Lula's woes
Squeezed between the World Bank and his populist constituency, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is walking a tightrope, writes Faiza Rady
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva
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Last week was simply bad news for Brazil. On Tuesday 19 August Brazilian UN special representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, died when a suicide bombing devastated the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of mourning for de Mello to honour a man whom he described as being more than just a national hero. "He was a world hero because few fought for world peace like he did," said Lula.
After de Mello's death, another catastrophe hit home. On Friday, only a few days before its scheduled launch into orbit, a space rocket equipped with two research satellites exploded on its launch pad at the Alcantra Air Base near Sao Louis in the north-eastern state of Maranhao.
The explosion reportedly happened when one of the rocket's four engines ignited during preliminary launching tests, leaving at least 21 people dead. The blast ripped apart the rocket's launch pad -- a structure the height of a 10- storey building -- reducing the site to rubble and leaving most of the dead workers and technicians burnt beyond recognition. The DNA of the victims' torn body parts are being tested for identification.
In addition to the horrendous human toll, material damages, including the cost of the rocket and its two satellites, are estimated at $12 million.
This was Brazil's third failed attempt to send a rocket into space. In November 1997, the first rocket crashed into the Atlantic shortly after being launched, and in 1999 another rocket had to be destroyed by remote control only three minutes after takeoff. Commenting on the struggles of Brazil's space programme, the head of the country's Space Agency Luiz Bevilacqua argued that such accidents could have been avoided with better funding. "We either dominate this technology [by investing adequately] or we will continue to depend on the goodwill of other countries for space data," said Bevilacqua.
The president apparently heeded Bevilacqua's advice. Despite this week's tragic loss of life and the massive material damage, Lula chose not to scrap the programme. Relaying Lula's decision, presidential Spokesperson Andre Singer said on Saturday that space remained an "important scientific and technological project for Brazil".
The president's decision to continue with the controversial and costly programme -- which critics say could kill even more people in the process, while pouring good money down the drain -- did not go over well with Lula's constituency: the unions and the country's poor peasants. For it was the labour unions and the Landless Peasants' Movement or the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), whose vote swept Lula into power, following his two previous losses at the polls.
A poor boy who left school at the age of 14 to work and help put food on the family table, Lula got his early political education in the trade unions, where he rose through the ranks to political prominence. When Lula ran for the presidency, he campaigned as a worker representing the interests of the working class. Among the world's sitting presidents, Lula is the only high school drop-out. In accordance with his deep-rooted personal beliefs, Lula's main goal emphasised during his campaign and presidency is to combat poverty. Taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and quoted in the Brazilian constitution, his campaign slogan proclaimed that the right of all citizens to eat three times a day is a fundamental human right. Lula's stated purpose is to achieve "zero hunger" in Brazil by the end of his mandate.
The president has been naturally lauded by the peasants and the working class as one of their own since his 1 January inauguration. Maybe even more importantly, beyond Brazil and even outside Latin America, Lula's election rekindled global hope in an alternative democratic system of government opposed to the dominant neo-liberal order. "Latin America is in a state of upheaval," wrote political analyst Ignacio Ramonet after the Brazilian elections in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. "For the first time this huge country -- which is the world's tenth-ranked industrial nation with a population of 170 million -- is about to have a democratic government under a leader who rejects liberal globalisation. Although in a very different context, it recalls the Chilean election of the socialist Salvador Allende as president in 1970."
However, despite Lula's political vision, his margin of manoeuvre has been narrowed to the extreme. Twenty years of rampant neo- liberalism have taken their toll in a country that has gained notoriety for the most unequal income distribution in the world.
In this context, the statistics for land distribution are especially damning. "Brazil is fat with land," say the Landless Peasants' Movement (MST), "there are 360 million of acres that can be cultivated." Nevertheless, rather than cultivate their land, the owners of vast tracts of land -- the latifundios -- prefer to barricade their properties behind high fences and let much of the land lie fallow. "There is a lot of land for a few people," explain the LWM. Indeed, 44 per cent of the land belongs to barely one per cent of "fat" owners, while, more than 15 million landless workers roam the country's roads in search of an ever-elusive subsistence. Meanwhile, in Brasilia's and Rio de Janeiro's favelas , vast impoverished urban slums, 46 million Brazilians eke out a miserable existence on less than one dollar a day.
Established some 20 years ago, the MST has been fighting for agrarian reforms and land redistribution ever since. Tired of decades of unfulfiled government pledges, the MST strategy includes occupying and settling uncultivated tracts of land. Besides maintaining a network of food and grain cooperatives for their members, the movement has established 2,500 agricultural settlements, with nurseries and schools for an estimated 100,000 children.
For the 15 million landless workers time is running out as they wait for their working-class president to make good on his campaign pledges. But Lula is understandably dragging his feet, as his range of action is severely constrained. Mired in debt to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the Brazilian government has to pay a whopping 32,7 billion euros per year to service the debt. Drawing on his still-vibrant grassroots base, Lula is desperately stalling for time. According to Gercino Jose da Silva, Lula's agricultural ombudsman, the government will settle 60,000 families on land of their own by the end of the year. But the MST say the poor of Brazil are too hungry to wait for piecemeal land reform. On the other side of the equation, the United States has given Lula high marks for his stringent fiscal policies.
