Lula, a political leader kidnapped by Lava Jato.

Lula is not just a political prisoner. Lula is a kidnapped political leader; he is a hostage of transcendental importance for the continuity and deepening of the regime of exception.

Lula was hunted down and kidnapped by Sérgio Moro and Deltan Dallagnol and locked up in the Lava Jato prison to prevent him from hindering the implementation of the far-right's power project in Brazil.

The legal farce that unfolded in the exceptional court of Lava Jato [TRF4] on January 24, 2018, became known as one of the greatest contemporary legal atrocities.

The arbitrary treatment of Lula is comparable to the farcical trial that illegally condemned the Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus at the end of the 19th century. That injustice formed the basis of Hannah Arendt's work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as well as the German thinker's work on antisemitism and Nazism.

Dreyfus also inspired the manifesto "J'accuse," a letter of denunciation to the President of France published in the newspaper Aurora in January 1898, in which Émile Zola called for the annulment of Dreyfus's illegal conviction and a fair and clean investigation.

Once imprisoned in the Lava Jato operation, Lula saw his civil and political rights, and even the rights he possesses as a human being, progressively stripped away.

Lula was robbed of his right to vote. To prevent his election, considered certain, as president of Brazil, the authoritarian regime defied the order of the UN Human Rights Committee and also robbed him of the right to be chosen by the majority of the Brazilian people in October 2018.

They silenced Lula's voice, his freedom of expression and free speech, preventing him from communicating with the people and from giving interviews to the press.

The inhumanity of Lava Jato knows no bounds. Besides prohibiting visits from religious figures and deciding which lawyers can assist him, the exceptional court prevented Lula from burying his brother Vavá. A barbaric cruelty and inhuman punishment that not even the dictatorship was capable of inflicting on him.

In 1980, Lula was allowed to leave his political prison to attend the wake and funeral of his mother, Dona Lindu. This cruel restriction imposed on Lula is not imposed on the country's prison population. In 2018, tens of thousands of inmates in the penitentiary system were authorized to leave prison in situations of death or serious illness of a family member.

The new farcical conviction handed down on February 6th by Moro's substitute judge followed the fascist script of criminal persecution that led to Lula's first conviction and his illegal imprisonment on April 7, 2018.

In her eagerness to convict Lula to ensure his incarnation in the gallery of villains before handing over the 13th Federal Court to the judge who will assume the post in the coming days, the young judge Gabriela Hardt committed gross errors, such as [1] convicting Lula of passive corruption without him holding public office at the time of the events; [2] treating Léo Pinheiro and José Aldemário as if they were 2 different people, when in reality the 2 designations refer to the same and only person, the businessman, confessed criminal and informant José Aldemário Pinheiro Filho; and [3] convicting Lula of corruption at PETROBRÁS in a case that has no connection whatsoever with the embezzlement at the state-owned company.

Lula is being prosecuted in at least six other fraudulent cases orchestrated by the Lava Jato prosecutors. Each case is scandalously more fraudulent than the last. One of them, for example, relates to the Gripen fighter jet technology program, implemented after his presidency.

The Lava Jato task force is afraid of Lula. They know that, if free, Lula wields extraordinary political and symbolic power that could destabilize the oligarchic pact of domination and the regime of exception. That's why they need to keep Lula incommunicado and isolated in captivity.

This second conviction confirms the pattern of judicial arbitrariness against Lula and shows the clear trend of new illegal convictions in other cases, piling up decades of condemnation that will mean Lula's life imprisonment.

The ruling class's hatred for Lula has reached its peak. The bourgeoisie no longer hides its desire to see Lula end his days in captivity.

In light of this dramatic reality, Lula's candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize takes on special significance.

It is necessary to turn the defense of Lula's Nobel Prize into a platform for a worldwide campaign denouncing his status as a political leader kidnapped and held captive by Lava Jato, where he sees his civil, political, and human rights destroyed every day.