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In Brazil a leftist president is in the cards; But, how far left is he?


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

October 7, 2002

In their wisdom, last Sunday more than 100 million Brazilian voters decided to disagree with those of us who thought they would not give leftist candidate Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva the leading spot in the first electoral round for the presidency. However, they also refused to go along with those that believed the first round would be for Lula a triumphal march.

This said, it looks as if the runoff on Oct. 27 will give Lula Ñ nobody calls him anything else Ñ the presidency he sought three times before and failed to make his. It appears to be scarcely possible that three weeks from now he would lose enough of the support he got Sunday to throw him off his route to Brasilia's Palacio do Planalto, or that his adversary Jose Serra Ñ who was sitting president Fernando Henrique Cardoso's chosen successor Ñ can gain enough of the votes of the two other major failed candidates, Anthony Garotinho, former governor of Rio de Janeiro state, or former finance minister Ciro Gomes, to catch up with Lula. Serra got 23.2 percent of the vote, exactly half the 46.4 percent that Lula got, while Garotinho trailed with 17.9 percent, ahead of Gomes's 12 percent. And, anyway, the people who voted for them are more likely to vote for Lula than for Serra.

If this time around Brazilian voters can be trusted to do what they are told, Washington will have to get used to dealing with a leftist as president of Latin America's largest nation and the ninth-ranking economy in the world. But his leftism might not be as hard as some American commentators make it to be Ñ of which more later.

Lula no longer urges landless farm workers to invade private property and dropped calls for an audit of Brazil's foreign debt Ñ widely understood to mean a default on payment. His running mate is a textile magnate with factories employing 16,000 workers.

Trying to allay market fears, Silva pledged to honor Brazil's $230 billion public debt and abide by terms of a $30 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. He said his concern is boosting exports and creating jobs, bringing Brazil's poor millions into the consuming mainstream Ñ not a populist revolution like President Hugo Ch‡vez attempted in Venezuela. Six hundred leading businessmen believed enough that this is indeed Lula's real agenda that they publicly offered him their support.

Will he stick to his new-found view of the job ahead? He may have no option. What may help to keep him honest is that his Workers' Party, even with the assistance of some minor groups, will definitely be in the minority in the all-powerful low chamber of Congress and Lula will probably have to resort to reach some sort of coalition with forces to the right of him.

Like the current administration, Silva opposes the presence of U.S. troops in Colombia and the embargo on Cuba. But a top Silva aide said "foreign relations with the United States and the rest of the world will not be dominated by ideological considerations."

"We want to establish correct diplomatic relations with the United States in which the defense of Brazilian interests . . . will be present," said Marco Aurelio Garcia, who has been mentioned as a possible foreign minister in a Workers' Party government.

The United States is "ready, willing and able to work together with Brazil," the U.S. State Department said Monday as it reached out to Brazil's prospective new president. Not, however, if some American commentators have their way.

Deroy Murdock, a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a Senior Fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia, suggests Lula is a major danger for the U.S. Murdock quotes Constantine Menges, a senior fellow in the Washington office of the Hudson Institute as saying: "We must prevent a nuclear-armed Axis of Evil in the Americas." According to Murdock, Lula Ñ speaking at an Air force Club in Rio de Janeiro Ñ said Brazil should have nuclear weapons, but no responsible Brazilian journalist can be found to validate the quote from the rather sensationalist Globo On Line that backs up this comment.

Faith Whittlesey, chairman of the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of international affairs, has Lula conspiring with "revolutionary leftists (like Nicaragua's Sandinistas, El Salvador's FMLN, the Cuban Communist Party, and Brazil's Workers' Party), terror-sponsoring states (such as Iraq, Libya, Syria), and terrorists (like the Irish Republican Army, the Basque ETA, Colombia's FARC, and some of the most notorious Middle Eastern terror groups". She quotes no sources for her information but, for the record, El Salvador's FMLN ceased to exist in 1992 and most of its leaders are now members of Congress. But where Whittlesey totally looses her moorings is when she suggests the U.S. should deny a visa to Lula for his proposed visit to Washington. Sure, just forget Brazil exists: 180 million people in a territory as large as the continental United States.

Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

October 7, 2002

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