Will incoming President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his leadership sorely tested by the riots in Brasilia, be able to unite a country as polarized as Brazil has become? He wisely rushed to Brasilia, the nation’s capital, just after the weekend’s Bolsonarista rioters were desecrating its key legislative and judicial buildings and being arrested by the Federal army and police. He and cabinet ministers accompanying him asserted by their words and their very presence that democracy would prevail and attacks on the nation’s capital be punished. Indeed, although hours (maybe weeks) late to the game, even former President Jair Bolsonaro condemned the rioters from the bolt hole in Florida to which he had earlier fled.
A New York Times headline screamed that the rioters were “delusional” – that they had been incited to vandalize and pillage Brasilia not this time by an ex-president’s direct urgings but by their own ex-president’s earlier criticisms of any electoral victories but his own.
In a direct runoff in early December, Lula received nearly 2 percent more votes than Bolsonaro. The loser never conceded defeat nor participated in an official handover to his successor. He fanned conspiracy theories, often blaming the manipulation of computerized voting machines for his loss. Rioters in Brasilia demanded the supposed “source code” that allegedly “controlled” the computers. Madness. Just as far right conspiracists stormed the American Capitol two years ago, so the Brazilians, chasing a “mass delusion” invaded their own governmental center. But, rather more passively than anticipated, Bolsonaro did not directly fan the flames of mayhem. Eventually, he told them to give up and go home (after 1,200 were detained).
About 727 of those held by the police have since been formally arrested. The justice ministry is also seeking the 100 or so mostly agricultural business interests that may have funded and spurred on the rioters. It alleges that a former Bolsonaro minister responsible for security in Brasilia state, plus its governor, helped to foment the protest and arranged with the police of Brasilia to facilitate the invasion. Fortunately, the government buildings entered by the mob were unoccupied, thus the riot was more expressive than in any sense instrumental.
Innumerable thousand loyalists still refuse to accept Bolsonaro’s defeat. They and many of Bolsonaro’s staunch backers are religiously conservative and little educated. They believed the trash talk by Bolsonaro and key associates labeling Lula as a communist in the Venezuelan mode capable of confiscating their property and turning Brazil into a Soviet-type state. They also cited Lula’s crookedness, based on his accepting a renovated sea-front apartment from the orchestrators of the massive Lava Jato (Car Wash) corruption scandal.
The Odebrecht conglomerate, South America’s largest construction firm, padded its bids to build facilities for Petrobras, the mammoth state-owned petroleum monopoly, giving kickbacks to a range of politicians, including (in a minor way) Lula. Judge Sérgio Moro, who sentenced Lula (and many other politicians) to nine years in prison, was determined to end immunity for corrupt legislators in Brazil. But, after Lula had served 580 days in jail, Brazil’s supreme court decided that Moro had illegally connived with prosecutors to deny Lula a fair trial. It freed Lula just in time for him to contest the 2020 election.
Lula, 76, a militant trade unionist born in a mud hut and paid to shine shoes as a child, was an immensely popular president from 2003 to 2011. Brazilian resources – iron ore, oil, beef, soybeans, sugar, bananas, orange juice, and wood pulp– fetched high prices and not only did Brazilian incomes rise, as well as the country’s stature in the world, but Lula (once desperately poor himself) redistributed much of the new wealth to Brazil’s least well off citizens. His Bolsa Familia – monthly cash payments to the country’s poor – raised their living standards substantially.
But his administration of Brazil a decade or more ago was hardly communistic, confiscatory, revolutionary, or undemocratic. Quite the reverse in fact. Brazil under Lula’s first and second presidencies was uplifting for both the deprived classes and their immensely wealthy overlords. Nearly everyone and every social sector prospered. Brazil under Lula also became a major player in world politics, taking its place beside China, Russia, India, and South Africa (BRICS) as a leading champion of the global south.
Now, with Bolsonaro deposed and his rioting followers detained, Lula must put Brazil back together. As divided politically as its larger North American brother, and as much for copycat reasons as from the status compression that so inspires conspiracy beliefs in the United States, Lula with all his acute political instincts may find it excruciatingly difficult to bring the Bolsonaristas to accept the kind of Brazil in which Lula believes.
After several recent recessionary quarters and excessive spending and padding of national and state finances by Bolsonaro, plus China’s slowdown and North America’s flirtation with recession, Lula will now find it hard to transform Brazil back into the success over which he earlier presided. Bolsonaro permitted the plundering of the Amazon rainforest. Lula is determined to reverse those policies in order to protect indigenous dwellers and to help save the globe from overheating. But big business cattle grazers and soy growers have been stripping the forest of trees and exploiting what was once critical carbon absorbing terrain. They oppose Lula in this and in other areas (many went all the way to Brasilia to riot).
Lula, the leftist, will seek renewed foreign investment so as to stimulate his nation’s faltering economy. But because much ($68 billion worth) of Brazil’s exports go to China (as opposed to $29 billion to the U.S. and $5 billion to Canada), it is on the future of China’s economy that Lula’s visions depend.
If the United States goes into recession, if the spread of Covid-19 halts Chinese industrial advances for a year or two, or if Brazilians again riot, Lula will find it almost impossible to restore prosperity to his divided peoples. His administration will have a much tougher time than before to pull Brazil up by its bootstraps.
Fortunately, and despite his corruption conviction and pardon, Lula is hardly ostentatious or a lover of bling. It is just possible that his actions and his delivery of improved real services to his citizens can win him the kind of trust that will make Brazil once again cohesive. If so, he can attend to the nation’s immense schooling deficits and needs, to its failure so far to integrate the inhabitants of the rural backlands with those of the cities, and to the security and economic needs of millions of slum dwellers in such locales as distant from each other as fabled coastal Rio de Janeiro and Manaus, the entrepôt of the Amazon.
Lula is undeniably authentic. In terms of the Brazilian public, he has never sugarcoated his words or falsified realities. In that sense, he exudes an integrity that Bolsonaro lacked. If anyone can restore Brazil to its past glories and erase the creeping stain of Trumpism south of the equator, Lula is that leader.
Lula must commission more offshore wind energy, instead of relying on the construction of more dams & more roads, which damage fisheries & indigenous peoples. Linda Agerbak.