Bush' blind trip to Brazil
By Olavo de Carvalho*
Originally written October 26th, 2005 | If ever an American president risked his skin for absolutely no gain at all, it is precisely what George W. Bush is going to do in his upcoming visit to Brazil. The idea of the trip emerged from the belief of some illuminated minds in the State Department that the only venomous snake in Latin America is Hugo Chavez and that the virtual antidote to its bite is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Well, this is probably the most stupid idea that Americans have put into their heads since The New York Times persuaded them that Ukraine under Stailn was doing well and even getting rich. This was in 1.933. Then Americans were lead to believe in 1.945 that the Russians would take their armies out of Eastern Europe as soon as the GI's went home; in 1.949 that Mao Tse-tung was a Christian reformer; in 1.953 that Fidel Castro was a democrat; in 1.973 that the Vietcongs would respect people's rights in South Vietnam and in 1.982 that Saddam Hussein was a decent guy. Now they are being persuaded that Lula will help them stop Hugo Chavez in order to restore democracy in Venezuela.
To a foreign observer, the most stricking trait of Americans is their propensity to look at themselves with caustic suspicion while on the other to take for granted the good intentions of their most wicked foes. It is as if in their souls the Christian sacrificial ethos had been isolated from the evangelical discernment between good and evil and crystallized into a new supreme commandment: Thou shall screw thyself up.
Mr. Lula da Silva has already declared loud and clear that he will not help anyone restore Venezuelan democracy because Venezuela's problem, as he sees it, is instead "too much democracy" [1]. Brazil, on the contrary, seems to have too little: a few days after that lovely statement, Mr. Lula went to the Communist Party of Brazil (Maoist) to ask for public forgiveness -he is a very pious man- for not having been so quick in democratizing his country a la Chavez in Venezuela [2]. In fact, while Mr. Chavez's assemblymen passed legislation to curb freedom of expression, sent the equivalent of the IRS to close hostile newspapers and ordered the army to shoot his enemies in the streets, the Brazilian president has contended himself only with a timid and failed attempt to impose press censorship. Besides, among the disgusting people who risked harming his Worker's Party monopolistic ambitions only seven have been killed till present [3]. The remaining ones were peacefully bribed, and one of them, the federal representative Roberto Jefferson, was ungrateful enough to tell everybody about it, thus launching the epidemy of corruption charges that since then have pitifully obstructed the march of chavista democracy in Brazil.
Even if he said nothing of that sort, Mr. Lula would still be unsuspected of any potential anti-Chavez intentions. In 1.990 he was, with his partner Fidel Castro, the co-founder of the "Sao Paulo Forum", the strategical organization of the communist and pro-communist parties in Latin America. For twelve years he personally ran the outfit, which includes amongst its more than 150 members the Colombian narcoguerrilla, the Sendero Luminoso and the Chilean MIR, a major stockholder of the prosperous industry of kidnappings in Brazilian territory. In a speech delivered on July 2nd, 2.005 celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Forum [4] Mr. Lula admitted that:
(1) The Sao Paolo Forum is a kind of secret or unobstrusive organization "built up... so that we might talk without it seeming so and without anyone realizing any political interference at all". It actively interferes into the domestic affairs of several Latin American nations, taking decisions and determining the course of events, free from all surveillance from public opinion.
(2) The so-called "Group of Friends of Venezuela", created to support Chavez in any circumstance, was nothing but a branch, an agency, a façade of the Sao Paolo Forum "owing to the existence of the Forum... we presented comrade President Chavez our proposal...".
(3) After his election in 2.002, whilst he officially relinquished the Presidency of the Sao Poalo Forum, Mr. Lula continued to work clandestinely for the organization, whose actions were instrumental in generating the 2.004 Venezuelan plebiscite results.
(4) Vital points of Brazilian foreign policy were decided by Mr. Lula in undercover meetings with foreign dictators, drug dealers and kidnappers "it was a political action of comrades, not the political action of a State together with another State or of a President together with another President". Above his duties as a President he placed his loyalty to the "comrades".
The strongest evidence that he consciously misled public opinion about the Sao Paolo Forum is that, on the eve of the 2.002 election, frightened by my articles concerning the organization, he prompted his "aide for international affairs" Giancarlo Summa to calm newspapers down with an official Workers' Party press release according to which the Forum was only a harmless debate club that took no political action [5]. Now he boasts about the "political action of comrades" -funded by Brazilian government resources and away from public's scrutiny.
All these facts, largely ignored by American -and most Brazilian- public opinion, perhaps did not reach the State Department. I say that because many of the Latin America "specialists" that the American establishment trusts for such matters are often conscious misinformers at the orders of the most rabid anti-American interests. Recently one of them, Mr. Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, a lecturer in Brazilian history at University of Paris, went to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to tell everybody there that the Sao Paolo Forum was a non-existent entity, wholly created by right-wing paranoid imagination. If indeed there are so many candid enough people in the CFR willing to believe that petty liar, instead of throwing him out with a kick at his backside, it comes as no surprise that the State Department ignores Lula's visceral commitmment to Hugo Chavez and Latin American communism. And if that is the case, it is obviuos that President Bush is being led to Brazil by hands of blind guides. All he can obtain from Lula is a handful of lies and false promises.
But the problem does not stop there. Several leftist organizations formerly supportive of the Worker's Party are now feeding anti-American sentiment to the population by means of a new Macchiavellian expedient: they profit from Lula's declining popularity to blame the US for the president's failures. Brushing aside the fact that, at the very least, the Party's involvement in crime dates back to 1.990, they argue that government corruption is due to Lula's "betrayal" to the communist cause after 2.002. Even the government campaign for massive gun grab, which for more than a decade was supported by every leftist party in Brazil, is now explained as a dirty "yankee trick" to disarm Brazilian people in order to make easier the future invasion of the country by American trops -yes shame on my fellow countrymen, but many people in the Brazilian press and even some important military take Fidel Castro seriously when he cries wolf on the imminent American invasion [6].
As if all of this was not enough the very Worker's Party, in order to cleanse itself from any pro-Americanism counterfeitingly attributed to it by its former allies, sheduled several anti-Bush rallies for the precise dates the American and Brazilian presidents will be shaking hands in Brasilia [7].
In the Brazilian national contest for Bush-haters, evreybody is a winner.
*Olavo de Carvalho, b. 1.947, is a Brazilian writer and philosopher, the author of a dozen books and a widely read columnist in Brazilian media, where he has been for more than ten years a steady voice in favour of free market economy, Judeo-Christian values and American democracy. Formerly a lecturer in political philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana (South of Brazil), he now lives in the US as a foreign correspondent for the Brazilian newspapers "Diario do Comercio" and "Jornal do Brazil". Owing to his political ideas he has been suffering all kinds of libellous attacks by leftist critics, but many outstanding characters in Brazilian life, like former Ambassador to the US Roberto Campos, and the president of Brazilian Academy, Josue Montello, aknowledged him as the top Brazilian thinker of the last decade.
[1]http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2005/09/050930_diegocg.shtml
[2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2005/09/050930_diegocg.shtml
[3]http://veja.abril.com.br/191005/p_042.html
[4] The transcript has been made available at the government official website: http://www.info.planalto.gov.br/download/discursos/pr812a.doc
[5]http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/10192002globo.htm
[6]http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/mundo/ult94u86136.shtml
[7] See Folha de S. Paolo http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u73408.shtml
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