With Abreu and Lima, Lula brings back Chávez, Lava Jato, fossil fuels and involvement with the USA

President Lula, who likes to play with fire, has already anticipated 2024 by bringing the Abreu and Lima refinery back into the limelight, which brings with it two ghosts and a warning: the biggest corruption scandal in history, the dangerous links between Lula and the PT in the external context and the risk of going against the grain, when the whole world and Brazil in particular are moving towards green energy. Green energy with refinery?

Not satisfied, Lula superimposed one mistake on top of another: the bet on Abreu and Lima and the involvement with the USA. According to him, their governments did everything right and Lava Jato was the fault of the “collusion” of the US Department of Justice with “judges and prosecutors”, because the United States never accepted that Brazil had a Petrobras. Delirium? Self-deception? Or are you kidding me by saying I like it?

President Lula during a ceremony for the resumption of work in the Abreu and Lima refinery Photo: Ricardo Stuckert/PR

Abreu and Lima has gone down in history as the symbol of Lava Jato and the lack of planning, bad bets, waste of public money and corruption. It’s already off to a bad start. Lula intervened in Petrobras’ investment plan and the project was created in 2005, with an expected cost of $2.5 billion. Ten years later, when the work was almost abandoned, the costs reached $20 billion.

Abreu and Lima, created in collaboration with the Venezuelan PDVSA, also presents the images and “communions” of Lula with Hugo Chavez, intellectual mentor and prime executor of the dismantling of Venezuela towards a dictatorship. After receiving Nicola Maduro with praise and salami in 2023, Lula stages the ghost of Chávez in early 2024.

And just when the announcement arrived that Petrobras would allocate R$ 8 billion to complete the work Marina Silva, of the Environment, shouted in Davos to convince the world that Brazil, which will host COP-30 in 2025, is leading the transition from fossil energy to green energy. Are those who invest in diesel refineries with combustion trucks and buses on a road of no return?

Read more from Eliane Cantanhêde

Petrobras, the epicenter of Lava Jato, involved its leaders with construction companies, parties allied with the PT and Planalto, but corruption is only a part, and the smallest, of its tragedy of those times. The biggest losses are due to mismanagement and political – and populist – interference in fuel prices. Paying more and selling at a lower price doesn’t work.

In his first internal tour of 2024, Lula got it right with gestures, programs and rapprochement of the Armed Forces, which are in the process of, let’s say, sanitization. But the ghosts of Abreu and Lima remain, the praise for China and the attacks on the USA. What do Brazil and Lula himself gain from it?

2024-01-20 23:00:00
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