[P2P-F] Fwd: Lula for beginners - Pablo Gentili (English, French and Arabic)

Mon Apr 16 22:14:02 CEST 2018

excellent text on the role of Lula,

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pablo Gentili - CLACSO <pgentili at clacso.edu.ar>
Date: Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 5:51 PM
Subject: Lula for beginners - Pablo Gentili (English, French and Arabic)
To:

Dear
friends,

I send you below and in annex the brief article "*Lula for beginners*",
which was published a few days ago in the Argentine newspaper *Página 12*.

The text was translated into English

and Portuguese and published in various media. A colleague friend has
translated it into Arabic
 and French
. I also send them in the annex.

*The article can be published freely. If you think it's worth it, I thank
you very much for disseminating it.*

A warm greeting,

Pablo Gentili
CLACSO

----------------

Lula for beginners
A parallel between Brazil's history and the story of its most charismatic
leader
09 April 2018
Article

The forces that shaped modern Brazil made the rise of a figure such as Lula
da Silva all but inevitable. Conditions in Brazil today mean his
imprisonment is certainly not the end of this chapter in the nation's
story. Pablo Gentili, Executive Secretary of the Latin American Council of
Social Sciences (CLACSO), analyses the  parallel between Brazil's history
and the story of its most charismatic leader.

Authors
Pablo Gentili <https://www.tni.org/en/profile/pablo-gentili>

[image: Lula, Ricardo Stuckert (CLACSO)]
Lula, Ricardo Stuckert / Photo credit CLACSO

“Brazil is not for beginners,” Tom Jobim asserted with his ruthless poetic
style.

Attempting to understand a country such as Brazil requires an immense
capacity for sociological imagination. Today’s Brazil retains the
historical marks that shaped its social genesis. Brazil is reliving the
past, day after day, in the arrogance of the elites, the persistence of
structures of slavery, and the systematic disregard for democracy and the
rights of most of its inhabitants, who have been transformed into aliens
within a nation and without a homeland.

Brazil's history has been shaped by brute force and garlanded with
indulgent narratives that have attempted to explain the unexplainable. In
short, even if nothing works, *Dios y la alegría son brasileños* (God and
joyfulness are Brazilians): What more could anybody ask for?

Brazil is a country whose independence was proclaimed by a prince, the son
of the king of Portugal, who declared himself “constitutional Emperor” and
perpetual defender of the nation. It is an independent country that was
born as an empire--an empire that remains today ruled by its owners.

Thus, democracy has been an exceptionality in Brazilian history. Lacking
political and social democracy, Brazil invented so-called “racial
democracy”, a doctrinaire fiction that could have served to build the
pretence of an egalitarian society, but which became the myth that conceals
an institutional racism that transforms millions of humans beings into
subjects of disdain and exclusion. In the nation with the world’s
second-largest black population, history is written by whites, power and
wealth are amassed by whites, and opportunities are always seized by
whites. The white population, composed of those who live indifferent to
violence and the segregation of many silenced, invisible, and abandoned
citizens: the poor, the black, the peasant, the indigenous, the raped women
and girls, the homeless, the landless, the people without names and without
rights.

Brazil is a continental country with a history plagued by coups and plagued
with lies. When in 1964 the military overthrew João Goulart, a
democratically elected president, they promised to restore constitutional
order in just one day. The regime remained in power for 21 years. The first
editorial of O Globo (Brazil’s main daily paper) after the coup proclaimed
a “resurgent democracy.”

And democracy re-emerged, indeed, but only two decades later and based on
legislation that demanded collective forgetting of and impunity for
military crimes. No one would be judged. No one convicted. Power was
delegated, without any popular vote, to an indirectly elected president who
died before taking office, thus transferring the mandate to an
expressionless and grey landowner who was also a mediocre poet and the
feudal heir to one of the country’s most impoverished regions. Democracy
wanted to resurface, but could not.

