00:00Brazil's incumbent president Lula da Silva and vice president Gerardo Altman
00:04formally announced their candidacies for re-election today in Sao Paulo.
00:09Our correspondent Premier has more.
00:13Delegates came from across Brazil today to the Workers' Party's National Convention
00:19to watch incumbent president LuĂs Inácio Lula da Silva declare his candidacy for re-election
00:26in this year's presidential elections, which will take place on October 4th.
00:31Brazil has a short campaign season.
00:33The deadline for declaring candidacies is August 4th,
00:37but no candidate can officially ask the public for votes until August 16th.
00:42This means that the official campaign season is only 49 days long in Brazil,
00:47and there's a lot of limits as to what candidates can and cannot do,
00:51especially in terms of funding from the private sector and individual donors.
00:56which is very tightly regulated here.
00:59During his speech today, Lula said that if he's re-elected,
01:03he's going to invest more money in military so that the Brazilian government can defend itself
01:08against possible kidnapping incursions, similar to what happened with Nicolas Maduro,
01:15who was kidnapped by the United States government earlier this year.
01:19Vice presidential candidate Gerardo Altman, who also declared his official candidacy today,
01:24made veiled references to meddling that's already underway from the United States and Argentinian governments.
01:31Javier Malay, the Argentinian far-right president, came to the Liberal Party conference two weeks ago
01:37and officially endorsed Flavio Bolsonaro for the presidency.
01:40And the U.S. has imposed tariffs.
01:43It's taken Brazil off of its friendly governments list.
01:46There's still almost a little over two months until Election Day.
01:49A lot could happen until then, so there's going to be a lot of jockeying back and forth
01:54between all the different candidates, and I'll be covering it for Telesur.
01:57Stay tuned. Election Day is October 4th.
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