The Latin American Continent once again seems to be turning towards left radicalism of the seventies. After Venezuela, now the biggest South American country Brazil has returned a president who is a trade unionist and a worker by background. The recently held elections swept aside the parliamentary rightist forces and for the first time in Brazil’s history, a government is to be established on January 1, 2003, with claims for bringing sweeping changes in the economic and socio-political life of the people.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won an unprecedented number of votes that counted more than 61 percent of the total. His Workers Party celebrated the victory in a way that made the famous Brazilian Samba dance look obscure. They celebrated it as another World Cup victory that had acted to obscure the woes of this poor nation and made people around the world think that the Brazilians only need Football and not bread to live upon. The capital Sao Paulo drenched itself in festivities and carnival. One of the poorest countries and said to be the 9th largest economy in the world, Brazil is home to the labour intensive and polluting industries that have shifted from the North rich to the South American continent and there are vast lands occupied by the US MNCs. Its woes are set to further multiply as the North American Free Trade Zone has extended to the whole of the South American continent setting in a process of deindustrialisation. Silva faces a tough challenge on the economic front, and if he tries to oppose the US stranglehold, as he promised during the elections, who knows what is in store for him! The World Bank has already threatened him saying that he must not try to change the economic policies of Brazil. Silva wants to tread on the path of "national capitalist development". The Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was overthrown in April by the CIA sponsored coup though the forces loyal to him regained the initiative and restored him. Ever since, he is under threat of another coup by the big business, bankers and industrialists.

Silva will be inheriting the state power of the reactionaries without, of course, an armed power of the proletariat backing him. The pink left has the fate either to be gobbled up by the reactionary bourgeois politics and becoming a part of the system, or the tragedy of being butchered, as was witnessed in Indonesia and Chile in 1965 and 1973 respectively. The US, which considers Latin America as its latifundia, watches like a cat all such developments that indicate any turn towards the left whether it comes through the bourgeois election system or an armed revolution. Its attitude towards the armed movement in the neighbouring Colombia and election-installed Chavez in Venezuela, which are not more than a stone’s throw away from Brazil, is equally confrontational.

"So far it has been easy," Silva says, easy of course, and he promises," to work round the clock" to fulfill his promises which is the "hard part" of his work. And here begins the danger. He is already aware of it and has not forgotten to tell Brazil’s investors and creditors, i.e., the international community of imperialist brigands, that he will maintain their confidence and Brazil’s fiscal responsibilities and will honour foreign debt. At the same time he has told them that they should know that his country "cannot have people suffering from hunger everyday." He promises job creation, housing, medical care and education, among other things, to the Brazilians. Along with, he has expressed his unhappiness with the way the Free Trade Zone is being pushed by the US throughout the American continent. His more "dangerous" views concern about his political promises, of which he opposes US military presence in Colombia, US embargo on Cuba and seeks close collaboration with Venezuela. All these are irritants for the US which has sounded a veiled warning to him by saying that the "US looks forward to working productively with Brazil." "Productively" for the US means to carry on the same relationship with Brazil that the previous governments have been maintaining, i.e., of Brazil’s semi colonial dependence.

The Venezuelan and Brazilian elections and the recent upsurges in Argentina have indicated that the people in the South American Continent want an end to poverty, hunger, unemployment and look towards the leftist politics for a solution. Nepal too had returned the UML for the same reasons but there the people were quick to find that the UML had no solution, and could not have one, to such problems, as the system remains the same. This pushed them towards more radicalism and a revolutionary alternative in the form of people’s war under a Maoist party. Without their own revolutionary armed forces the people cannot think of changing their wretched living conditions and elections do not provide them with this power. There cannot be a peaceful solution to the problems of the people as long as the present state power with its anti-people institutions and reactionary armed forces remains intact. The Brazilians have opted for an illusion through Silva. The world imperialist system can give them a World Cup, not allow a revolution. Imperialism can only expect of them to give an ecstatic Samba and not a red flag. If nothing else brings home this point the fate of Salvador Allende should. The people of Brazil have shown that they have a great dream for themselves and for the oppressed humanity. But to realize this dream there is a need of a hurricane of people’s armed movement, only that can prevent a repeat of a Brazilian Chile.

October 31, 2002