Lula of Brazil
The Story So Farby Richard Bourne
California, 304 pp., $24.95
Just two decades ago Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was unknown, or distinctly unwelcome, in most Brazilian and American homes. Beginning in 1978 he led a wave of illegal and disruptive strikes by metalworkers and others in Brazil, and in 1980 he helped found the leftist Workers' party (PT). In 1990 he and the PT were instrumental in organizing a post-Soviet leftist Latin alliance called the S o Paulo Forum, which some at home and abroad have hyperbolically called a "narco-terrorist insurgency."
Then in 2002 Lula, as he is commonly called, on his fourth attempt, and taking more moderate stances than previously, was elected president of Brazil with 61 percent of the popular vote. Despite corruption scandals in mid-decade that would have overwhelmed most politicians, he was reelected by the same margin in 2006.
So who is this guy? Who was he? What is the relationship between the two? Focus on him this morning and he seems to be the plainest of beetroot borscht, but look back again in the afternoon and he seems more like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. At times he seems to be a basically tenderhearted leader with reasonable programs to help the poor, as with his Bolsa-Familia conditional cash transfer program that links welfare to keeping kids in school. Then he says something to suggest ideological rigidity, political pandering, or senility, such as his comment to Der Spiegel last May that Hugo Chávez is "the best president Venezuela has had in the last 100 years."
On balance, since 2002, Lula has emerged as one of the most relatively encouraging personae in South America, quite successfully leading a large and complicated country with more critical problems (and promises) than Baskin-Robbins has flavors. The 2007 Latinobarómetro poll of 18 Latin countries found him the most respected leader in the hemisphere. Of course, some of his radical comrades from his early days find his recent moderation a betrayal of the workers and the noble cause of socialism. But the renowned Brazilian leftist economist Celso Furtado gave Lula some good advice on those militants just before his death in 2004: "You should never give up on your radicals. They give vitality to the party and, more important, show you the path you shouldn't follow."
In this smooth-flowing and enlightening biography Richard Bourne, a senior fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, relates a life story that he calls as "incredible and inspiring" as Abraham Lincoln's.
His account begins with the historical context preceding Lula's birth in 1945 in Pernambuco state, that easternmost point of Brazil and South America that pokes into the Atlantic Ocean pointing at Africa, the original homeland of so many millions of Brazilians. At the age of seven Lula and his family moved to S o Paulo, where the boy spent his early years selling peanuts, shining shoes, operating a lathe, and acquiring his less than a year of formal education. This industrial city, during a rough period of military dictatorship (1964-1985), provided the context for Lula's formation as an originally mild, but increasingly militant, trade union leader, as well as his springboard to national presidential politics.
Bourne paints a picture of Lula the man that rings largely true for most of us who have followed or dealt with him over time. By the mid-1970s Lula had discovered "he was rather good with people and in the rough-and-tumble of union politics." Over the next few years personal and public events changed him from a shy beginner to a dramatic orator and organizer of a union movement who became a national figure "with thousands of workers hanging on his every world. He loved the oxygen of publicity."
He is no intellectual, but a highly intuitive conciliator with enduring preferences that have often been modified, or even sacrificed, for pragmatic reasons. His most persistent personal qualities "in the fickle, self-seeking, and often corrupt world of Brazilian politics," writes Bourne, are "stamina, determination, and ambition." When Lula was first trounced by Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1994 presidential election, he came to understand that, if he wanted to ever get more than a third of the electorate to vote for him, he would have to broaden his support base through the alliances and compromises, some of them unsavory, that are the essence of Brazilian politics.
Bourne notes also that "somewhere inside Lula, by 2002, an ethical dimension had gone missing," this being particularly evident in mid-decade when explosive corruption and scandal centered in the PT almost torpedoed his administration.
