I met her again in 1970 in the Tiradentes prison in Sao Paulo. She was in the women´s wing known as the Maidens´ Tower and I was in the men´s. On Sundays I was allowed to go through the gate dividing the two wings in order to celebrate the liturgy with the women. In jail, even atheists did not refuse divine blessings.

Our paths crossed a third time in the presidential palace in Brasilia in 2003. She as Minister for Energy and Mines and I as special adviser for the Zero Hunger programme.

Dilma has a strong character and a short fuse. During her first term in office I suggested she learn to meditate. She once tried phoning me but our agendas did not coincide.

She is an administrator, a manageress, lacking shrewdness in politics. She wants to decide, not negotiate. She wants to resolve things, not consult about them. This impetuousness hinders her political performance.

Our last encounter was on November 26 2014 shortly after her re-election, when she defeated the opposition. She talked for over an hour in her presidential office with Leonardo Boff, Marcia Miranda, Maria Helena Arrochellas, Luiz Carlos Susin, Rosileny Schwantes and me, all of us linked to Liberation Theology. We offered her suggestions for profound structural reforms.

Early in 2015 it became evident that Dilma could not comply with the items on our agenda. I felt foreboding for her government. What she proposed to do, as the sorcerer´s apprentice, is dominated by conservative forces, for they are the very sorcerer.

Associated to what is most physiological in Brazilian politics, Michel Temer approved the parliamentary coup, opening a dangerous precedent: from now on in Brazil, opposition not only rhymes with deposition. It is a trick to usurp political power which, with its back to the people, takes over the State machine.

(Published MHP Literary Agent – Advisor)

It is curious to note that when announcing the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, the CIA did not exhibit his body, like they did, unnecessarily, the body of another “hunting trophy” – Ernesto Che Guevara.

Bin Laden left this life and entered history. There is nothing new about this. History, which few recall, is full of bandits and terrorists whose names and deeds are hardly remembered. The most well known are King Herod; Torquemada, the grand Inquisitor; Queen Victoria, the greatest drug trafficker of all time who fostered the Opium War in China; Hitler; President Truman who dropped atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Stalin.

The danger is that Osama might move from history to myth and from myth to martyr. His death should not deserve more than a notice on the inside pages of the newspapers. However as the USA is a necrophilic country which feeds on the victims of its wars, Obama transforms Osama into an icon of evil, inciting the imagination of all those who, for some reason, hate US imperialism.

Saddam Hussein, a puppet of the White House manipulated against the Iranian Islamic revolution, proved that sorcery backfires against the sorcerer.

After 1979, the CIA armed Osama Bin Laden using him against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. The CIA taught him how to produce explosives and carry out terrorist attacks, to move his fortune through phantom businesses and offshore accounts, operate secret codes and infiltrate agents and controls.

“Bin Laden is the product of the American services” affirmed Swiss author Richard Labévière. In 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall Bin Laden began to aim his terrorist arsenal at the heart of Uncle Sam.

Terrorism is abominable, even when practised by the left, for all terrorism only benefits one side: the extreme right. In life, you reap what you sow. This is true both in the personal and social realm. If the USA are attacked so violently today it is because, in some way, they used their power to humiliate peoples and ethnic groups. They have abused of their power for decades, as in the case of the occupation of Puerto Rico, in the naval base at Guantanamo in the heart of Cuba, in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and now Libya, in the participation in Central Europe’s wars and in their omission in Arab and African conflicts and dictatorships.

It is time for the USA, as mediators, to induce Arabs and Israelis to reach a peace agreement. All this has been postponed for the sake of Uncle Sam’s hegemony on the planet. All of a sudden hatred erupted in a brutal way, showing that the enemy can also act unethically with the only difference being that it does not dispose of international forums to legitimise its criminal actions, as is the case of the UN’s connivance with the genocides practised by the White House.

Those who know the history of Latin America know very well that during the last 100 years the US interfered directly in the sovereignty of our countries, spreading terror. Maurice Bishop was assassinated by the green berets in Grenada, the Sandinistas fell due to Reagan’s unleashed terrorism, the Cubans continue to be blockaded since 1961 without a right to normal relations with the rest of the countries in the world and one part of their territory, Guantanamo, is still invaded by the Pentagon.

In the 1960s and 70s dictatorships were installed in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Guatemala and El Salvador sponsored by the CIA and under Henry Kissinger’s orders.

Violence attracts violence, Brazilian bishop Dom Helder Camara used to say. Terrorism leads nowhere, except to harden the right and suppress democracy, prompting the powerful to believe that the people are incapable of governing themselves.

Innocent victims cannot be sacrificed in order to satisfy the profits of imperial governments which judge themselves to own the world and plan to divide the planet like cutting slices in a delicious cake. The September 11 2001 attacks demonstrated that there is neither science nor technology capable of protecting peoples or nations. It is useless for the USA to spend trillions of dollars on sophisticated defence schemes. It would be better to apply that fortune towards world peace, which will come forth only when it is the daughter of justice.

The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the East-West conflict. What now needs to fall is the North-South wall of inequality. If we have no bread, neither the Father nor peace will be ours.[1]

*Frei Betto is a writer, author of “Conversa entre a fé e a ciência” (Conversation on faith and science) (Agir), written together with Marcelo Gleiser. www.freibetto.org twitter: @freibetto