The heiress of Itaú, who supported the coup, is now calling for a "pact for democracy."
Maria Alice Setúbal, heiress and billionaire shareholder of Banco Itaú Unibanco, who supported the 2016 coup d'état, wrote an article defending a "pact for democracy"; in the "democracy" she defends, former presidents Dilma and Lula have no place; a sponsor of Marina Silva for years, the heiress invests in some social causes while her bank had more than R$ 6 billion in profit in the first quarter alone.
247 - Maria Alice Setúbal, heiress to Banco Itaú, owner of 1,3% of her family's group's shares, equivalent to 0,5% of Itaú Unibanco, which supported the coup against President Dilma Rousseff, wrote an article in Folha de S. Paulo now defending a "pact for democracy." The billionaire has been, since the 2010 presidential elections, the main sponsor and financier of Marina Silva, who also supported the 2016 coup d'état.
In the text, Neca, as she is known, refers to Dilma's removal as "impeachment" and makes no critical mention of the episode. Similarly, she calls for "clean, diverse elections with broad participation in October," but does not mention Lula's conviction and imprisonment or the desire of the elites who orchestrated the coup to eliminate him from the election. This suggests that the heiress of Banco Itaú Unibanco believes the elections will be "clean" without Lula's presence.
Maria Alice Setúbal is riding the wave of the Pact for Democracy, an initiative of more than 60 civil society organizations - see hereThe Tide Setúbal Foundation, founded and chaired by Neca and named after her mother, who died in 1997 at the age of 52, participates in the Pact. It has been a recurring strategy of some billionaires around the world to use a tiny fraction of their resources to sponsor causes that are socially and politically well-regarded, with the aim of shielding their businesses, which exploit billions of people around the planet. This is the case of Banco Itaú Unibanco, the largest bank in the country. The institution had no less than R$ 24 billion in profits in 2017 – R$ 6,28 billion in the first quarter of 2018 alone, when unemployment reached 13 million people, hunger began to plague millions, social policies were decimated, labor rights crushed, and the economy almost paralyzed, thanks to the coup supported, among others, by Itaú Unibanco.
Itaú Unibanco is one of the largest advertisers of the Folha-UOL Group. On the eve of the publication of Maria Alice Setúbal's article, the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper featured a full-page advertisement for the bank. Curiously, in the biographical footnote of the article (brief information about the author), there is no mention of the fact that Neca is a shareholder of Itaú Unibanco.
If you want to read the article, click here. here