Official note by the Workers Party of Brazil National Presidency

The temporary detention of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva represents a serious blow for democracy and the Constitution.
This is a new and unworthy chapter in the coup-driven escalation that is seeking to destabilize the government of President Dilma Rousseff, criminalize the Workers Party, and attack the Brazilian people’s main leader.
Sectors of the State’s judicial and police apparatus, in collusion with media groups and the right-wing opposition, are the leading center of an operation designed to subvert the results from the polls.
The countless cases of selective investigations, illegal leakages, and trampling over individual rights are a clear evidence that the Nation is being bled through the construction of an arbitrary regime of exception under the command of conservative forces whose only goal is to return to the government at any cost.
These same reactionary groups, in the past, resorted to the barracks. Now they allure enemies of democracy in courts, in the Public Prosecution, and in the Federal Police, encouraged and protected by the monopolist media.
Former President Lula is the main target of those who do not accept the transformation process started in 2003, marked by a change in the living conditions and by the rising role of the workers in the city and in the country.
The Workers Party, at this moment of affront against the democratic system and popular sovereignty, reaffirms the permanent rallying of its militants. The Petistas are called to defend, side by side with our allies, in the streets and institutions, both the constitutional rules and the innocence of former President Lula.
May those fishing in the murky waters of coup plotting make no illusions: The Brazilian people, of whom the former Head of State is the most illustrious son, shall know how to resist and defeat the forces of hatred and backwardness.