Say what you will about Joe Biden, but at least he hadn’t been recently released from prison prior to running for president against Donald Trump in 2020.

The same, though, can’t be said for 77-year-old leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who in April 2018 began serving a 12-year prison sentence for corruption and money laundering — a sentence that was radically reduced due to a strange and friendly Supreme Court decision that said defendants can remain free until they’ve exhausted all of their appeals.

Thus, the man known across Brazil simply as Lula was released from prison just in time to make another run for president, which he won by a whisker over popular right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. On the election night of October 30, with half of the country’s precincts reporting, Bolsonaro clung to a narrow 0.5% lead. But just as was the case in the 2020 American election, an early lead for the conservative incumbent began eroding over the course of the evening. Just before 7 p.m., with 72% of precincts reporting, Lula took his first lead of the night and ultimately claimed a narrow victory margin of just under 2%.

So: From a prison cell to the presidency in just over three years. If it seems almost too good to be true, it’s because it just might be.

“The real interesting smoking gun to me,” said independent journalist Matthew Tyrmand, “is down-ballot. Twenty-seven out of 81 Senate seats were up, and the Bolsonaro party won 19 of them. That’s massive. And they won on the strength of Bolsonaro’s … personality. He drove them over the line. He endorsed them. He built their careers. The votes for these down-ballot candidates were votes for Bolsonaro. Yet Lula seemed to outperform [these] candidates.”

Similarly in the 2020 U.S. election, down-ballot Republicans won 15 House seats, while their standard-bearer, the charismatic and energetic guy at the top of their ticket, “lost” the presidency by a whopping seven million votes to a decrepit old guy who rarely left his basement and who lost 18 of 19 bellwether counties.

“The dude,” says Tyrmand of Da Silva, “goes around the country and people scream and jeer, ‘Criminal! Traitor! Corrupt! Felon!’ It’s why he didn’t campaign.”

The similarities are eerie, no?

And so Lula, having been sworn in for a third time on New Year’s Day, takes office amid widespread anger due to the perception by Bolsonaro supporters of voter fraud. And while he didn’t mention Bolsonaro by name, Lula “promised that members of his predecessor’s administration would be held accountable.”

“We do not carry any spirit of revenge against those who sought to subjugate the nation to their personal and ideological designs,” said Lula, “but we are going to ensure the rule of law. Those who erred will answer for their errors, with broad rights to their defense within the due legal process.”

Translation: We won, and we’re going to arrest and prosecute my opponent and his associates.

Tyrmand has been one of precious few American journalists in Brazil, which is curious given that this is the second-most populous country in the Western Hemisphere. He’s covered the presidential election, and during the 70 days since election day he’s covered the peaceful protests of the Bolsonaro supporters — peaceful, that is, until Sunday, when hordes of the former president’s people clashed with police and stormed numerous government buildings. Some of the images were jarring:

🚨#BREAKING: Mounted Police Officers are being Beaten By Rioters In Brazil pic.twitter.com/vNS3wYZpWz

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) January 8, 2023

As the New York Post reports: “Thousands of rioters clad in the country’s colors of green and yellow took more than 100 buses to [the capital city of] Brasília and overwhelmed security to storm and ransack the governmental buildings, breaking windows, toppling furniture — including the bench that seats the nation’s high court — and vandalizing monuments.”

The images and the reporting make it clear that Brazil’s unrest is far worse than it ever was in the U.S. But Tyrmand believes government agents and provocateurs turned the protest violent. And here again, as Ray Epps or any of the other agents provocateur or undercover federal agents who were in and around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, can attest, things aren’t always as they seem. Tyrmand spoke about this unrest last night:

On @TuckerCarlson discussing the “Reichstag fire” that was Jan 8th riot & how it served a key purpose for the @alexandre @LulaOficial @FlavioDino regime: to end the protest movement of 🇧🇷’s free people & clamp down w/a burgeoning gulag state. Two have died today at their hands. pic.twitter.com/q4WMhrCys9

— Matthew Tyrmand (@MatthewTyrmand) January 10, 2023

While all this was going on, Lula’s kindred spirits here in the U.S. — namely, hard-left House Democrats like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar — were calling on Joe Biden to extradite Bolsonaro from a suburban Orlando, Florida, safe house, which is where he’s been since his term ended on January 1.

We can’t blame him for getting out of Dodge, given the high likelihood that he’d have been arrested and imprisoned immediately. Or worse.

Yesterday, the 67-year-old former president’s health took a turn for the worse, as he checked himself into an Orlando hospital complaining of “severe abdominal pains.” This wouldn’t be unusual, as Bolsonaro has been beset by ailments since surviving a 2018 assassination attempt in which he was stabbed in the abdomen and lost nearly 40% of his blood.

Let’s hope the likes of AOC and Omar — and Joe Biden himself — can muster up enough human decency to allow this man to recover, and to provide him sanctuary if he requests it.

After all, they’re giving sanctuary to everyone else.

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UPDATE: Bolsonaro was discharged from that central Florida hospital last night. What’s next for him is unclear, as Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the administration hadn’t received any requests from Brazil related to the former president.