For the third time since the beginning of Lula’s campaign for reelection former members of Brazil’s Armed Forces high command have broke their silence to harshly criticize the president and the ruling Workers Party.
In the latest attack, on the eve of Sunday’s (October 29) presidential elections, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the PT are called the "biggest gang of graduated outlaws ever in national history."
The most recent assault, published in the homepage of the Military Club’s Internet site, is signed by reserve Air Force brigadier, Ivan Moacyr da Frota, who is also the president of the Brazilian Air Force Club. The manifesto is called "Poor Brazil Country."
The abrasive note starts by saying that "The electoral polls for president suggest the embarrassing indication that more than half the Brazilian population is conniving with corruption and the criminal hoaxes that the current government has been charged with."
Frota continues, "The country seems to have been occupied by a true gang that, supported by a political party assembled the biggest gang of graduated outlaws ever in national history. (Brazilian Penal Code: Article 288 – Gang formation).
The first step Lula and his gang took, says the manifesto, was to infiltrate the State and strategic sectors of society with members of the Workers Party. For that end, congressmen were bribed, bankers and businessmen were extorted and PT militants were placed in strategic positions all across the country, including public offices, media and artistic milieu.
"Finally, it became evident, with use of public money, the insidious and humiliating tactic of buying the electoral adhesion of several million innocent voters from the poorest social classes especially in the country’s North and Northeast, in exchange for the institutional alms represented by the Bolsa Família (Family Voucher).
"The dramatic conclusion to all of this, as widely reported by the press, is that if this government is reelected, it will have been by the rotten side of the Brazilian society, each component having been bought for a price."
The statement goes on to say that the first round’s campaign was already filthy and corrupted while the second round exposed whatever rotted bowels had remained hidden.
"In the unexpected runoff, the felons’ supergang was taken by despair when faced with the threat of losing their privileges and jobs – the extorted private posts, and the inflated public ones."
The document also accuses the government’s machine of probably using public money to offend the family of the opposition candidate. It also charges it with committing terrorism when it spread the rumors that the opposition wishes to privatize state-run companies.
"What authority has a government that sells out the country’s patrimony, with several members sued for corruption, to accuse anybody of venal privatization of public property, when, recently, it ratified itself law 11.284, of 03/02/2006, that encourages the indiscriminate use, for 60 years, of public forests in the Amazon region, which constitutes an explicit transfer of parts of the national territory to foreign ownership?"
The note goes on to accuse the Lula government of auctioning oil-rich areas to foreign companies to explore.
"So much falsehood, hypocrisy and deceit, put in the unsuspecting mind of the less enlightened populations!"
The retired brigadier, who was already a presidential candidate by the PMN party, urges other Brazilians to get out from this hypnotic trance and do something to prevent what he calls the big looting of the Nation, and the threat of an institutional destabilization.
People have to take sides he says: or they are part of the gang organized to rob the nation or they choose to belong to that side that abhors corruption. And Frota concludes with a short comment:
"I want to make it clear that I present this statement as a citizen, as an individual, and, not as the president of the Air Force Club. The national present moment is very serious and, having to choose between verbal nonsense and omission’s cowardice, I opted for the first."