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That does not make him a cultivated speaker of his own language.
He had very few years of schooling before he went to work as a
laborer, and he comes from the Northeast of Brazil, a region some
people think of as backward. Wags asked, "What is it that
Marx, Engels and Lula have in common?" The intended answer:
"Not a one of them speaks Portuguese." People used to
question Lula's relative lack of formal schooling. However, he
has spent the last 15+ years preparing himself for the kinds of
responsibility which now fall upon him. But while the signs of
his origin may always be upon his tongue, there is very little
that is backward about this man.
Back then Lula was already dialoguing with those who would normally
oppose him, accepting a speaking engagement at the War College
(Escola Superior de Guerra, or ESG, a redoubt of hardline military
officers). The dialoguing has never stopped, and Lula has gotten
a great deal smoother.
Another thing that was striking about Lula was that he was a
master at holding his own party together. The PT is really a coalition,
made up of a variety of "tendencies." Some of the tendencies
are rather sectarian, being made up of true believers in one or
another political doctrine; others are closer to the Catholic
Church. Lula's "tendency" within the party is called
the "articulation," which may tell you something. They
could easily go flying off in different directions. It was striking
that Lula could hold his party together, while the president of
the Republic who was then in power was unable to hold his cabinet
together.
In 1990, Lula was the PT's candidate for President and almost
won. In the runoff election, after the field had been narrowed
down to two candidates, Lula crept up from behind until he and
Fernando Collor de Mello were neck-and-neck. Then Mr. Collor played
dirty, and put Lula's ex-girlfriend on TV to say what she thought
of him. Then Collor won by a narrow margin, and went on to a presidency
that would end in impeachment. In 1994 and 1998 Lula tried again,
and the future seemed to be well-defined: the PT would always
choose Lula as its presidential candidate, and Lula would always
lose.
In 2002 Lula came out and told his party he was tired of losing.
Then he started to pursue alliances outside his party on a scale
never attempted by that party before. Some of the alliances made
his party swallow hard. As a strategy for getting elected, it
worked. It is clear that many people voted for Lula for President
who did not vote for his party in other races.
The U.S. ambassador, Donna Hrinak, knows the PT well and has
had dialogue with it before. She has told the press she expects
negotiations to be difficult, which is doubtless putting it mildly.
She is clearly different from the in-your-face diplomats who have
made waves in Venezuela and Bolivia. One in-your-face type made
a strong statement about how Brazil had better join ALCA (Free
Trade Area of the Americas, FTAA in English), to which Lula replied:
"I am not going to answer the deputy of the deputy of the
deputy (in Portuguese: o sub do sub do sub); when I am President
I will talk about this with Bush himself." Those are the
words of an experienced negotiator.
On matters of economic expertise, Lula will have access to some
pretty good minds. One of the people available to him will be
an economist, Aloísio Mercadante, who spoke to a visiting
group of Presbyterians here in São Paulo not too long ago.
One more quote from Lula: "The PT put me in office, but
I am going to be everybody's president." I think he means
that. When PT people have been mayors, they have tended that way.
His natural adversaries are being surprisingly good losers, and
the climate is one of celebration of democracy. For now, the sense
is that your party might have lost, but the country won.
Archibald M. Woodruff
Mission Co-Worker
Brazil
The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 258
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