and with the lack of impartiality of justice."

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The Brazilian Workers' Party is scheduled to convene another massive demonstration for this Friday, in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, the state where Lula was born.

According to the PT, the new sentence against the leftist former president of Brazil is "full of errors" and represents "another episode of a judicial persecution plot which aims to dissolve Lula’s political leadership."

Eugenio Aragao, a former Minister of Justice who cooperates with the PT leader's defense, stated that Lula's cases will not be resolved favorably through the judiciary because all lawsuits against him have been politically constructed.

"A favorable outcome for the Lula case will be political, not judicial. The accusation and the sentence against him are political... they are part of a corporate project of the Public Ministry and the Judicial Branch," Aragao explained, ratifying that the new sentence lacks evidence while accusing that the real goal is to keep Lula in prison.