As a listless workday at the Lula Institute drew to a close on Thursday, April 5, 2018, ex-president Dilma Rousseff, Senator Cid Gomes, Paraná senator and Workers’ Party (PT) president Gleisi Hoffmann, and Lula’s lawyers Valeska Teixeira and Cristiano Zanin sipped coffee and talked, while waving goodbye to the last few workers as they trickled out of the building.
From a strictly legal perspective, after the Supreme Court ruling, everyone there knew that Lula’s arrest warrant could come at any moment. The feeling, however, was that there was no reason it should happen immediately.
Lula was certain that he was going to be free over the weekend, and he left his second-floor office, descended a spiral staircase to a short hallway with two sofas and matte glass walls, and asked for his young assistant, the sociologist Marco Aurélio “Marcola” Santana Ribeiro, if he could place a call for him to Moisés Selerges, director of the ABC Metalworkers’ Union and one of Lula’s good friends.
