Brazil’s Lula spends first day in prison, already hoping to be free
CURITIBA: Brazil’s leftist icon Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva served the first day of a 12-year prison sentence for corruption on Sunday, but was already hoping for a way out through the courts this week in a drama gripping the country ahead of presidential elections.
The 72-year-old, who served two terms as head of state between 2003 and 2010, entered the prison in the southern city of Curitiba late on Saturday, becoming Brazil’s first ex-president to be jailed as a criminal.
His cell is located in the same federal police building that serves as the base of operation “Car Wash,” Brazil’s wide-ranging anti-graft investigation that brought him down.
Although Brazil’s recent presidents have often ended up in trouble --impeached, felled by a coup and even one suicide -- Lula is the first to have been convicted and locked up. He was found guilty last year of accepting a luxury apartment as a bribe from a construction company and is the biggest scalp so far of the Car Wash probe.
He insists on his innocence and says he was framed to stop him running in the October presidential elections in which polls show him as frontrunner.
But there could be new surprises ahead, with a potentially explosive legal development coming as early as Wednesday when the Supreme Court could revisit the current law on incarceration during appeals, local media said.
Today, anyone convicted and losing a first appeal, as in Lula’s case, must conduct further appeals from prison.
But there is pressure to change that so that higher court appeals could be pursued in liberty, which would mean freedom for Lula. Lula’s new home, which measures roughly 15 square metre, has extremely good conditions by the standards of Brazil’s often violent, desperately overcrowded prisons.