The first presidential elections since 1960 would be held only in 1989. For
almost 30 years Brazil had just managed to live on the margins  of
representative democracy. The elites, however, claimed that the period of
dictatorial exception was a true economic “miracle”, by which a nation able
to grow more than 30 percent in just one year could be transformed at the
same time into one of the most unjust and unequal societies on the planet.
 The rupture

Brazilian history since the 1990s is more or less common knowledge. First,
Fernando Collor defeated Lula in a presidential election with support from
the Rede Globo media conglomerate. Collor was impeached and removed, and
Itamar Franco assumed as president, who did almost nothing in office,
although he was good-natured (and liked to be photographed beside young
women without underwear, which made many think he was a good president).
Itamar was succeeded by the prince of sociologists, Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, who also defeated Lula and demanded that those who knew his
academic past forget everything he had written before being elected. In
1998, Lula was again defeated by Fernando Henrique, who, besides pushing
forward a plan for privatisations, never reversed, and in some cases
worsened, the already deteriorating living conditions of the poor. During
his two terms, poverty grew or remained stable. By 2002 31,8 percent of the
population lived in poverty. That year, Lula finally won the presidential
election.

The decline of the Cardoso government meant the exhaustion, or at least the
profound deterioration, of a model of accumulation and domination that had
prevailed since the democratic transition. Despite the crisis of the
regime, Brazil’s elites hoped that Lula would not mean a threat to their
corrupt and selfish interests. They had reasons for such hope. Lula, a
former metalworker leader, had written a letter to the Brazilian people in
which he promised not to threaten the wealth and properties of the rich,
but to develop instead a programme of social inclusion that would be
beneficial for the whole country. The elites believed Lula’s pledge either
because they had no other choice or because they thought that they finally
had defeated him. We may never know, but we do know that the former leader
of the metalworkers’ union was true to his word and developed an
unprecedented programme of social reforms, with exceptional results.

Poverty dropped significantly, falling by 73 percent in 12 years. So-called
chronic poverty fell from almost ten to one percent. Income levels
increased across all social sectors. The income of the richest grew 23
percent, while for the poorest, the increase was 84 percent. Brazil ceased
to be included in the humiliating Map of Hunger published by the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), expanding
opportunities and welfare conditions hitherto unimaginable for the
country's poorest sectors.

But the great social, educational and economic indicators, and ultimately
the excellent social performance of his government, was not what endowed
Lula with immense recognition and approval. What transformed him into a
real myth, leading to a sort of personality cult and great popular
admiration, was the founding nature that his mandate had acquired. The poor
might not interpret social or economic conditions with the theoretical
tools and the cryptic data used by intellectuals, but they are not less
subtle or insightful when it comes to understanding their own social
reality.

The poor know, for instance, that income has to do with their abilities and
welfare opportunities. Thus, they operationalise such knowledge based on
very specific indicators. For example, having access to more and better
educational levels, accessing credit that would allow them to buy a house
or basic consumer goods, have electricity, sanitation, drinking water and –
when they exaggerate their welfare aspirations – travel to visit their
loved ones by plane.

All this, which constitutes an inventory of basic rights and opportunities
in any modern republic, had never been accessible to millions of
Brazilians. Lula's government, and subsequently Dilma Rousseff, his
successor, offered for the first time an effective opportunity for
self-recognition as citizens to a huge contingent of people who had been
despised, discarded and humiliated by the elites that pretended to ignore
their existence as subjects of rights, or simply as human beings with
unsatisfied basic needs.

Lula came to repair such historic injustice and he did it with a huge
capacity for management and the exercise of strong political leadership,
bot inside and outside the country.

Lula's overwhelming strength took the indolent and ignorant elites by
surprise. They had assumed that a metalworker with no university education
would fail in his efforts to direct the destiny of the tenth economic power
on the planet.

Within a decade, Lula and Dilma reduced the housing deficit that affected
the poorer sectors of the population by 53 percent . They built more than
1,700,000 dignified housing units, universalised access to electricity (in
a country with immense inequality in the provision of energy services),
significantly increased the percentage of households with access to water,
doubled the number of university students, and built more universities and
technical schools than ever before in the history of the country until
2002. All these policies were the result of putting the poor at the centre
of the national budgetary priorities, especially benefiting rural people,
women, youth, the indigenous and black population.

