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CounterPunch
January
14, 2003
Eyewitness in Brasilia
Lula Takes Over
by JULIE REMOLD with
EVA NEUBERG
BRASILIA. On the incredibly long road from Rio we passed
lots of cars with Lula bumper stickers and license plates from
far away. There seemed to be caravans of lefties from all over.
At one point we were going slowly enough to roll down the windows
and give the Lula hand-sign?which consists of using your thumb
and forefinger to make the "L" that means "loser"
in the U.S and honk the horn. More than 500 kilometers out of
Brasilia it seemed like everyone on the highway was headed
to the same place. I thought a lot about why we decided to make
the 16-hour drive and why so many others came so far. I realized
that this is truly a huge and historic moment. I spent twenty-eight
years in the U.S. and two here and I don't remember ever having
the chance to be at this kind of a positive historic event before.
The day before New Year' we ran across
a graduate student from Porto Seguro, Bahia. He was arriving
in Brasilia for the inauguration after a 45 day, 1764 km walk.
Later we went to the local Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Worker'
Party headquarters to get our stickers and t-shirts. The building
is huge sort of shopping mall, fairly luxurious, home to many
sex shops and union offices. Walking in, we got lost but since
we were wearing PT buttons and I carried a red purse someone
noticed right away we were heading in the wrong direction and
showed us to where we wanted to go. Within the building, strangers
were talking to strangers in a way I have only seen before during
disasters. We got offers to show us around some of the outlying
areas of Brasilia and people, strangers with similar interests,
were exchanging phone numbers and email addresses. We met a
man on the PT staff who moved to Brasilia 12 years ago to work
on Lula's first presidential campaign and who has been here
ever since. In a crowd outside the office, just hanging out
and looking pretty much like anybody else, was a just-elected
senator who represents the federal district, which includes
Brasilia, and was about to go into office.
Considering that Lula has had about 45%
of the vote for 12 years now, I had expected to see more of
a divide between the old-timers who always supported him and
those who changed their minds over the years, but you don't
sense a lot of that. We've heard of some grumbling along the
lines of how folks who were never leftist before are now pretending
they1ve been big fans of Lula all along, but overall this has
been pretty muted. The campaign slogan of a esperanca venceu
o medo or hope winning over fear was on banners all over town.
About the town: Brasilia seemed much wealthier than most other
cities I have been to in Brazil. The garbage is picked up, the
traffic is controlled, people complain about the high crime
rate but it does not look anything like Rio. Today we saw what
appeared to be a child juggling flares at an intersection. We
see this all the time in Rio?but when we got closer we saw that,
based on her dress, she was more like a middle- class young
woman. Our friend Ladario guessed that she might be a theater
student. It turned out that the poverty is here though, that
Brasilia is just much more economically segregated than Rio
and we1d simply not left the ritzy part.
The party started New Year's Eve with
people setting up their informal refreshment stands along the
esplanade you saw in all the pictures and footage. When we arrived
about an hour and a half after the New Year' countdown the roads
were impassable. The esplanade was covered with celebrators
dressed in PT shirts. People were screaming and waving flags
and small musical groups were performing everywhere with people
dancing all around. Interestingly, the conservative governor
of the Federal District decided not to hold any municipal New
Year' Eve festivities or fireworks. He claimed that he did not
want to overshadow the inauguration. Could it be that he did
not feel like celebrating, himself?
In addition to being the first leftist
elected in many years, Lula is the first leader (apart from
members of the military dictatorship, who is not descended from
European nobility. In a sense you could look at his election
as the end of the last vestige of Portuguese colonization. The
day had very much the spirit of an independence day. PT was
formed 22 years ago, with some members abandoning armed struggle
to participate in a political process. Many of the party's formers
leaders have served time in prison (during the dictatorship,
it was illegal for workers to organize.) Many of their co-workers
simply disappeared. The progress is amazing.
It's hard to see from the footage how
big the crowd was. Brasilia's architecture is on a mammoth scale.
