00:00And as Brazil is entering the final hours of the electoral campaign ahead of the general election,
00:06our correspondent Brian Meir has more details. Welcome, Brian.
00:12Hi, thanks for having me.
00:16Well, President Lula has just finished what could possibly be the last campaign parade of his career.
00:27If he wins tomorrow, and some people are saying he has a chance of that, Lula himself believes he will,
00:34this could have been the last campaign rally of his 60-year, 55-year career in politics and labor union
00:44activism.
00:45It was a momentous event with tens of thousands of people coming out to support him,
00:50as well as the aligned candidates for governor Fernando Haddad, Senator Marina Silva and Simone Tebet,
00:58and a dozen candidates for state and federal congress here in Sao Paulo.
01:04And one thing that was on a lot of people's minds, who I spoke with at the rally today,
01:09was the fact that the U.S. government closed down its embassy and consulates in Brazil yesterday,
01:17announcing that they believed they were under threat of some kind of action.
01:22And so today it came out that U.S. or some foreign intelligence organization tipped off to the federal police
01:29that some people were making on a plan to attack a U.S. consulate,
01:35and the federal police raided their homes and found almost no evidence of that.
01:39So now the Workers' Party is officially requesting that this incident be included in the investigation
01:45by the Superior Electoral Court into foreign interference in this year's presidential election.
01:51The problem is, the man in charge of the Superior Electoral Court this year, André Mendonça, is a Jair Bolsonaro
01:57appointee,
01:58but we'll see what happens as things unfold.
02:03Brian, one question. In these final hours of the campaign ahead of Election Day,
02:08what are the main issues that could ultimately determine borderless decisions in Sunday's election?
02:15Well, there's a lot of manipulation going on on social media,
02:19but in terms of issues, the real big three are Brazil's development strategy,
02:25the use of its natural resources, and its weight on the international stage.
02:30Flavio Bolsonaro and Luís Inácio Lula da Silva have very different ideas about these three issues.
02:37Flavio Bolsonaro wants to turn a monopoly for U.S. companies over to Brazil's rare earth minerals.
02:44He wants the U.S. to assume a position of a kind of protectorate.
02:48I mean, he wants Brazil to be a kind of protectorate of the United States.
02:51And his idea of development is laissez-faire neoliberal economics.
02:55And in all three of those issues, President Lula has almost opposite positions.
03:01And that's what it's really coming down to in this final stretch.
03:05Thank you. Thank you, Brian, for your information.
03:09We will reach you again in a Comis News Brief.
03:12We continue with more. We go now to Venezuela.
03:15Combat
