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Comment by napsterbr | Hacker News Reader

One side will claim the trial was unfair or overreaching or political. The other will claim that the judicial system did work as expected and followed the rules it set forth well before the 2022 elections began.

I have my own take, but then again it is heavily influenced by my own bias. It's hard to share an unbiased opinion here.

The idea that Lula is using his political power to take Bolsonaro out of the game is laughable, IMO.

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Good point. And that is where Lula and Maduro are very similar being both byproducts of a sophisticated political elite operating behind the scenes in Latin America. (some people use "deep state", but I think it is too much of a US based terminology. In Brazil we say "sistema", the system, and we are more used to it.)

This elite in Venezuela is responsible for keeping Maduro where he is today. And its Brazilian counterpart is responsible for releasing Lula from prison and making him a president within a 2 year time span.

Maduro and Lula cannot do any of that by themselves.

Good summary but I think you missed one piece. Lula was convicted and ultimately was allowed to run and govern.

> The idea that Lula is using his political power to take Bolsonaro out of the game is laughable, IMO.

Huh? He literally said he ran for president out of a petty need for revenge against everyone who wronged him. Everything he said he would do, he's doing right now. There was even a torture and assassination attempt against the judge who convicted him and his family about a day after he openly and publicly said he was going to fuck the guy.

> The idea that Lula is using his political power to take Bolsonaro out of the game is laughable, IMO.

I doubt Lula is calling up Superior Court justices and telling them what to do-but he doesn’t need to. It is like the 2000 US case of Bush v Gore-all the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices voted for Bush, all the Democratic-appointed justices voted for Gore. The first outnumbered the second, so Bush won the Presidential election. Neither candidate or party ordered the justices to vote a particular way-they didn’t need to.

The US court system has been corrupted by politicisation. The same appears to be true of Brazil-and Argentina too. Indeed, I wonder if there is any judicial system in the Americas which is free from that disease. (Canada, maybe?)

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