Lula needs to defuse Bolsonaro's (Guedes's) grenades in order to start governing.

By Hildegard Angel, for 247

Illegal mining is the most striking representation of what the former government was like: compulsive gold hunters, under the auspices of the financial market, in collusion with powerful media outlets. 

It was such a shameless act, the revelation of the offshore accounts of the two most important managers in our economy didn't even tickle the media. It went unnoticed.

Brazil has become a den of swindlers, and a large part of its people, a bunch of obedient and compliant ruminants, as if under the effect of a collective "goodnight Cinderella" (a date rape drug). 

They filled their coffers and airplanes with the Brazilian nation's treasure and took off, leaving the rest of the gang infiltrated within the institutions to continue looting and devastating "Serra Pelada," including a courtier holding the key to the Central vault, with complete flight autonomy.

The Central Bank under Campos Neto has the same quality standard as the Ministry of the Environment under Ricardo Salles and the Ministry of Health under Pazuello. Even by manipulating data, it failed to meet the inflation target. It erred in its growth projections for 2019, 2020, and 2021. 

The video being replayed here is just to refresh your memory about that announcement, made on January 26th, regarding the Central Bank's billion-dollar error. 

Given the seriousness of the matter, the person who should have shown their face to the people was the president of the Central Bank, but His Excellency, from an illustrious economic dynasty, preferred to delegate the embarrassment to the head of Statistics at the Central Bank, Fernando Rocha, whom Brazilians have never seen or heard of. 

It would be the same as an army general, upon losing a battle, delegating to the major the mission of communicating the failure. 

The Central Bank's failure in question was an arithmetic error. A calculation mistake. Since October 2021, it had been publishing incorrect statistics on the exchange rate flow of the Brazilian economy, failing to identify US$1 billion in imports monthly. 

The exchange rate measures the dollars that enter and leave the country in foreign trade operations, investments, or the purchase and sale of reserves. With the correction of the erroneous data, the country ended 2022 in the negative, not in the positive as previously announced. In the jargon of trickery, this would be called a scam.

The error amounted to more than US$12 billion – approximately R$60 billion at the current exchange rate. 

In the midst of an election year, the Central Bank reported a net inflow of US$9,5 billion into the country, giving the impression that more foreigners were bringing money here, when in fact the opposite was true. There was a negative balance of US$3,2 billion. More resources were being withdrawn from the country. It was no longer an inflow of capital, but an outflow. 

A minor accounting error that gave the country a surplus when it was actually running a deficit. 

Very convenient, in an election year, to publicize that the economy was booming and for the fake news machine to spread fictitious data. Can we call this an electoral crime? Yes, we can. 

While this accounting error may not have had a major impact on the economy, it certainly did on the election campaign.

It was the "independent" Central Bank, which ate barbecue with Bolsonaro and Guedes, frequented their WhatsApp groups, and imposed the highest interest rates in the world on Brazilians.

Today, TV news reports lament the rising price of rice and beans without assigning responsibility. They don't even mention, for example, the reduction in agricultural land, because soy and pastureland are encroaching on everything, devastating forests and promoting wildfires. Agricultural policies aimed at controlling food security were abolished during the previous administration.  

These are the grenades left by Bolsonaro and Guedes in our pockets, which Lula needs to defuse in order to fulfill his project of governing for the people.

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