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Brazil’s Corruption Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem

By Travis Waldron

Huffington Post quotes article by AS/COA’s Brian Winter on Lula's lasting legacy in Brazil. 

The world’s largest nonnuclear power and fourth-largest democracy is in the midst of a political crisis it can’t seem to escape.

Over the past three years, Brazil’s ever-growing corruption scandal has enveloped hundreds of politicians. President Dilma Rousseff was impeached last fall. And last Wednesday, Brazil’s problems got even worse: A federal judge convicted the country’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on charges of corruption and money laundering.

The conviction and potential imprisonment of a former president, especially one who was a leading candidate for next year’s presidential election, will throw Brazil even deeper into crisis. But it should also cause concern for the rest of the world. Without a stable Brazil, it will be hard — perhaps impossible — to solve the planet’s most pressing international problems...

There are, however, reasons to be hopeful about Brazil.

Operation Car Wash has been dismissed by its critics as a political witch hunt. Da Silva’s supporters on the left view it as such, partly because the investigation targeted Workers’ Party politicians in its earliest stages, partly because da Silva’s alleged misdeeds don’t seem quite as bad as Temer’s, and partly because of da Silva’s rabid popularity ― there are “millions of Brazilians,” Americas Quarterly’s Brian Winter wrote in May, “who ― still ― believe Lula is the only politician who ever did anything for them.”...

Read the full article here.

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