Lula lost two consecutive presidential elections to Cardoso, a major influence on his career. The switchbacks of the famous sociologist-turned-politician were more fundamental and in-your-face than Lula's, and not all are owned up to in his engaging memoir, The Accidental President of Brazil. Cardoso was one of the key creators of the "dependency" economics that dominated Latin America for several decades, mostly underlying rather than resolving long-term problems. That is, he spent the first half of his adult life as an enormously popular professor writing and teaching the evils of globalization to ravenous young students on several continents--as different as one could be from Lula. Then in the second half, when he headed ministries of foreign affairs and economics and was president, he became an eloquent proponent of most of the absolute "no-nos" he had condemned for decades to thunderous acclamation in academe.
As president, Lula has tried to retain and implement more of his original beliefs from his early PT career. Sometimes he has been quite successful, as with the Bolsa-Familia ("Family Fund") program that, by 2006, provided welfare to some 12 million poor Brazilians, so long as parents kept their kids in school. In general he favors pragmatic political, social, and economic policies and has learned that markets and the private sector are essential to a growing nation. Though most bankers, and others at the top of society, ceased fearing him after 2002 because of his largely orthodox economic policies, in the 2006 election he remained strongest in the north and northeast of the country and, in Bourne's words, "the poorer, blacker parts of Brazil chose Lula; the richer, better educated, and whiter ones chose [Geraldo] Alckmin."
Even after describing many of Lula's full or partial failures, Bourne concludes that his "two driving motivations" are to end the worst poverty in Brazil and respect and reward his country's workers. But the pursuit of these objectives, and personal power, have led him to compromise and promote "cautious economic policy, behind which he could promote pro-poor social programs." By the mid-1990s, Bourne concludes, Lula could no longer be considered a socialist.
Still for all his efforts and compromises, Lula has not made nearly as much progress as many in this most unequal of Latin countries had hoped for. Bourne believes that Lula was held back in reducing inequality in living conditions, education, health, and other fields by following relatively orthodox domestic economic policies (without which conditions would have been much worse) and because he warded off frontal opposition from vested interests by working with them more than confronting them head-on.
Most analysts believe Lula has compromised more in his domestic than his foreign policies. Internationally, he has promoted a strong and independent Brazil, in political and economic terms, and full respect for other countries of the developing world, and particularly in Latin America. He pursued a greater Brazilian role in the hemisphere by, among other things, opposing the U.S.-backed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and in the world by active participation in international conferences and seeking a permanent seat on the Security Council. Lula was instrumental in bringing about a resolution of the recent conflict, which nearly broke into warfare, among Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia.
Ironically Lula has increasingly found himself in competition with another Latin leftist, Chávez of Venezuela, who also wants to lead Latin America as the region's new Bolivar--or more accurately, Fidel--pursuing what he calls "21st century socialism." Just into Lula's first presidency, a top foreign policy official told me, in Brasilia, that "Chávez has a simplistic, messianic approach, while Lula is moderate and realistic, working through coalitions."
That analysis has held up, and Lula has had both successes and failures in the region in dealing with the Chavistas. One painful experience he endured related to dealing with the WTO and globalization, which he came to see as advantageous to Brazil when used effectively. In 2001 the World Social Forum was founded in Porto Alegre, a PT stronghold, to confront the World Economic Forum in Davos. Lula was greeted with loud cheers at the first couple of WSF meetings, but when he could not go along with the "simplistic anti-WTO and anti-globalization cries of his former allies," as Bourne described it, they had a falling-out and by 2005 WSF members were booing Lula and cheering Chávez, their new hero.
Bourne gives us an excellent review of the life of one of Latin America's most important, and in many ways hopeful, leaders in decades, one who can bring along the reasonable left without terrifying the center and reasonable right in Brazilian politics. Still, Brazil faces enormous challenges, and while Bourne enumerates these and the venality of the Brazilian system, he does not note pointedly enough the historical roots of Brazil's problems, coming from the culture implanted in the country centuries ago by Portugal.
Lula's failure to make greater progress in eliminating inequality, and the corruption scandal that shook his government toward the end of his first term, were merely symptoms of the underlying, broadly based cultural reality of Brazil and most of Latin America: labyrinthine systems that exclude majorities and will challenge and usually thwart the very best Brazilian (and other Latin) reformers for decades, or centuries, to come.
William Ratliff is a fellow and curator of the Americas collection at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and an adjunct fellow at the Independent Institute.