Lula Powwows With Chavez, Castro
Friday, Jan. 3, 2003
Lula's first day in office as Brazil's president was a left-wing lulu. He started at breakfast with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and ended the day with dinner with Fidel Castro, both in town for his inauguration.
The alliance of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Cuban communist dictator and Venezuela's embattled crypto-communist is an "axis of good," Chavez claims. Such an alliance, the Washington Times warns, could threaten to throw a roadblock in the way of America's plans to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas stretching from Alaska to the tip of Argentina by 2005.
During their breakfast meeting Chavez asked Lula da Silva to send technical experts from Brazil's state-owned oil company to replace some of the 30,000 Venezuelan state oil workers who have joined a crippling nationwide strike aimed at driving him out of office. Lula said he would think about it.
And before his dinner with Lula, Castro told Associated Press Television News that Brazilian-Cuban relations would grow stronger now that Brazil has its first elected leftist president.
But experts told the Times that Lula's efforts to accommodate Castro and Chavez could be nothing more than calculated political window dressing, because both are hugely popular among Brazil's far left.
They noted that Lula da Silva, 57, has angered his party's left wing by naming fiscal moderates to Cabinet posts but needs the party's help to push his programs through Congress, where he lacks a majority.
Those who view Lula's use of free enterprise as a sign that he might not be as far to the left as he appears to be forget that this is the same tactic Lenin used in 1921, when he adopted the so-called New Economic Program to jump-start Moscow's crippled economy.
Lenin supported the efforts of the peasants and other Russians to trade and to produce in a largely private-enterprise economy. He used the policy to sucker Russian peasants and capitalists into cooperating with Moscow. When the economy recovered, the harsh communist economy was re-established, and the peasants and the capitalists ended up in the gulag, or dead.
"Embracing Castro and Chavez, the symbols of anti-U.S. influence in Latin America, gets Silva political capital in Brazil," Stephen Habra, a Latin American specialist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, told the Times.
"But this is a dangerous game. You go too far one way or the other and this will blow up in your face."
Coining the phony "axis of good" term after Lula was elected in October, Chavez hailed the victory and said Venezuela, Brazil and Cuba should team up, supposedly to fight poverty.
But Brazilian political scientists scoffed at the possibility of any "axis of good" being created by the meetings of Lula, Castro and Chavez.
"There is no way this represents the beginning of Chavez' 'axis of good' and much less the 'axis of evil' imagined by right-wing Americans," Luciano Dias, a political scientist at the Brasilia-based Brazilian Institute of Political Studies, told the Times. www.newsmax.com