Journalist and writer Fernando Morais recently revealed that U.S. government agencies have been monitoring Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for more than five decades, according to local media.
According to the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the information, obtained through requests filed in 2019, covers the period from 1966 to that year, resulting in the production of 819 documents, totaling 3,300 pages of records, mostly prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Among other aspects, the documents detail Lula’s relationship with former President Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), with authorities in the Middle East and China, in addition to Brazilian military plans and the production of the mixed-economy oil company Petrobras.
Despite the vast collection, the renowned communicator and writer has not yet had access to all the documents, and there is no information collected from the 2023 period. Morais had the help of the law firm Pogust Goodhead to request information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
“The President was still in jail when I got powers of attorney to collect, on his behalf, all the existing records in the agencies. There are agencies that obviously had nothing … But I asked for all of them,” he explained.
So far, 613 documents were identified from the CIA, 111 from the State Department, 49 from the Defense Intelligence Agency, 27 from the Department of Defense, eight from the U.S. Army South, and one from the Army Cyber Command.
The expectation is that the new data obtained from the U.S. records could enrich the second part of the biography of the former labor leader, currently in production.(Granma)
