“I believe that Brazil has become insane,” stabbed, his voice quiet, the photographer Sebastião Salgado. He was invited by Léa Salamé at the microphone of France Inter , on Monday, 5 November. A native of Minas Gerai, a state in the south-east of Brazil, the photographer has observed for forty years the world, from Rwanda to Yugoslavia, pssant, of course, by all the nooks and crannies of his native country.

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“We have put in prison one who could have been elected in the first round. Lula, he was a political prisoner.”

Sebastião Salgado at France Inter

“This was not done in one shot, but over several years,” he continues. This goes back to the impeachment of president Dilma Roussef. Virtually a coup since it had been elected democratically.” In 2016, the deputies voted the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, accused of having made-up of public accounts to promote his re-election in 2014.

“[An impeachment] to implement a component completely corrupt. It is at this point that we lost control of the country. It has become very hard, very violent,” says the photographer of 74 years. The vice-president Michel Temer, who had inherited the presidency by interim and full-year, quickly fell into disgrace, accused of passive corruption and threatened to turn impeachment.

“And we put in prison one who could have been elected in the first round: Lula, without proof, was put in prison. One can almost speak of a political prisoner,” growls the artist to the iconic black and white shots. The ex-brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is serving from April 2018 sentenced to twelve years in prison for corruption had not obtained the right to stand in the presidential election. And had to pass the torch to Fernando Haddad.

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“But the government of Lula was not pure, there has been a lot of corruptions. In order to govern, they have bought political support. What turned against the democratic forces,” says Sebastião Salgado. Explaining the reasons of the victory of Jair Bolsonaro, on October 28.