Former senator Benedito de Lira, father of the president of , (-AL), died this Tuesday (14), aged 82.
The former congressman has been, since 2021, mayor of the small Barra de São Miguel, in Alagoas, a city known for its beaches and vacation homes, and was re-elected in 2024.
He was undergoing cancer treatment and, on December 31, he underwent an emergency surgical procedure. He was admitted to Arthur Ramos Hospital, in Maceió. With his death, his vice-mayor, Henrique Alves Pinto, will take over as mayor.
Benedito did not participate in the inauguration ceremony for the second term, on January 1st. On the occasion, he was represented by Arthur Lira, who became emotional in a speech made with references to his father.
The president of the Chamber of Deputies was in Maceió following his father’s treatment. This was one of the reasons cited for not being present at the ceremony celebrating the two years of January 8th last week.
Benedito de Lira was born on May 1, 1942 and began his political career in the 60s, in Arena, the party supporting the military regime (1964-1985), having later migrated to successor parties, such as PDS, PFL and, more recently, PP.
He was a councilor in the city where he was born, currently the municipality of Junqueiro (AL), and also in Maceió.
From 1983 to 1994 he was a state deputy. In 1995, he reached the Chamber of Deputies, where he served three terms.
The peak of his career occurred in 2010, when he was elected senator for Alagoas. He sought re-election in 2018, but ended up in fourth place. His return to public life occurred two years later, with the election for the Mayor of Barra de São Miguel.
After the defeat in 2018, Benedito retired, but ended up running for elected office again. “In 2018, I lost the election and went home. I stayed there until 2020. And feeling empty, missing something. I talked to my wife and said: I’m going to inform the mayor of Barra and the people that I’m going to contest the election “, he said, in an interview in 2020.
Throughout his political career, Benedito de Lira was part of the so-called lower clergy of Congress, that is, the mass of deputies and senators without much national prominence.
Some of his first notable achievements in the Chamber were .
In 1997, he was part of the group of parliamentarians who declared that they were against the constitutional amendment of re-election, but who, at the last minute, changed sides and voted in favor of the measure defended by (PSDB) and which allowed the re-election of the President of the Republic in the year following.
Benedito de Lira was at the time one of the few Pefelists who were against re-election. After a conversation with FHC, however, he changed his mind.
“I changed due to requests from friends and my son, who is a councilor in Maceió for the PSDB and is starting his career”, at the time, in reference to the young Arthur Lira.
In the Senate, Benedito would end up breaking with the PT and voting for the impeachment of then president Dilma Rousseff, in 2016.
Benedito also had his name involved in the scandals (misappropriation of public funds to purchase ambulances and hospital equipment) and Lava Jato, .
In the Lava Jato investigations, Benedito was denounced in statements by and denounced in the so-called “PP gang” alongside his son Arthur.
that father and son benefited from resources diverted from Petrobras, resulted in a complaint filed by the Attorney General’s Office against the two people from Alagoas in 2015. The Supreme Court, however, rejected two years later continuing these accusations.
Regarding the accusation of a quadrillion, the complaint was dismembered, leaving the part against parliamentarians serving in office in the Federal Supreme Court. The case relating to Benedito was referred to the first instance.
The Supreme Court accepted the gang’s complaint in 2019, but, in 2021, in an unusual decision, . The complaint against Benedito was also filed by the first instance.
In 2022, when Lula was elected president of the Republic, Benedito de Lira, who is known in the state as “Biu de Lira”, told Sheet than the support given by his son to Jair Bolsonaro (PL), which ended up happening later.
“Boy, look, here’s the thing: you, in politics, have to have a side. And he [Arthur Lira] was an ally, is an ally [de Bolsonaro]as president of the Chamber. Logically, this helped the municipality here a lot. I’m the mayor, and we stick with it [Bolsonaro]. Is the election over? He finished. Let’s think about the future”, said Benedito, at the time.
On February 1, 2023, the day Lira was re-elected to command the Chamber, her father fell ill during the inauguration ceremony for the new deputies, in the Chamber plenary, and had to be rescued. He was taken to a private hospital, with symptoms of dehydration.
Barra de São Miguel, with just 8,000 inhabitants, has been one of the municipalities boosted with funds from parliamentary amendments in recent years. In 2021, a report from Sheet showed that the city hall was, in Alagoas, the one that had received the most resources for rapporteur amendments proportionally to the population.
