Analysis: Lula tries to bridge global gap

www.upi.com By Bradley Brooks UPI Business Correspondent From the Business & Economics Desk Published 1/23/2003 2:43 PM

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- Brazil's new leftist leader will bridge the globalization gap this week, speaking first at the World Social Forum then at the summit which that gathering is meant to protest: the elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

On Friday, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will become the first-ever leader of the Brazilian government to speak at the World Social Forum, which opened Thursday in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

For many of the 100,000 activists in attendance, Lula, as he is known, and his October election in Latin America's largest country represents the best hope in lessening economic inequalities between the First and Third Worlds.

"After participating for the third time at the World Social Forum (previously as an activist), I'm going to Davos to demonstrate that another world is possible," Lula said in a Thursday statement. "Davos needs to listen to Porto Alegre."

He said there was an need for a new pact that would bridge economic disparity.

"I will take to Davos the message that the rich countries need to distribute the wealth of the planet," he said.

Great words of hope, no question, that most people wouldn't disagree with: who doesn't want to see a more efficient global economy that would make us all more prosperous? The great difficulty, of course, is backing those words with the grueling work that goes into tackling global economic issues: drug patent fights, agricultural subsidies, stalled talks on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

It is the bare-knuckled arena of international trade negotiations and Brazil's role of representing the Third World where Lula's appetite for either pragmatically making headway or falling back on ideological differences will be tested.

"One of things that will be important is not only his bridging the globalization gap, but his keeping the discussion of the gap alive," said Margaret Keck, a political science professor at John's Hopkins University, of Lula's role in representing poor countries.

Keck, whose book "The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil" was the first major study of Lula and the political party he helped found, says Lula has the potential to be a Third World leader who can act as both a catalyst and a salve as rich and poor countries try to reach mutual understandings.

Yet for others, Lula embodies a Latin America that is veering to the ideological left, where voters have recently elected leaders whose apparent opposition to American-style capitalism gives fright to some Bush administration officials and leaders on Capitol Hill.

It was just at last year's World Social Forum that then presidential-candidate Lula told reporters, "I'll fight with all my power to stop the FTAA in Brazil."

Others point to his friendliness with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro as evidence that Lula is going to lead Latin America in the wrong direction.

That worried a few Republican congressmen enough that they sent a letter to President Bush before Lula's October election, expressing concerns about the threat of having a wild-eyed leftist running Latin America's largest economy.

Keck rejects these arguments, saying that it is simply too soon to tell if Latin America really has aggressively gone to the left, or if the left in Latin America has simply wised up and come more to the center, where it can win elections.

"Despite all the connections that get made between Lula and Castro and Chavez, the fact is he is very different from them, his history is extremely different from theirs," Keck said.

"It is important to have somebody out there as an international spokesman for bridging the globalization gap, someone who has legitimacy and who doesn't raise the same kinds of knee-jerk ..'well, he was a revolutionary and radical populist' .. response."

Lumping Lula in with Chavez or Castro is inaccurate at best, and, truth be told, a wholly simplistic vision of a region comprised of extremely different countries, but that for short-hand purposes becomes "Latin America" in the United States.

Lula himself has disavowed any connection with the political beliefs of Chavez or Castro, repeatedly saying he has no intention of leading Brazil to economic self-destruction, like Chavez.

The fact that Lula received more votes than any other democratically elected leader in the history of the world -- with the exception of Ronald Reagan's 1984 election -- should be evidence enough that he is no Castro.

But the proof, clearly, will be in the pudding, and whether Lula is truly intent on taking his country out of its miserable economic state will be seen in how he addresses his dualistic concern: uplifting the poor by bringing more economic justice to the world.

Marta Lagos, the director of Latinobarometro, a Santiago, Chile-based group that tracks public opinion in Latin America, told United Press International in November that the notion that the region is swinging to the left can't be viewed through the same prism as it was during the Cold War years.

"There is no leftist revolution before us, nor is there a military regression," Lagos said. "The left and right as they were in the past is gone. The alternatives are not a socialist state versus capitalism. Today, the market economy has no competitor."

Just how Lula intends to make Brazil competitive in the global economy -- and what sort of example he will provide for the rest of the developing world -- is yet to be seen.

But for Keck, Lula's past experience of leading union negotiations against Brazil's military regime makes him a savvy spokesman ready to take to the world stage.

"Lula and the Workers' Party have a lot more experience in governing than it used to," Keck said. "That has made most people in the party aware of the costs of radicalizing expectations too much, too quickly."

"It has given people more realistic notions of what is possible."