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Contrary to what the video claims, Lula did not say he will implement a dictatorship in Brazil in an interview with Chinese channel

Investigated Content: Video in which the digital influencer and candidate for federal deputy from Goiás Gustavo Gayer, from the Liberal Party (PL), states that Lula openly declared that he wanted to establish a dictatorship in Brazil. Gayer is based on excerpts from an interview with PT to the Chinese channel Guancha.

where it was published: Facebook and YouTube.

Completion of Proof: The video published by Gustavo Gayer is misleading, in which he claims that Lula openly declared that he wanted to implement a dictatorship in Brazil. In the material, excerpts from an interview made in July 2021 by Chinese journalist Eric Li are presented, in which there is no statement in this sense. The passage used by Gayer to exemplify the former president’s alleged desire to establish a dictatorship in the country is as follows: “China has a party that has power, it has a strong state, that makes decisions and that people comply with. Something we don’t have here in Brazil. We had a coup on Dilma Rousseff, on our president, because of a lie”.

Lula’s statements were taken out of context and were part of a response about the reason for the low performance of other countries in the BRICS bloc (made up of Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) compared to the development of China.

Neither in the excerpts cut and used in the video published by Gayer, nor in the original video, was the desire to establish a dictatorship in the country stated. In the approximately 51 minutes of the interview, the PT does not use the word dictatorship nor does he say anything about the desire to establish an authoritarian regime in Brazil. In response to Comprova, Lula’s press office also denied that he had spoken of establishing a dictatorship.

misleading, for Comprova, is content taken from the original context and used in another so that its meaning undergoes changes; that uses inaccurate data or that leads to an interpretation different from the author’s intention; content that confuses, with or without the deliberate intent to cause harm.

Scope of publication: Comprova investigates suspicious content with the greatest reach on social networks. On Facebook, the original post by pre-candidate Gustavo Gayer reached, until August 11, 2022, 269 thousand views. In it, there were 34 thousand shares, 3.3 thousand comments and 35 thousand reactions. Gayer also posted the YouTube video link on his Facebook page, garnering over 354 shares, 692 reactions and 109 comments. The video on YouTube, up to the same date, had 180,000 views and 2,700 comments. According to data captured by CrowdTangle, the video was posted on 17 different pages, with a total of 386,000 followers.

What the author of the publication says: Searched by email by Comprova, Gustavo Gayer did not respond.

How do we check: During the video, Gayer mentions that the lines were taken from the recording of an interview for a Chinese channel. The verification, then, began with a search in search engines such as Google for keywords such as “Lula”, “Chinese channel interview” and “dictatorship”. From the searches, the team arrived at the full interview of the former president of the Republic to the Guancha newspaperpublished in July 2021.

After transcribing both Lula’s interview with the Chinese channel and the video published by Gustavo Gayer, Comprova analyzed all the PT’s speech clippings used in the verified video. Those involved were also sought and mentioned in the video via email and WhatsApp. Lula’s advice was also sought.

Lula does not speak openly about implanting a dictatorship, as stated in the video

Contrary to what Gustavo Gayer claimed, Lula never declares his intention to establish a dictatorship in Brazil. The term “dictatorship” is not mentioned in the clipped excerpts used in Gayer’s video or in the original interview, broadcast live by Guancha and by national vehicles such as TVT Network in partnership with the newspaper Brasil de Fato.

In Gayer’s video, pieces of Lula’s response to the question made by Chinese journalist Eric Li about the low economic development of other BRICS countries are presented in relation to China’s performance in recent decades. The former president responds: “Why did China do this? Because China has a party, China is the result of a 1949 Mao Tse Tung revolution. China has a party that has power, it has a strong state, that makes decisions and that people comply with. Something we don’t have here in Brazil. We had a coup on Dilma Rousseff, on our president, because of a lie.”

In the same interview, in his view of the facts, Lula says that “many of the social policies that the people need” were made in China, because of the “strong state”. In addition, according to the former president, the Asian country fought the coronavirus quickly due to a strong state policy. Despite the praise of the Chinese government and his personal assessment of the issue, Lula did not say that he wanted to establish a communist dictatorship in Brazil.

PT says that “China is an example of development for the world” and says he hopes that other countries learn from the country, “so that they are richer, stronger, have more distribution of wealth and have a more humane world”.

Lula cites China to highlight it as an example of “political organization”, a characteristic that he believes to have been the basis for the Chinese to have managed to evolve in the last 20 years “with a lot of competence, with a lot of culture, with a lot of investment and with a lot of scientific and technological knowledge”.

Interview with the Chinese channel took place in 2021

Gayer misleadingly emphasizes that Lula’s interview with the Chinese portal would have been carried out recently. However, the conversation was broadcast live on July 7, 2021 on YouTube. Gayer’s video was posted on July 28, 2022, so a year later.

To the newspaper Guancha, the current candidate for the Presidency of the Republic also mentions that China, in addition to party issues, “evolved in an extraordinary way” because it also believed in “investment in education”. “Millions of young Chinese traveled around the world to train, to learn, and that is why China has taken an extraordinary leap in quality”, exemplified the PT. All these factors, in Lula’s opinion, were crucial for China to present itself with “a consolidated economy” and less vulnerable to the other superpowers.

In the interview, Lula also defends that, during his term in office, he thought a lot about his relationship not only with China, but also with India and South Africa. He said that he had tried to articulate so that developing countries could form a “strategic partnership” so that such regions, “being half of humanity”, would not be “depending on the dollar policy” to, for example, act in foreign trade or form partnerships in the technological development.

In addition to the comparison and the associations on the development model, the PT does not say that he intends to implement a dictatorial model in Brazil.

Gustavo Gayer

Gustavo Gayer has already been denied in Comprova verifications that showed what video is deceiving when showing partial poll results with intention to vote for presidentthat a document does not prove fraud in the 2018 electionsand that one Brazilian research did not use lethal doses to kill patients and discredit the use of chloroquine. The businessman was candidate the mayor of Goiânia in 2020 by the Christian Democracy (DC) and was in 4th place, with 7.6% of the votes. According to information released on his YouTube channel, which has one million subscribers, he is a pre-candidate for federal deputy.

why do we investigate: Comprova reinforces the importance of investigating suspicious content that goes viral on social networks and investigates the video because of its direct relationship with the presidential elections. The verified publication cites former president and presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Misleading and false content involving political actors is harmful to the democratic process and hinders the voter’s decision, which must be made based on true information. In the verified video, it is stated that Lula “had to be prevented from running for president” because he wanted to “implant a dictatorship in Brazil” and encourages the dissemination of false information on social networks.

Other checks on the topic: The same excerpt from Lula’s interview was previously verified by Comprova on two occasions. In the first, the former president was accused of wanting to apply religious restrictions in Brazil and, in the second, to defend the implantation of communism. Both contents were classified as misleading.

Investigated by: Projeto Comprova*. Verified by: Plural, CBN Cuiabá, Piauí, JC Online, Correio do Povo, Correio do Estado, Correio Braziliense, O Popular, A Gazeta, O Dia, SBT and SBT News.

*This verification was carried out by journalists from the vehicles O Povo, Plural and SBT-RIO, who participated in the Residency Program at Comprova.

Source: CNN Brasil

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