Supporters launch committee in defense of Lula in Portugal.

By Carlos Hortmann, contributor to 247 in Lisbon - The well-known Casa do Alentejo in Lisbon has been a venue for many political activities and actions in defense of democracy in Brazil. Prominent figures in Portuguese and Brazilian national politics have passed through its doors, most recently former President Dilma Rousseff and Guilherme Boulos.

Inspired by the initiative of Celso Amorim, former Brazilian Foreign Minister, the Andorinha Collective (a supra-partisan left-wing organization) and the PT Nucleus of Lisbon, together with various social, trade union, intellectual and cultural movements, as well as political parties and agents, are promoting the creation of the International Committee of Solidarity with Lula and Democracy in Brazil in Portugal.

According to the organizers, this Committee seeks to intensify the fight for Brazilian democracy, and one of its primary causes is the freedom of Lula. The international community, regardless of whether they support Lula or the left, especially political and legal actors, recognizes that the former president is a political prisoner, due to the sentence based on convictions and lacking conclusive evidence handed down by the federal judge responsible for Operation Lava Jato, Sérgio Moro. Therefore, these various segments of Portuguese society have taken the initiative to create yet another trench in the fight for democracy around the world.

Some of the entities supporting the launch of the committee are: Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), Left Bloc (BE), Ecologist Party "The Greens" (Verdes), Unitary Socialist Workers' Party, Casa do Brasil, Portuguese Council for Peace and Cooperation (CPPC), Portuguese Communist Youth (JCP), Casa do Alentejo, General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP), Coletivo Vozes Importunas, Anti-Racist Front (FAR), SOS Racism, PT Lisbon Nucleus and Coletivo Andorinha.

Read below the manifesto that created the committee:

MANIFESTO FOR THE CREATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE IN DEFENSE OF LULA'S RELEASE - LISBON

The arrest of former President Lula corroborates and deepens the parliamentary-legal-media coup that occurred in Brazil in 2016 against the elected President Dilma Rousseff. After the biased conduct of the legal process in which Lula was a defendant, which resulted in his conviction in the first and second instances in the Brazilian Federal Court, the order determining his arrest (published less than 24 hours after the Supreme Federal Court denied the habeas corpus filed by the former president) caused national commotion by consolidating the agenda of ideological use of State institutions for the benefit of an illegitimate minority that currently misgoverns Brazil.

Judge Sérgio Moro, who presided over the trial against Lula, appeared on numerous occasions at the invitation of and alongside political opponents of the former president. This information alone, in any country in the world, would attest to the lack of impartiality of the Judiciary. The direct effects of such actions are reflected in legal uncertainty and the discrediting of the country's democratic institutions. There is no way to believe in the impartiality of a judge who...

He travels to Portugal, the United States, and other countries, boasting of his "achievements" and receiving awards from entities politically committed to commercial and imperialist interests.

The conviction of former President Lula lacks factual evidence. Instead, there are the infamous "plea bargains" that drastically reduce sentences for crimes committed by major businessmen, since they cite inferences about Lula's "alleged" involvement, clearly aimed at serving the interests of criminalizing left-wing political activity. Unlike other accused politicians, against whom there is unequivocal evidence of corruption (foreign bank accounts, illicit enrichment, suitcases of money), Lula's trial was marked by a consortium of the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Federal Court to create a kind of evidentiary fiction, based on PowerPoint presentations and vague arguments lacking any material basis in reality.

Beyond the symbolic nature of Lula's imprisonment in the eyes of the public, the curtailment of his freedom makes it impossible for one of the country's greatest political leaders to communicate with the population, thus attempting to weaken his victory in the general elections in October 2018. Both the conviction and the imprisonment of the former president are strategies to undermine his candidacy and campaign for the 2018 general elections, in which all opinion polls conducted so far indicate a victory for the Workers' Party candidate by a wide margin.

Supporting Lula's freedom is affirming a commitment to the democratic pact and to the popular sovereignty from which all political power should emanate. It is an act of resistance against the juristocracy, against media bias, and against the influence of economic oligopolies on Brazil's political decisions.

That is why today the international mobilization in solidarity with Lula is so important: to denounce the violation of rights that has been occurring repeatedly in Brazil since the illegitimate government of Michel Temer took office; to demonstrate the vigilance that international organizations are dedicating to the alarming situation the country is going through; to stop the maintenance of the State of Exception in Brazilian territory.

Therefore, as Brazilians, as immigrants, as Portuguese, as democrats, as human beings, we will shout:

Free Lula!