BRAZIL’S former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has vowed that neither legal persecution nor violent intimidation will stop his fight for the presidency after his campaign convoy came under gun fire.

Shots hit two buses in the caravan that has been touring Parana state in southern Brazil yesterday. Officials of Lula’s Workers Party, which has won all presidential elections since 2002 but was removed from power in a constitutional coup in 2016, said Parana was the only state not to have provided a police escort for the campaign.

Lula, as Mr da Silva is universally known, told crowds after the attack that “the powerful can kill one, two or three roses, but they can never stop spring from coming.

“If they think they can do away with my will to fight, they are wrong. The day I cannot shout any more, I will shout through your throats. The day my mind stops thinking, I will think through your minds.”

On Monday, an appeals court rejected his procedural objections to a corruption conviction widely regarded as stitched up — Lula allegedly received a flat as a bribe from construction company OAS, but the conviction rests on the testimony of a single convict whose prison sentence was reduced in return for it, and no documentary evidence exists to back it up.

If Brazil’s Supreme Court decides on April 4 not to allow further appeals, Lula will be barred from standing for the presidency and could go to jail.

Communist Senator Vanessa Grazziotin denounced the “fascist, violent and intolerant manifestations” represented by attacks on Lula’s caravan, stressing that the most popular president in Brazil’s history had also been its best.

The Communist Party of Brazil’s “pre-candidate” for the presidency Manuela d’Avila said there was no doubt that Lula’s conviction was political.

“The first in the polls is Lula, but he is not committed to the book of fiscal austerity, so they have judicialised the issue and prevented him from competing,” she said.

Attacking the coup that replaced his elected successor Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, as “anti-democratic, anti-national and misogynist,” she said Brazil’s elite was determined to fix the election because their programme of privatisation and cuts was so unpopular, it was “impossible to put in the public eye.”