The pre-salt auction and Dilma's reelection.

I think the president, or rather, the former president Lula, exaggerated a bit when he said in Argentina that the traditional media never gave him a positive headline.

That's not true, Mr. Lula. Do you remember the carnival we had (majestic plural) when you announced the fabulous pre-salt reserves?

All of Brazil, from right to left, celebrated.

I'm willing to bet that, whatever the headline in Globo was, even Merval, deep down, must have felt a pang of pride for being Brazilian.

There had already been another episode, that of biodiesel, celebrated after the announcement that Brazil, thanks to its government, had invented "green gasoline".

It's a shame that no one talks anymore about biodiesel, which was, and continues to be, a matter of global interest.

It's also a shame that the pre-salt oil remains in the depths of the ocean. Because... why?

Firstly, because upon discovering this immense wealth of oil dormant at the bottom of the sea, some very greedy friend of his suggested a change in the rules for oil exploration, inventing this so-called profit-sharing system and demanding that future partners participate in this sharing with a high percentage of national technology.

And that's what happened.

Petrobras doesn't have that technology. Large companies still don't have a safe track record of deep-water exploration.

Thus, the so-called major oil explorers chose to withdraw from participating in the Libra Field Auction, the first major investment in the pre-salt layer.

The auction will be held on Monday, with the participation of second-tier consortia, including Chinese ones.

I said it will be done. Or it would have been done.

The Director of the Oil Workers Federation, Mr. Francisco José de Oliveira, believes that such immense wealth – estimated at 15 billion barrels – cannot simply be auctioned off without first undergoing a broad debate with Brazilian society.

Read: National Congress, social movements, unions and associations. Read also: lengthy discussions about where and how to apply the pre-salt resources.

Francisco José has already gathered a list of over 200 parliamentarians, including members of the PT party, who are in favor of this broad discussion, and he will not accept just a minister's guarantee that the resources will go to education and health. But he has no hope of moving forward given the pressures from the presidential palace.

Tired of the situation, he called a strike at 16 refineries.

However, respectable voices have also raised their voices, albeit from a different angle, that are also opposed to the auction.

Among them is Professor Ildo Sauer, former Director of Gas and Energy at Petrobras, known for his nationalist fervor.

Ildo Sauer believes that a rushed auction of the Libra oil field is primarily in the interest of US energy policy, which has not been able to secure its energy supply even with the recent discovery of shale gas, which also appears to be abundant in the US.

From my little corner of the internet, I agree with Professor Ildo Sauer and the President of the Unified Federation of Oil Workers, Francisco José, for a third, pragmatic reason.

It's better to leave those 15 billion reais quietly six or seven kilometers below the waterline than to start dipping into that money with a single objective: to re-elect Dilma Rousseff.