EDITORIAL
Fresh hope for Brazil
The recent election of Luiz Inacio
Lula da Silva as Brazilian president represents a moment of fresh hope for that
nation’s estimated 54 million who live on a dollar a day or less. Lula
came into office on the pledge to fight hunger and work on behalf of
Brazil’s poor. His election is also part of a backlash growing in Latin
America to tough economic austerity measures forced on local governments by
foreign economists.
Lula understands poverty and its hardships. He was born in one of
the poorest areas in northeastern Brazil. At 3, his mother took him and his
brothers and sisters to São Paulo on the back of an open truck with
other migrants. By then his father had abandoned the family. His mother earned
income by washing clothes. The family lived in a hut until it fell down on top
of them.
As a young man he entered an automobile factory as a steelworker
and eventually came to prominence by organizing strikes against the
country’s 1964-85 military regime. During the dictatorship he was
persecuted and jailed.
Earlier this month, in his inauguration speech, he named the three
things he most wants to fight: hunger, unemployment and economic stagnation. He
didn’t waste much time getting started. On his second day as president he
suspended a $760 million purchase of a dozen new jet fighter planes, saying the
money could be better used to relieve hunger. He also ordered his minister of
the treasury to work closely with the secretary responsible for his “Zero
Hunger” campaign.
Among the first dignitaries he invited to dine with him was
beleaguered Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Cuban president Fidel
Castro.
U.S. papers have called him a leftist, but, according to a
Brazilian church official, a Lula enthusiast, the new president is “not a
Marxist or any other ‘ist.’ He is a very intelligent man who
remembers how hungry he was as a child and how hard his mother worked to raise
all the children. He doesn’t want other children to go through the same
thing.” Lula is collaborating with a number of Brazilian liberation
theologians.
But for all the hopes associated with his election, Lula inherits
an economy hobbled by low growth, rising inflation, high interest rates and
investor concerns over Brazil’s $260 billion debt burden.
Antonio Palocci, who took up his post as Lula’s finance
minister, promised there would be no surprises in economic policy, but that the
government would maintain tight spending, low inflation policies and a floating
exchange rate.
“We are not going to reinvent the basic principles of
economic policy,” he said. “In a country like Brazil, lasting
stability only comes with … sustained growth and social
stability.”
Given internal and external social and economic pressures no
president, whatever his predilections, for now, seems to have much wiggle room.
National Catholic Reporter, January 24,
2003
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