Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva left office in 2010 so beloved — U.S. President Barack Obama called him “the man” — and with approval ratings so historically high that the trappings of tributes filled 10 shipping containers.
There was wine from French ex-heads of state Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, an oxcart from a popular music group, and a crèche his wife Marisa would place in the presidential palace’s front yard. It would all have to go, eventually, involving more than a million reais ($308,000) in shipping and storage costs, and it was the question, among many others, of who paid those costs and why that landed the man known as Lula before his interrogators.
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