Brazilians rally in Sao Paolo to demand Lula’s release
Hundreds of Brazilians have marched through the streets of Sao Paulo to show their support for former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who started serving a 12-year jail sentence for corruption charges last week.
Brazilian demonstrators took to the streets of the country’s largest city on Wednesday, chanting “Free Lula.”
Representatives of Brazil’s trade unions and political parties also took part in the rally.
Lula turned himself in to police for arrest on January 7 after two days of defying a court order that sentenced him to 12 years in prison on corruption and money laundering charges.
Lula vowed to continue his fight for proving his innocence, saying, “You’ll see that I will come out of this bigger, stronger.”
The veteran Brazilian politician said the trial was a plot to prevent him from running in the country’s October presidential elections, in which he is currently in the lead.
Under Brazilian electoral law, a presidential candidate is forbidden from running for office for eight years after being found guilty of a crime, though some exemptions have been made in the past.
He led Brazil in two four-year terms as president from 2003 to January 2011 and left office with an approval rating higher than 80 percent.
Lula faces seven criminal proceedings. He has declared his innocence in all of them.
He was convicted in 2017 and originally sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for accepting a luxury apartment from a construction company involved in a wide-ranging corruption probe, which uncovered a web of kickbacks, bribes, and slush funds involving top politicians from nearly every party and across the business world.
Lula’s lawyers appealed that conviction, but it was upheld unanimously in January by a regional federal court in Porto Alegre, which further raised his prison term to 12 years and one month.
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