On Tuesday (25), President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party) celebrated the release of Australian journalist Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder.
"Today, the world is a little better and less unjust. Julian Assange is free after 1,901 days in prison. His release and return home, albeit belatedly, is a victory for democracy and the fight for press freedom," said the Brazilian president in a social media post.
Since the beginning of his third presidential term, in January 2023, Lula has been one of the most vocal global leaders in defending Assange’s release. Among the information revealed by WikiLeaks throughout a decade, one has marked Brazilian diplomacy: the publication of documents proving that Dilma Rousseff was being spied on.
The case
In July 2015, WikiLeaks published a list of 29 phone numbers of Brazilian government officials, including then President Rousseff, who were regularly spied on by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) since 2011.
The NSA monitored ten phone numbers directly linked to the former president, including office landlines and cell phones such as those of her personal assistant, Anderson Dornelles, and ministers such as Antonio Palocci.
The revelations coincided with Rousseff’s rapprochement with President Barack Obama's administration, after revelations made public in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden that the Brazilian president was being spied on by the NSA. In that first week of July 2015, the president made her first official trip to the US, an agenda previously canceled when Snowden’s revelations emerged two years earlier.
"The Secretariat of Communication of the Presidency of the Republic informs that the President considers the issue finished. President Rousseff reiterates she trusts President Obama and the commitment he has made. The US and Brazil will increasingly strengthen their strategic partnership, based on mutual respect and the development of their peoples," Rousseff’s Office said in the statement.
Then exiled at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange said in a statement that the US government's spying practices had not been suspended at the time, despite Obama's promises to the Brazilian government.
"If President Rousseff wants to see more US investment in Brazil after her recent visit, as she claims, how can she guarantee Brazilian companies that their American counterparts will not have an advantage provided by surveillance? To what extent can she really guarantee that espionage has stopped - not just on her, but on all Brazilian issues?" Assange asked.
Persecution
Assange was released on Monday (24) from London's Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he had been held for over five years. He flew to the Mariana Islands, where a hearing is expected to approve his release. After his brief stay in a US territory in the Pacific – the islands are closer to Australia than the American continent – the journalist should be released, and return to his home country, Australia.
Between 2010 and 2011, some of the top newspapers in the world published extensive material on US military abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the 250,000 documents WikiLeaks exposed was US Army material on torture used in the Guantanamo detention center.
For exposing these crimes, Julian Assange has been persecuted by the US government. First, a flimsy accusation of sexual violence – later dropped – forced him to take refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There, in a small, stuffy room, he lived for seven years, petting a cat and receiving visits from important people. He was eventually arrested in 2019.
From then on, fears grew that he would be extradited to the US, where he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.
At the end of 2015, media outlets that had published confidential material first released by WikiLeaks in 2010 (The Guardian, The New York Times, El País, Le Monde, Der Spiegel) presented a letter to the US asking the country to drop the charges against Assange.
Edited by: Leandro Melito
