Now, just weeks later, Lula was granted brief leave from prison — this time to attend the burial of his 7-year-old grandson Arthur, who died of meningitis this week. Lula reportedly flew from Curitiba, where he’s being held, to Sao Paulo to attend the service.

He left prison at 7 a.m. Saturday, and photos showed him waving to a crowd of people holding up their phones as he arrived at the Jardim da Colina cemetery for the funeral. Voice of America reported that Arthur had visited his grandfather in prison twice, and Gleisi Hoffman, leader of the Workers’ Party, told the news outlet that Lula “cried several times” and was “downcast” about his grandson’s death.

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About 200 people gathered around the cemetery chanting “Free Lula!” And the former president’s website recapped his remarks from the funeral, where he said that “when they meet in heaven, he will bring proof of his innocence for all the bullying that Arthur suffered in school for having a grandfather in prison," the Associated Press reported.

When he was president, Barack Obama once referred to the now 73-year-old as “the most popular politician on Earth.” But Lula later found himself at the center of a massive corruption probe, dubbed Operation Car Wash. The investigation targeted leaders across Latin America, and led to the unraveling of a large-scale corruption scheme in Brazil.

Last April, Lula was convicted of accepting bribes from one of Brazil’s largest construction companies, and he still faced further corruption charges. He has claimed the charges were politically motivated to prevent him from running for president again.

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As part of the same corruption probe, three former Peruvian presidents were accused of taking bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company which has admitted to paying some $800 million in bribes to leaders around the region in recent years. As The Post reported at the time of Lula’s imprisonment, the probe was seen by some in Brazil as a political witch hunt that unfairly laid too much blame on Lula, and by others as a promising sign of progress against the country’s widespread corruption problem. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the probe led to “the largest foreign bribery case in history.”

During his tenure as president, Lula implemented popular social programs that were widely credited with bringing millions of Brazilians from poverty. When he stepped down in 2011, he had an 87 percent approval rating. After facing his corruption charges, he insisted his political career would continue — even from behind bars.

“If my crime was putting poor, black people in universities, allowing poor people to eat meat, to have their own cars, have their own homes, then I will continue being a criminal in this country, because I will do much more,” Lula said about the accusations about him at the time.

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But in February, he was sentenced to another almost 13 years in prison on separate corruption charges, again for accepting bribes from construction companies. He is expected to appeal.

Last October, Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency, a populist who called his inauguration “a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, of inversion of values, of statism and political correctness.”

This week, on Twitter, Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, tweeted that Lula “is a common-law prisoner,” and said his temporary release for the funeral was “absurd.”

“When a relative of another prisoner dies, is he escorted by the federal police to go to the services?” he wrote. He appeared to have later deleted the remarks.