Leia o artigo em português aqui
On October 8, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) ordered Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate who will face off against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the run-off election on Sunday, to delete social posts linking Lula to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) drug cartel, which the US government considers a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
But Lula is linked to PCC figures through his accountant, João Muniz Leite, who prepared the president’s income tax returns, kept the books of Lula’s longtime lawyer Roberto Teixeira for 14 years, keeps those of Lula’s son, Fábio Luís, and who São Paulo prosecutors say helped the cartel launder money. Muniz Leite’s office sits in the same building that housed Lula’s son’s companies.
Sharing an accountant with PCC figures doesn’t mean that the PCC controls Lula, who vigorously objected to the US government labeling the PCC a “terrorist organization.”
But the court went too far in claiming no factual basis linked Lula to the PCC. Even CNN Brasil, which Lula’s critics regard as friendly to him, republished an Estadão article headlined, “Accountant linked to Lula is suspected of laundering R$ 16 million in lottery with PCC.”
Moreover, São Paulo prosecutors this month charged Senival Moura, a city councilman from Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), and 20 others with laundering PCC money through Transunião, a São Paulo bus company, BNews São Paulo reported on October 2.
Prosecutors called him a “central piece” (“peça central”) of the company; Metrópoles, reporting his June arrest, had described him as “a hidden leader” (“um líder oculto”) of it. His lawyer, Márcio Sayeg, said he “never belonged to a criminal organization and never had ties to the PCC” (“jamais integrou organização criminosa, jamais manteve vínculo com o PCC”).
And the PT’s name had come up in PCC cases before. In 2014, the party’s São Paulo executive expelled state deputy Luiz Moura after police caught him at a meeting with suspected PCC members. And in 2019, investigators used a wiretap to record a PCC boss saying, “The PT had serious dialogue with us, bro” (“O PT tinha diálogo com nois cabuloso, mano”).
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who ordered mass censorship of Bolsonaro allies, and who is implicated in a sweeping banking fraud scandal, oversaw censorship of the Lula-PCC link in 2022.
On the day of the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election, Moraes ordered the news site O Antagonista to remove a story reporting that the PCC’s leader, Marcola, had declared a vote for Lula in a Federal Police intercept. The story quoted Marcola saying Lula “is better [than Bolsonaro], even though he’s a crook” (“é melhor [que Bolsonaro], mesmo sendo pilantra”).
Moraes called the story “a fact known to be false, with grave decontextualization,” but he did not say the recording was fake. He wrote that “no declaration of a vote by Marcola for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is found” (“não se constata qualquer declaração de voto de Marcola no candidato Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva”) and that the dialogues “have only a political connotation” (“apresentam apenas conotação política”). Jovem Pan, Terra, and Jair Bolsonaro’s accounts received the same order, and each faced a fine of R$100,000 a day for leaving the story up.
O Antagonista noted that the ruling “accepts, without right of reply, the arguments of the PT candidate’s campaign lawyers.” By October 20, 2022, about 60 pieces of content had been removed at Lula’s request.
Earlier, in July 2022, Moraes, then acting president of the electoral court, had ordered the removal of content linking Lula and the Workers’ Party to the PCC, including a video on the 2002 murder of Celso Daniel, a Workers’ Party mayor. He wrote that it was “a known and widely publicized fact that the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office definitively closed its inquiries, with no news of the involvement of the Workers’ Party or its members,” which “demonstrates, with clarity and objectivity, the dissemination of facts known to be false.”
The July petition came from the Workers’ Party, whose lawyers of record included Cristiano Zanin Martins, Lula’s defense attorney. Lula appointed Zanin to the Supreme Court, and Zanin took his seat on August 3, 2023.
But the same office raided Lula’s accountant three years later. And one month before Moraes signed that order, Estadão had reported that the man who prepared Lula’s tax returns had split a R$16 million Mega Sena prize with a PCC drug trafficker.
After a September 2025 raid, part of an investigation called Operation Spare, prosecutors said the record left “no doubt about the active participation of João Muniz in the criminal organization’s money laundering strategies.” Three years earlier, questioned in the lottery case, Muniz Leite admitted that a PCC drug supplier had been his client and denied laundering.
Muniz Leite is suspected of laundering money for Anselmo Becheli Santa Fausta, known as Cara Preta, a PCC drug supplier, and in 2021, Muniz Leite came under police scrutiny after winning 55 lottery prizes in a single year. By April 2024, federal police data showed that he and his wife had won an astonishing 640 times across different lotteries. Brazil’s tax authority concluded that, even with the prize money included, his income did not match his companies’ gross revenue.