Pope: Lula was unjustly arrested and Dilma has clean hands – 03/31/2023 – Power

Pope Francis said that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT) was convicted by Justice without evidence, and that former President Dilma Rousseff (PT) has “clean hands”, in addition to having undergone an impeachment process classified by him as unfair.

The statement was made in an interview shown on Thursday (30) on the Argentine network C5N. It was recorded before Francis’ admission to a hospital in Rome on Wednesday (29) after complaining of difficulty breathing. He should be discharged this Saturday (1st).

The pontiff recalled Brazilian examples when asked about “lawfare”, a term used to define the use of the justice system of a given country for the political persecution of opponents. The priest also mentioned other countries, such as Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.

“Lawfare makes its way into the media. You have to prevent a certain person from reaching a position. So, people disqualify him and raise the suspicion of a crime. So, a whole summary is made, a huge summary, where is not found [a prova do delito], but the size of this summary is enough to condemn. ‘Where is the crime here?’ ‘But, yes, it seems so…’ That’s how they condemned Lula”, said the religious.

When the interviewer stated that Dilma was impeached in 2016 for a “minor administrative act”, the leader of the Catholic Church countered, stating that the former president is “a woman with clean hands, an excellent woman”.

The pope also cited the “fumus delicti”, a legal term in Latin to conceptualize the proof of a crime through sufficient evidence of authorship, and even said that “sometimes, the smoke of the crime leads you to the fire, other times it is a smoke that is lost because there is no foundation”.

Finally, when the journalist closed the matter by saying that “innocents are condemned”, the pontiff pointed out that “in Brazil, this happened in both cases”, referring to Lula and Dilma. For him, “politicians have the mission of unmasking an unjust justice”.

Dilma lost her mandate in 2016 in an impeachment process that was carried out in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate. Both Houses considered that the then president committed a crime of responsibility for the so-called “fiscal disputes”, with the opening of budgetary credit without the approval of Congress.

The decision, in the process and on the merits, was accompanied without contestation by the STF (Federal Supreme Court).

Last December, Francisco had already said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper that the process that led Lula to prison began with false news. “A trial has to be as clean as possible, with courts that have no interest other than to do justice,” he said at the time.

The priest also said, at the time, that false news about political leaders is very serious. “They can destroy a person,” he said.