If one tries to understand Brazil from the perspective of an Argentine
analyst, even taking into account huge differences and historical
specificities, one could say that the role assumed by Lula can be better
compared to that of Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s, rather than the role
played by Néstor Kirchner in the decade that followed the crisis of 2001.
President Kirchner assumed an exceptional responsibility in undertaking the
foundation of a republic built on pillars of equality, human rights and
social justice. He did it with a great capacity for public management,
governing a country in ruins, but taking as a reference an idea and a
historical trajectory (Perón’s project) that he believed should be
recovered or refounded.

But Lula is different. Lula is a founder. He is the great democratic
architect of a Brazil that never existed.

For us, Argentines, the powerful and forceful slogan that states that "the
homeland is the other" (“*la patria es el **otro*”) is the emotional
synthesis of a decade of achievements that we have conquered collectively;
a synthesis that acquires a sense and a referentiality in a common past
that vividly embodies the need to build a new present. It is a past that is
projected and mirrored in the great democratic leaders of our national
history (Hipólito Yrigoyen, Juan Domingo Perón, Evita Perón, Héctor
Campora, Raúl Alfonsín), as well as in the victims of the dictatorship and
in our heroic mothers and grandmothers (*Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de
Mayo*). It is the possible future that faces a real past.
Later…

Brazil did not have the same past as Argentina or anything comparable to
it. Only half a century later than Argentina, Brazil fulfilled the mandate
often assigned to popular governments in Latin America: to install, build
and defend a republican, modernising and democratic order, against the
predatory barbarism imposed by backwards-looking elites who seem nostalgic
for the Middle Ages.

Lula founded a republican Brazil. He is a leader who is unwilling to accept
that there cannot be room for everyone in a country of equals and a leader
who, openly and without hypocritical remorse, is not afraid to declare his
confident that everyone can live better, that the poor should eat well,
live well, send their children to universities, and own the houses in which
they live. Lula has no aspirations to become another fashionable hippie
preaching against consumerism. He knows that the poor are essential players
in  realising the possibility of a dignified life, beyond simple false
promises.

Why did Judge Sérgio Moro imprison Lula Moro without any proof other than
his personal conviction? Because it has been the strategy that the
(unproductive and predatory) financial powers, the great communicational
monopoly that is the Globo Network, and conservative political sectors
(including former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso) have found to end
what they believe is an unacceptable precedent that would challenge that
selfish and petty Brazil structured around privileges rooted in the
country’s history. They do not accept Lula’s return to power. They believed
that the coup against Dilma Rousseff would sink him forever. They were
wrong. Now they believe that by imprisoning him he will be silenced. They
are wrong, again.

They want to put an end to the stubborn and persistent metallurgist union
leader who seems to be never willing to surrender and hand over the weapons
of dignity, trust in politics and confidence in the value of popular
mobilisations. But they also want to kill all the Lulas to come. They want
to end what they see as a fatal virus against their privileges and corrupt
impunity: the possibility that many may think that if a metalworker without
formal schooling, a poor migrant from the impoverished Northeast region,
could govern the country, others like him might also do so.

They are imprisoning Lula, but they imprison an idea. They seek to imprison
the future. They will fail. There will be no jail space for the multitude
of free men and women, who continue to struggle to build a future that
belongs to them, that nobody can take away

.

*Pablo Gentili* is executive secretary of the Latin American Council of
Social Sciences, CLACSO, and professor at the State University of Rio de
Janeiro, UERJ.

-- 

*Pablo Gentili*
Secretario Ejecutivo, CLACSO
(+5411) 4304-9145 / 4304-9505
Twitter: @_CLACSO
Facebook: www.facebook.com/CLACSO.Oficial/
Twitter: @pablogentili
Facebook: www.facebook.com/contrapuntos.elpais.pablogentili/
www.clacso.org

*CLACSO es una red internacional creada en 1967 con estatus asociativo en
la UNESCO. Reúne más de 620 centros de investigación y posgrado en ciencias
sociales y humanidades de 47 países en los cinco continentes.*

www.clacso.org.ar/conferencia2018/

*Por favor, considere el medio ambiente antes de imprimir este e-mail.
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.*

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