After 15 years, corruption charges are dropped against former top PT officials José Genoino and Delubio Soares related to the "mensalão" lawfare attack, orchestratedto block Lula's reelection. A key argument of Perry Anderson's "Lula's Brazil" crumbles. https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/justica/mensalao-trf-1-extingue-punibilidade-de-genoino-delubio-e-marcos-valerio

Unlike the bourgeois US leftist intellectuals who smeared him, José Genoino risked his life fighting fascism as as a communist guerilla fighter in Araguaia during the Brazilian military dictatorship, was arrested, tortured and went on to help found the PT party in 1979.

When Genoino was arrested on trumped up corruption charges, he was national President of the PT, living in a lower middle class neighborhood in half of a bungalow and driving a car with a 1 litre engine in it. He was clearly not someone who used politics for illicit gains.

Genoino was a key actor in unifying liberation theology activists, labor unions and social movements to form the initial core of the modern Brazilian organized left. This base level movement led to 4 consecutive presidencies, defeating the FTAA and nearly ending hunger in Brazil.

When you read anglo self-proclaimed leftist hit jobs on the PT and "corruption" by people like Dave Zirin and Perry Anderson, remember that instead of giving the benifit of the doubt to revolutionary heroes, they parroted right wing narratives and helped normalize the 2016 coup.