Brazilian Leader Vows He Will Plead for the Poor in Davos
www.nytimes.com By TONY SMITH
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan. 24 — Urging the rich world to make peace not war, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged today to champion the cause of all poor countries when he addresses the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this weekend.
Raising whoops and cheers from a crowd of tens of thousands of antiglobalization activists gathered in this southern Brazilian city for the third annual World Social Forum, Mr. da Silva promised that his message to the cream of international finance and politics meeting in the Swiss Alps would be blunt.
"A lot of people in Davos don't like me, although they don't even know me," the Brazilian president said. "But in Davos I will say exactly what I say here.
"We need a new world economic order that distributes wealth more fairly," he said, "so that impoverished countries have a chance of becoming less impoverished, so that African babies have the same right to eat as a blond, blue-eyed baby born in Scandinavia."
Mr. da Silva, a former metalworker and union leader won a landslide election victory in October, but he has been savaged by the radical wings of his Workers' Party and the antiglobalization movement for agreeing to attend the World Economic Forum, seen here as antithetical to Porto Alegre's grass-roots meeting.
But his address today touched all the right buttons with the crowd, which gathered at a riverside park.
The loudest cheers came when Mr. da Silva, standing on a stage draped with a banner reading "No to Imperialism! Against the Imperialist War!" spoke out against a possible war against Iraq.
"The world doesn't need war, it needs peace and understanding," he said. "I often wonder why, instead of spending billions and billions of dollars on arms, they don't spend it on bread, rice and beans that could help feed the poor of the world."
However radical his speech at Davos may be, Mr. da Silva will also have to strike a more pragmatic note behind the scenes when he confers with the international movers and shakers there.
Fears — so far unfounded — that Mr. da Silva might steer Brazil off the free-market course that it has plied for the past decade, sent the country's currency, stock and bond markets tumbling last year, and they are only just recovering.
With foreign investment in the country slowing, Brazil must export more to keep its books balanced. But to do that its cash-starved exporters need credit lines from abroad, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them, cut off during the election campaign, have yet to be restored.
For now, by appointing a market-friendly finance minister and central bank chief, Mr. da Silva has managed to keep the financial markets healthy, while still talking tough about redressing Brazil's appalling gap between haves and have-nots.
He also gained a vote of confidence on Friday from Anne Krueger, the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which last year approved a $30 billion loan package for Brazil. Speaking in Davos, Ms. Krueger said the new Brazilian government's efforts to maintain fiscal and monetary discipline were "a step forward."
Mr. da Silva might be walking a tightrope, but most analysts agreed he had to play both sides to start a dialogue between rich and poor.
"The reality is that he has to have a foot in both worlds," said John Schmitt, a labor economist from Washington. "A dialogue has to be possible."
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