The coup government is a fuel cartel.

I have been waging a battle against the fuel cartel in the Federal District for about 15 years.

Over the years we have had victories with the help of CADE (Administrative Council for Economic Defense) and the courts: we managed to lower prices; business owners in the sector paid multimillion-dollar fines of approximately 200 million for illegal practices.

To our dismay, mine and that of the Brazilian consumer, with the media-driven parliamentary coup in Brazil, the government itself became part of the cartel and cartelized the entire country.

The first measures that paved the way for this nonsense began during Fernando Henrique's time when he removed price controls from the federal government's sphere, saying that the fuel market was free – something that cannot be free because the price is cartelized from production to refining, passing through the gas stations.

What is happening today? The return of Pedro Parente's absurd policy, which is the same one from the FHC era of dollarizing fuel prices and considering the variation in the international price of a barrel of oil when defining domestic prices.

This doesn't make sense because if it did, when the price of a barrel of oil fell internationally, the price of gasoline here should also fall, and that has never happened. This connection only works to increase prices, never to decrease them.

In the eight years between 95 and 2002, the price of gasoline was readjusted by 350%, that is, an average increase of 44% per year.

During the PT governments, from 2003 to 2015, gasoline was readjusted by 45%, an average of 3.75% per year. In other words, the readjustment in the last 12 years was equivalent to the average of one (1) year of the previous period.

In addition to all this, this coup government regrouped taxes on fuels, which had been exempted during Dilma's government.

They brought up the issue of CIDE, PIS, and COFINS again, and the states, including here in the Federal District, took full advantage of it to increase the ICMS.

I have said more than once in articles published on 247 that the government takes advantage of the daily increase in fuel prices to raise funds.

This is the easy way out they find - taxing the consumer more and more - since they don't have the capacity to tax the great fortunes so that the rich in this country actually pay appropriate taxes.

In this way, the middle class and the poorest population are left defenseless and at the mercy of Michel Temer's madness.

This truckers' strike is a cry for survival from a category of slaves, helpless in the face of constant increases in diesel fuel and supplies for truck and trailer maintenance, while freight prices remain very low.

It is up to the people of the Federal District and Brazil to reflect deeply on Temer's abuses of power, and to demonstrate in the streets and squares of this country, to remove this gang from the Presidential Palace and restore peace.