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Article snippet: RIO DE JANEIRO — It was anything but a surrender. At times jovial and defiant, the former president of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, stood before a crowd of cheering supporters, painting himself as the victim of a deceitful judiciary that had wandered dangerously into politics. “If they think that with this sentence they will take me out of the game, let them know that I’m in the game,” Mr. da Silva said on Thursday, a day after his conviction on corruption and money laundering charges threatened his bid for a third presidency. Corruption investigations have discredited virtually every powerful political force in Brazil, upending the country before presidential elections next year. Now political adversaries on very different sides of the ideological spectrum are relying on the same survival strategy: attacking the legitimacy of prosecutors and judges who have set out to dismantle the culture of corruption that Brazilian politicians have institutionalized over decades. The ruling against Mr. da Silva, one of Latin America’s most lionized and influential politicians, is the biggest conviction in a battle between the political class and a corps of judges and prosecutors — many of them in their 20s, 30s and 40s — who have dashed the impunity that elected officials have enjoyed for years. On one side of the fight are veteran politicians like Mr. da Silva and the current president, Michel Temer, who faces the possibility of being ousted from office and sent to prison on c... Link to the full article to read more