Since the late afternoon of Thursday, March 10, the top story on social media and on a number of Internet pages was the request for the preventive detention of ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva filed by the State of São Paulo Office of the Prosecutor.

A week after the Federal Police made all the headlines with the spectacular nature of its request for a deposition when, forcefully and unnecessarily, they took ex-President Lula to testify in a Federal Police precinct in São Paulo’s Congonhas Airport, and days before an opposition-led call for a demonstration, it’s show time for the São Paulo state prosecution.

Since the late afternoon of Thursday, March 10, the top story on social media and on a number of Internet pages was the request for the preventive detention of ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva filed by the State of São Paulo Office of the Prosecutor.

Prosecutors José Carlos Blat, Cássio Conserino, and Fernando Henrique Araújo filed for the preventive arrest and reported Lula for the crimes of money laundering and misrepresentation in connection with the triplex in Condomínio Solaris, in Guarujá (SP). The arrest, they argue, is intended to guarantee that penal law can be enforced, “for he is widely known to retain the power of a former President of the Republic, which makes it extremely easy for him to evade arrest”.

The arguments used by the prosecutors to base their filing, such as the possibility that the ex-president would run away, prompted a wave on social media, with #MicoPublico leading the posts mocking, among other things, the magistrates’ utter misinformation when they wrote, in an attempt to appropriate words and terms of the left, that Marx and Hegel (sic) were ashamed of the factory-worker leader.

It seems that prosecutors don’t have the same academic background they used to. The reference is incorrect because Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was the one who wrote, together with Karl Marx (1818-1883), the Communist Manifesto, the founding work of scientific socialism.

The prosecutors generated a flood of memes and jokes. They made a gross mistake in their urge to embellish an accusation formulated on the basis of feeble arguments, according to several specialists and lawyers, as well as prompting State of São Paulo Judges to condemn off the record the arguments and the need for the request itself.

On Thursday evening, the Lula Institute criticized in a press release the preventive arrest warrant of the ex-president filed by the state prosecution. For the Institute, in filing the request Prosecutor Cássio Conserino provides further evidence of his “bias”.

“This basis clearly shows an attempt to trivialize the principle of pretrial detention, which is inconsistent with the responsibility a member of the Prosecutor’s Office must have when performing his/her duties”, states the press release. Read the full text here.

The national president of the Workers Party, Rui Falcão, classified the request as a “media-driven measure”: “the request for preventive detention is consistent with what was already being done by this prosecutor (Conserino) and his partners, reporting President Lula without any evidence”, he criticized, further stating that such measure causes “indignation”.

The decision by the São Paulo State Office of the Prosecutor was challenged and denounced by Workers Party parliamentarians, leaders, and activists. See what some of the PT representatives and senators said here.

The request is so absurd that not even the big media, which have been cyclically supporting the persecution against Lula in their editorials, adhered to the preventive detention warrant, disinclined to support the prosecutors’ initiative. The argument used in the stories released in the big media on Friday, March 11, in the voice of specialists, is that the legal basis is weak, besides warning about the “risk of trivializing preventive detention” and pointing to the “emotional” way the investigation against Lula is being conducted.

Press release by Lula’s attorneys on the charges filed by the State of São Paulo Office of the Prosecutor

The full version of the application for the pretrial detention of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as released by the media shows that Justice Prosecutors Cassio Roberto Conserino, José Carlos Blat, and Fernando Henrique de Moraes Araújo based such application mainly on the following allegations:

1) Lula  would have criticized the Office of the Prosecutor and the judicial decisions;

2) Lula “could inflame the population to turn against the criminal investigations”;

3) Lula resorted to his “political partners” to file for an injunction with the National Council of Public Prosecutors (CNMP) to suspend his deposition during the investigations;

4) Lula would be placing himself above the law.
This basis clearly shows an attempt to trivialize the principle of pretrial detention, which is inconsistent with the responsibility a member of the Prosecutor’s Office must have when performing his/her duties.

What was actually sought was to gag a political leader to keep him from expressing his thought and even from exercising his rights. Only during the dictatorship, when all citizen guarantees were suspended, one’s opinion and the exercising of rights were cause for deprivation of freedom.

Lula has never stood against the investigations or the authority of the institutions. But he has the right, just like any other citizen, to rise up against unlawfulness and arbitrariness. There is nothing illegal in his doing so, much less a legal justification for his preventative arrest.

Also, the prosecutors do not have a single concrete fact to justify the charges brought against former President Lula and his relatives. They have not moved one step ahead beyond hypothesis.

They have based their accusation of concealment of assets on opinions that, against all evidence, cannot disqualify a property title as endowed with public faith.

The application for pretrial detention is clear evidence that the principle of the natural prosecutor –recognized in this case by the National Council of Public Prosecutors – has harmful effects on those directly affected and on society at large.

For all these reasons, we expect Justice will reject the application, remaining faithful to the law that was despised by the public prosecutors when they formulated the application for the preventive detention of former President Lula.

Cristiano Zanin Martins