Lula’s son takes issues such as highways and betting to the government – 02/22/2024 – Power

The youngest son of President Lula (PT), Luis Claudio Lula da Silva, 39, usually brings up matters that concern his daily life to his father since he started living in the Amazon to work as a football manager.

As shown by SheetLuís Cláudio teamed up with a South Korean businessman who operates in the Manaus Free Zone and a mayor from União Brasil to build the Parintins football club, which competes in the Amazonense Championship and is trying to get a place in the Brazilian Series D.

Luís Cláudio, for example, took his father to defend the paving of BR-319, which connects Manaus to Porto Velho. In the coming months, Lula’s son intends to travel the highway, film the road conditions and show the videos to the Chief Executive.

“BR-319 is essential for the region. During last year’s drought, there was great isolation,” he told Sheet Lula’s son, reverberating the speech of politicians and businesspeople who are lobbying for the highway.

This lobby gained strength following the extreme drought in 2023, a year in which there were record lows in rivers, with a direct impact on navigation, the main form of transport in the Amazon.

Since taking over as football director at RPE Parintins, Luis Claudio has split between Amazonas and São Paulo.

“I know 80% of the ministers from before [da eleição]. I am intimate with [Fernando] Haddad [ministro da Fazenda]with [Alexandre] Padilha [ministro das Relações Institucionais]to drink coffee”, says Lula’s youngest.

One of the issues already discussed, according to him, is about football betting shops, with the existence of an illegal and parallel market that has been harming the sport, according to Luis Claudio. “I talk openly with Haddad about this. Regulation and charges for investigation must exist, as there are loopholes for corruption with betting.”

The discussion about BR-319 mainly involves the so-called middle section, between kilometers 250 and 655.7 – a length of 405.7 kilometers.

In July 2022, three months before Jair Bolsonaro’s (PL) defeat to Lula, the then president of Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), Eduardo Bim, issued a preliminary license for paving the section. Bim was in office on the recommendation of now federal deputy Ricardo Salles (PL-SP), Minister of the Environment under Bolsonaro.

Documents from the environmental licensing process show that the work could lead to more grabbing of public lands along the highway, increase illegal deforestation and boost criminal logging.

An inspection carried out by Ibama last September found the advance of devastation, burning and occupation of public lands along BR-319, with the arc of deforestation heading towards the central and northern portions of Amazonas, two of the most preserved in the Amazon. Furthermore, there are 225 degraded areas on the highway, even before paving work.

Manaus and the region experienced successive waves of smoke in the extreme drought of 2023, due to deforestation and fires. Even so, politicians and businesspeople used the drought as a pretext to expand their lobby for paving the highway. The Lula government created a group to try to speed up the licensing process.

“My father is surrounded by ministers, he doesn’t always know the reality”, says Luis Claudio. “I talk to him about the logistical difficulties here, about the isolation.”

According to Lula’s son, the drought led to a shortage of food and items such as cement in Rio Preto da Eva (AM), the city where RPE Parintins is based, 85 km from Manaus.

“BR-319 is the only connection with the rest of the country. It’s a difficult project, but it has to go”, says Luis Claudio. “My father wants to know more, he wants to hear.”

Regarding the football betting market, whose operation was authorized by a 2018 law, the director of RPE Parintins says that there are three or four “large trustworthy houses” and that there is a multitude of clandestine bets, with virtual groups, bookies and other operators, leading to manipulation of results.

“As there is no way to inhibit it, it has to be regulated”, says Luis Claudio, who says he would agree to sponsor the team he manages from a bookmaker. The Lula government hopes to increase revenue by regulating the sector.

The director makes more general criticisms of Brazilian football: it is scrapped, partly due to the way the CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) operates. “My father needs to look at football more fondly.”

The conversations he has with members of his father’s government cannot be understood as influence peddling, says Luis Claudio. “It would be if I had any advantage. You’ll never see Luis Claudio ask for a favor.”

He says he is more welcomed in the world of football because he is Lula’s son, and that this was once the opposite, with closed doors at the height of the Operation Lava Jato offensives. The resentment persists, due to the death of his mother, Marisa Letícia, in 2017, which he attributed to what would have been persecution against the family.

“Being a son [de Lula] opens the doors, of course. But it’s already closed too. What I need to have is a decent product to deliver”, says the director of RPE Parintins, who has worked as an assistant for teams such as Palmeiras, São Paulo and Corinthians, in addition to having structured an American football league in Brazil.