The official estimates were 200,000 people, which is larger
than any previous Brazilian inauguration. We got a good spot
on the side of the Congress building lawn that was not closed
off and waited for Lula' arrival. Much of the crowd could not
really get a view of the red-carpet ramp leading up to the
Congress or the driveway in the foreground that the Congress
used to enter the building.
Every once in a while people near the
front would cheer for an entering VIP?usually barely visible
inside a car ?and those behind us would ask "Who is it?"
Soon if one person started cheering or screaming everyone would
follow their lead. At one point a janitor walked up the driveway
carrying a very important bag of garbage and a roar came from
the crowd. Someone had mistaken him for a congressman and one
thing led to another. He stood on the ramp playing along and
waving to the crowd, and even had the good humor to come back
when the crowd demanded an encore. Someone near me said "Who
knows, next time around it really could be his inauguration."
It was an absurd remark in one way, since Lula has 22 years
of political leadership behind him, but the idea that the world
is not divided between VIPs and the "povo" (regular
people) was very much in the spirit of the day.
The lawn area surrounding the Congressional
building was closed off by lines of police but after a small
group broke through, a number of others started to swarm into
the area. The crowds from the esplanade descended upon the closed
area with only shallow reflecting pools separating them from
the president' entrance place. Then people started to jump into
the reflecting pools and eventually the entire lawn was full,
including most of the pools. Understandably the security situation
was a bit out of control at this point, with the crowds much
closer to the president than had been planned. And a further
security challenge was that the few who did break through the
police and mounted police to reach Lula were greeted with big
hugs. At one point a woman broke through and rushed to Lula
on the veranda of the presidential palace. He gave her a hug,
agreed to take a photo with her and then he actually apologized
that he could not stick around and chat. Seems that Lula has
no intention of helping his security forces in keeping the people
away from him.
After being sworn in by Congress Lula
gave a speech which basically reviewed the main points of his
campaign. This speech, like the one he gave immediately after
his victory was important, in terms of showing that his plans
have not changed and that what he said during the campaign is
exactly what he plans to do. As one local television commentator
put it, "It has been a long time since PT surprised us."
He started by reiterating his plans to implement the national
anti-hunger campaign that he announced shortly after his victory,
saying he would consider his presidency a success if all Brazilians
have breakfast, lunch, and dinner by the end of his term. He
repeated his plans to make employment his "obsession,"
as he put it, to grow Mercosul (Mercosud), support political
stability in South America, support investment in education,
growth in the productive sector, and increase agricultural production
and exports.
I suppose goals like industrial and agricultural
growth may not sound like particularly leftist ideas from an
American perspective but unemployment is a huge problem here,
in the past year the economy has stagnated dramatically, and
Brazil's productivity is nowhere near where it should be. You
can drive for hours through fertile, unused lands where the
forests are cut but the planting never happens. Meanwhile people
are going hungry all over the country. Lula' choice of Vice
President, Jose Alencar, reflects his emphasis on economic growth?Alencar
is the founder of Coteminas, the largest textile group in Brazil.
After the ceremonial exchanging of the
presidential sash, where the former President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso removed the sash and gave it to Lula, it was time for
another speech. In this one Lula said that the victory was not
just his, that many Brazilians had fought for years, for longer
than the PTs existence for this chance. He said that he was
aware of the challenges before him but that "there is nobody
on earth more optimistic" than he is and he reminded everyone
that he had lost four elections before becoming president. The
overall message was that perseverance and patience are needed
along with everyone' contribution. Lula gave the entire speech
without any notes. It made me think that during the setbacks
along the way he had probably imagined that speech so many times
he already knew it by heart.
Besides "hope over fear" the
slogans of the day were pretty much the same slogans as the
campaign. "Agora e Lula", or "Now it's Lula,"
?meaning pretty much that current policies have only made things
worse, and now it is time for a change. Another slogan was "Without
fear of being happy," meaning that voters in Brazil were
willing to take a risk for a better future. I only hope that
next time around voters in the U.S. will have the opportunity
to do the same.
Julie Remold
is a doctoral student in anthropology at the Federal University
in Rio de Janeiro.
Eva Neuberg
is a freelance writer and editor in New York City.
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