May 23, 2003
)
How Brazil's Lula Is Fooling the World (Gerald Brant, Brazzil, May 2003)While Brazil's new socialist government has drawn applause from the IMF and financial circles for continuing former President Cardoso's orthodox economic policies in order to maintain bond and currency market stability, it has adopted an aggressive and nationalistic foreign policy ...
The causes for concern regarding Brazil's foreign policy are in the Pal?cio do Planalto (Presidential Palace), namely with President Lula's Foreign Policy Advisor, Marco Aurelio Garcia, a hard-line Marxist operative. Garcia is a founder and executive secretary of the S?o Paulo Forum, an organization of leftist parties and revolutionary movements dedicated to "offsetting our losses in Eastern Europe with our victories in Latin America"....
One can get a glimpse of his thinking from ideas like "We have to first give the impression that we are democrats, initially, we have to accept certain things. But that won't last." Garcia has described his party, the PT, as "radical, of the left, socialist." And, in an article that he published in 2001 celebrating The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, he concluded that: "The agenda is clear. If this new horizon, which we search for is still called communism, it is time to re-constitute it."...
US Ambassador to Brazil Donna Hrinak, a career diplomat, seems to think [Lula deserves the benefit of the doubt]. The daughter of a Pittsburgh steelworker, Ambassador Hrinak's sympathies for the PT are so notorious that the running joke in Bras?lia (Brazil's capital) was to ask whether she would show up at Lula's inauguration in a red dress.
In what can perhaps be best described as an acute case of what diplomats call "localitis", Ambassador Hrinak publicly applauded the global anti-war movement and agreed to meet with Iraq's Ambassador in Bras?lia at the PT's suggestion, just weeks before US Secretary of State Colin Powell requested that all countries expel Saddam Hussein's diplomats....
Furthermore, primetime TV ads sponsored by the PT and its allied parties such as the PC do B (Brazilian Communist Party) and PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party) harshly attacked President Bush for his position on Iraq. Amazingly, these attack ads generated no public response from Ambassador Hrinak.
A few days ago I saw a cartoon of President Bush playing one of those arcade games where weasels keep popping up from random holes and you have to keep swatting at them with a mallet. There's no shortage of weasels worth swatting in today's world.
It was reported a year ago that Lula, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez had created an informal alliance to promote the spread of socialism in Latin America. It may be only transient, but the recent political success of the left in South America is cause for concern.
I saw recently also that some South American leftists are bruiting about the idea of forming a "United States of Latin America," which, like the EU, could serve as a powerful competitor to the U.S. The idea doesn't seem to have traction yet, but we shouldn't be surprised that such unions are the left's response to globalization.
Of course, these people are destined to fail. Garcia can assert the need to "re-constitute Communism," but he will never find a version of Communism that works. The question is how much harm they do before their failure is complete.