While Olavo de Carvalho in typical fashion says Brazilian politics are beyond salvation, due to nationwide corruption established as part of a leftist agenda, Guilherme Fiuza lends a rather more humorous and sharp view of Lula’s clumsy foreign politics, even making a fool out of the UN in the process.
Hunger exportation
Lula and chancelor Celso Amorim are deeply sorry that the UN’s General Assembly only happens once a year. Not so much because of the trip to New York. But more for the fact that in that forum, a sort of international politics Neverland, speeches and compromises fly peacefully, with nothing to make them fall sprawling to the ground of reality.
At the UN’s Neverland, the ex-Embrafilme bureaucrat Celso Amorim is a planetary strategist. He commands powerful emerging countries’ blocks, G-20 + 5, + 10, a coalition that grows, in the end, at each UN-paid diplomats dinner. In that enchanted territory, the US and Europe are paralyzed in fear of those two little bearded Brazilian dwarfs, capable of mobilizing a third-world country alliance without precedents against the helpless giants.
There they scheme the great turnarounds of international chess. Such as the historic Brasil-China alliance, established at Lula’s arrival in Beijing alongside 400 businessmen, to distribute over 400 thousand handshakes. And if China soon thereafter blocked Brazilian soy and stole a bunch of the allied country’s markets, it is of no importance. These news don’t get to Neverland.
Information that the US and Europe solemnly ignored Brazilian “victories” against cotton and sugarcane subsidies also don’t end up there. Everything remains like before, but the paintings in Neverland’s walls show an image of Brazil with its foot on top of the world’s owners’ heads. Not even Michael Jackson got this far.
During a UN General Assembly session, Celso Amorim can feel himself as carrying the country on his back in search of a spot at the Security Council. It is very thrilling, almost like a World Cup, or maybe an Oscar - and it doesn’t matter that the Brazilian movie is never picked, or that the team is always disqualified at the opening round. The human being needs the fantasy, the myth, and this dispute to enter the Security Council comes in handy. Some will say it’s a stupid goal, that the said Council is an absolutely demoralized and useless institution, that Brazil’s pretensions are somewhat like a redneck trying to get a peek at the big guys’ party. But these vultures won’t be listened to, for this kind of lowly critic doesn’t reach Neverland.
It was at this blessed territory that the concept of Lula’s administration’s excelent foreign policy was built. An agressive and smart policy, that winks to Lybia’s dictatorship, that sends secret agents to be trained in Cuba, that enriches nuclear material without showing it to the international community (look out for Brazil, we may be building the bomb), that doesn’t disdain of Bolivian cocaleros‘ help, that buys Hugo Chavez’s anti-American fights and puts BNDES’s money on Caracas’ subway, that sends soldiers to Haiti, that revokes a New York Times journalist’s visa and demands american tourists to smear their fingers and provide their fingerprints at customs. Undoubtedly, powerful Brazil is back.
And it is at Neverland that the, so to say, Brazilian social imperialism is being built. Lula’s administration doesn’t have the bomb yet, but it has an even more powerful weapon: hunger fighting technology. It still hasn’t been revealed inside the country, but that is customary, for it’s a secret of state and national security matter.
And whoever thought Zero Hunger was a failure, an official and unsuccessful imitation of Betinho’s Citizenship Action, and that the government had merely strung together programs that already existed in Bolsa Família, with the aggravating circumstance of not supervising school registration fees offset, and to make matters worse had allowed the money to end at the hands of people with DVD players, microwave ovens and a car parked in their garage - whoever thought, after all, these bunch of bad things about the fight against hunger in Brazil, has bitten the dust. At the UN’s 60th General Assembly, the world found out that Lula’s administration will export its hunger fighting technology to all countries in need.
This could even sound like a mockery. A joke in bad taste from a government that spent three years trying to politically control the IBGE [the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute, responsible for all of Brazil’s official statistics], the press, the Public Ministry [something like Brazil’s Federal Trade Commission], the pension funds, the State funds, even the most unimportant of public posts, and didn’t wake up any day with a chip on its shoulder and the will to govern. But these are the sort of impressions that can only affect the ignorant. They don’t know what goes on at the benevolent and gratifying atmosphere of Neverland.
