That would be the WTO membership agreement.

PIX does not violate it. But even if it did, like any other country on Earth, Brazil has an endless list of US violations that it could claim it’s remediating.

It’s not a middle finger to Trump. The Brazilian government has had that position for a long time.

A long time ago the Japanese government decided that the entire country producing only one kind of food is bonkers, and started forcing farmers to diversify.

Jump to a handful of decades later, and the diversification effort was kept every ear, with people complaining that they can’t keep it forever, and the government claiming that it never caused any problem. Repeat that again and again, and well, finally it has caused some problem.

The police, persecution and two independent levels of the Judiciary found him to be the central player on the Petrobras scandal that you talked about (and either way, it was created while he was the president). He was the central player on the scandal of car companies paying him (personally) to avoid paying taxes. He inherited the position of central player on the scandal of construction companies paying bribes.

There were dozens of other crimes. He was right on the middle in most of them. Including the one where he used taxpayer money to bribe representatives and senators.

Cut the bullshit.

It now seems that the arrest was for more political rather than criminal reasons

That’s just false.

They rewrote the law so that the judges that judged were the wrong ones, decided that this invalidated the judgement that already happened, and that no existing judge had the authority to rule over the case. He wasn’t deemed non-guilty of anything, no evidence was found wrong, and no crime was corrected.

If he stops making newsworth content, the news will be tempted to fill their space with other, less egregious corruption scandals.

So, I don’t expect him to go out free, but I really expect him to keep just enough freedom he needs to keep throwing shit around.

A trade surplus doesn’t mean they are going well.

Total exports increasing does. But it’s only half of the picture.