“Lula, son of a ***!” chanted at Sciences-Po? Pro-Bolsonaro troll poisoning

Published on : 12/10/2021 – 6:21 PM

This is the rumor circulating on Brazilian social networks that support Jair Bolsonaro, the current far-right president of the Latin American country: his political opponent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as “Lula”, ex-president and figure of the Brazilian left, would have been called “fis de p ****” (“filha da P ***”) and blocked the road by French students during his visit to the Sciences-Po Paris campus , on November 16.

In support, a video originally shared on Lula’s official Twitter account, in which we can see the former president at Sciences-Po Paris facing students who sing and play percussion in rhythm. After approaching them to observe them, Lula turns around and continues his way through the crowd.

But on pro-Bolsonaro social media, an alternate version of the same video, this time including captions meant to explain what’s going on, has been circulating in recent days.

At the 41st second the students would shout, according to the legend in yellow: “filha da p…” to Lula, or “son of p…” in Portuguese. Then, still according to the legend in yellow, Lula would then have turned around, blocked by the student orchestra.

This version circulated on many groups and Facebook page, Twitter, Telegram or Instagram pro-Bolsonaro, sometimes generating thousands of comments ironic on the situation or rejoicing: “Lula welcomed as it should be”, can we read in particular.

“It’s the Batuka”

Except that in reality, these subtitles do not correspond to what the Parisian students say who play percussion on the video. The latter are in fact part of the Batuka de Sciences-Po, a batucada group, a type of percussion orchestra originally from Brazil. The group regularly hosts sporting events and some student parties.

On November 16, Sciences-Po’s Batuka therefore organized this representation for the visit of the former Brazilian president to their establishment. And contrary to what the subtitles of the video which circulated in Brazil indicate, the students do not say “Filha de P ***” but: “C’est la Batuka”, in French, a sentence they often repeat during their performances.

This poorly captioned video to mock Lula has gone viral this week and has been subject to several checks in Brazil, such as by the media “Boatos” and “Aos Fatos”. Several posts containing the false information have since been removed.

The editorial staff of Observateurs de France 24 joined Clara Bruno, a master’s student and “Mestre whistle” from the Batuka de Sciences-Po – the equivalent of a conductor for a batucada group. She was not expecting this curious misunderstanding. Because, on the contrary, Lula was eagerly awaited by Batuka.

“About ten years ago, Lula came to Sciences-Po and was greeted with music by the Batuka: it has always been a bit of a mythical episode for our group, and there we were lucky that it happened again. , we were very happy to play for him.

We were immediately surprised by the success of the video of our performance, shared by Lula. There were a lot of reactions, compliments and also, very quickly, criticisms of Lula made by pro-Bolsonaro accounts on our Instagram.

And finally, more recently, we received comments telling us that our video had been hijacked, used in fake news in Brazil, we were then contacted by Brazilian journalists who asked us to specify what exactly we were saying in French. on the video. That’s how we discovered this “troll” version of our video. ”