A lawsuit was filed by Lula alleging offense at the messages that called him a “cachaceiro” and that he should be arrested.| Photo: Twitter Luciano Hang/reproduction/archive

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) lost a lawsuit against businessman Luciano Hang, owner of the Havan store chain, for alleged criticisms made of him in 2019 in Santa Catarina. The process investigates what would be a financing for flights of an airplane that carried banners with messages calling him a “cachaceiro” and citing his arrest in the Federal Police jail at the time.

Lula was released from prison in November 2019 and filed a lawsuit claiming that the businessman posted on Twitter that he would pay for planes to fly to the coast of Santa Catarina with “patriotic” messages. That year, Hang posted a video on social media commemorating the now president’s first year of detention.

The president claimed that the messages contained content offensive to him and asked for compensation for moral damages. Hang justified that the post was supported by freedom of expression and indicated “previous censorship of Lula and the comic content of the publication” and the messages on the planes.

In the decision taken on March 30 and published this week, Judge Rafael Espindola Berndt, of the 2nd Civil Court of the Judicial District of Navegantes (SC), said in the decision that Lula is a public person and is subject to criticism, and that it is up to the public opinion to judge the phrases supposedly conveyed with funding from Hang.

“Consequently, I understand that the dialectic of the concrete case is compatible with the current political game, in which barbs are exchanged between the actors in front of the general public, which, in this case, does not reveal the existence of indemnifiable damage to the author, falling to the public opinion itself the judgment of disapproval or not of the acts practiced by the defendant in the present case”, says in a record of the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

Among the phrases raised on the tracks are “Lula cachaceiro gives me back my money”, “Lula in jail, I with my foot in the sand”, “Better than summer is Lula in prison” and “Lula in a cage is Brazil awake”. The president can still appeal the decision.