OPINION:
Corruption in Brazil is as old as the Amazon rain forest. Brazilians are also very savvy: I traded bonds with most of the Brazilian banks for a couple decades so I know this very well. You can’t pick them off on a trade because they are too good.
Thus it came as no surprise when a source showed me evidence that documents leaked after the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency, but before his inauguration in order to start an investigation, were possibly part of an elaborate plan to unseat a conservative president by the Left, very similar to what is going on in the United States against President Trump.
Corruption requires cunning and duplicity.
Here’s how this unfolded. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Donald Trump, runs for president touting an anti-corruption platform, to rid the former Portuguese colony of its age-old vice, graft.
The Leftist elite in power didn’t like this one bit. They enjoyed their grip on the government and its agencies.
Similar to the threat posed by Ronald Reagan, they tried to kill him. Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach last September during a campaign rally and rushed to the hospital for surgery.
After he won the election, the threat from a populist leader in this Latin American nation became very real. People were threatened; their place in life put in jeopardy. Their power semed to be slipping away. Sound familiar?
Key the corruption scandal and the subsequent investigation.
Documents were leaked to the media from the Council for Financial Activities Control (COAF), outlining concerns over payments to Bolsonaro’s son Flavio’s driver a year earlier. The timing of the release was suspicious. Why get the documents out to journalists before the inauguration? And a year after they were written? Could it be a last ditch ploy to prevent Bolsonaro from gaining power?
It gets better.
Jawad Rhalib is an established writer, director, and journalist. He hired an investigator to dig up information on the document release, who corresponded with the journalist who received them — Constanca Rezende. His investigator taped the conversations. These tapes are there for all to see and hear on his blog at Mediapart, entitled, ’Where is the press going?’ There are transcripts of the conversations there as well. Here Constanca allegedly details how the documents came from COAF in order to implicate and destroy President Bolsonaro via his son.
The transcript of Rhalib’s investigator’s conversation with Rezende goes like this (paraphrased translation):
Investigator: So you mean they had these documents long ago but didn’t do anything until the election?
Rezende: They didn’t write about this or investigate this until after the election and then they started the investigation; we wrote about this because the case was stopped. They didn’t do anything with these documents, they [COAF] only are starting to do something now.
Rhalib writes, “Constanca Rezende is in possession of non-public documents that were illegally leaked to him by the COAF…and written over a year ago. Yet, they were released only in December of 2018, just after the general election in October and before the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro in January 2019. The timing of transmitting the COAF documents to Brazilian journalists raises serious questions. Who benefits from this media release? As well of the motivations of the COAF?
“I am not a fan of Bolsonaro, but I find that using the power of the media to attack a president through his son is, however, quite twisted and unacceptable to the journalist I am.”
In this day and age it should not be a surprise to anyone the depths that the ’progressives’ will go to in any country to attack leaders who threaten their grip on power. Conservatives are fighting the media, education systems, government agencies and organized crime.
Therefore, when alleged schemes like this are uncovered, they need to be shouted from the rooftops, or at least as far as the corrupt big tech companies will let them travel.
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