The former president was accompanied by former minister José Eduardo Cardozo, who was her lawyer during the impeachment process, and former ministers Kátia Abreu, Miguel Rossetto, Jaques Wagner and Ricardo Berzoini, and some senators members of the Workers’ Party.

In Porto Alegre, where she arrived, a militant group organized an event in social media, entitled “Carinhaço com Dilma pela Democracia” [Cuddling Dilma for Democracy].

Although she has been convicted of crime of responsibility, Rousseff has not lost the benefits offered to former presidents of the Republic, because she fully served her first term of office, from 2011 to 2014. After approving Rousseff’s impeachment, the Senate decided to keep her political rights, allowing her to hold public offices.

Rousseff will not earn a salary, but will retain the right of having 8 workers, 2 advisers, 4 bodyguards and 2 drivers, in addition to 2 cars. All costs related to these workers’ management and to the 2 cars will be covered by the staff office, funded by the Treasury.

Demonstrations

Police in São Paulo, Brazil’s financial and industrial hub, used tear gas on Sunday to disperse thousands of demonstrators at the end of a peaceful march to protest the removal of the president.

It was the largest of a wave of demonstrations against new President Michel Temer since the conservative lawyer was sworn in to replace Rousseff for the rest of her term through 2018.

The marchers, rallied by left-wing groups and unions aligned with Rousseff’s Workers Party, called for new elections and chanted “Out with Temer!”

The organizers said 50,000 people turned out for the march to a square in western São Paulo that included families with children, witnesses said.

As the rally ended and demonstrators headed for metro entrances, riot police fired tear gas canisters that caused panic and led to clashes. Police said they were forced to intervene to stop vandalism at the end of a peaceful march.

There were smaller anti-Temer demonstrations on Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba and other Brazilian cities.

Temer played down the wave of protests in comments to reporters: “They are small groups, not popular movements of any size,” he said. “In a population of 204 million Brazilians, they are not representative.”

A court on September 5 ordered the release of 18 of the 27 protesters arrested by military police the day before, during protests against President Michel Temer in São Paulo.

According to Marcelo Feller, an attorney for one of the released activists, “the judge lifted the custody because he found the detainees had not committed any crime.” According to him, the charges have been dropped, but the released protesters may still be investigated.

“In the judge’s words, these are sad days for our democracy, regardless of people’s political views, and he said verbally, woe is the nation whose citizens have to suffer and keep quiet about it,” said Feller, who was at the hearing that ordered the release.

According to a protester who identified herself as Sofia, although the arrest took place around 3:30pm, the reason for the detention was still unknown by 5am. She said female detainees were forced to go to the metro station restroom and “take off all their clothes to be searched by female police officers.”

One of the released young men, who identified himself as Gabriel, said a police officer grabbed a bent iron bar and said it belonged to him. “In the police report they wrote the bar was mine, that they had found it in my backpack. I didn’t even have a backpack,” Gabriel said.

At a news conference in the afternoon, the commander of the capital police patrol, Dimitrios Fyskatoris, defended the actions taken by military police (PM) during the protests and said he had not detected any excesses.

“Military police have the required expertise, training, and equipment, and has been doing a good job of monitoring demonstrations mostly with no issues,” he said.

Last week, there were protests against Michel Temer from Monday (August 29) through Friday (September 2) and on Sunday ( September 4) organized by several movements, and all of them were repressed by military police with tear gas, pepper sprays, and rubber bullets.

On Sunday, shortly after the event had been wound up by the organizers, police began firing tear gas, tear gas and water cannons to disperse the protesters.

According to Colonel Fyskatoris, the purpose of the measure was merely saving lives. He said that when the protesters were already dispersing, “there was widespread vandalism by individuals or small groups.” He emphasized that military police had to “restore order” to “protect lives.”

The colonel noted that military police adopt certain procedures that cover specific riot control measures, such as firing rubber bullets down. Asked about police repression on the streets in recent days and attacks on media staff, the colonel denied any protocols had been breached and said those cases could be regarded as occasional “misconduct”. When that happens, he said, the facts are “thoroughly investigated.”

The Pope

Pope Francis called for people to pray to the Aparecida Virgin to protect “all of Brazil and all of the Brazilian people in this very sad moment”, in reference to the removal of Dilma Rousseff as president and her replacement by vice-president and interim president Michel Temer, which occurred last week.

The Argentine born pope made the statement during the unveiling of a bronze statue dedicated to Brazil’s patron saint in the Vatican gardens, and explained he was not sure if he would be able to visit Brazil in 2017 as he had promised back in 2013 when the attended the World Youth Day.

“In 2013 I promised I would return next year. I don’t know if it will be possible, but at least I will have Virgin Aparecida here, much closer”, explained Francis.

The pope also invited to pray so that the Aparecida Virgin protects the poorest, the discarded, the abandoned elderly, the street children and all those who fall in the hands of all kind of exploiters, and to save Brazil’s people with social justice and the love of Jesus Christ.

Francis recalled that the image of the Aparecida Virgin was found by some poor workers and he hoped that now it could be found “by all Brazilians, and particularly by those who need jobs, education and are deprived of their dignity”.

The initiative to donate an image of the Aparecida Virgin and adorn the Vatican gardens was from the Brazilian embassy in the Vatican and the Aparecida Archdiocese.

ABr/Mercopress

Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, will appear before the 81 senators on Monday to defend herself, but her opponents are confident they have more than the 54 votes needed to convict her.

The final vote expected on late Tuesday or the early hours of Wednesday would confirm her Vice President Michel Temer as Brazil’s new leader for the rest of her term through 2018, ending 13 years of left-wing Workers Party (PT) rule.

A poll published by O Globo newspaper on Thursday showed that 51 senators were committed to voting to dismiss Rousseff, with only 19 supporting her and 11 undecided.

Temer’s right-leaning government held last minute talks with senators and political parties to shore up votes against Rousseff, who has denied any wrongdoing and described efforts to oust her as a ‘coup’. Temer aides said they expect at least 60 senators to vote against Rousseff.

If he is confirmed president by Rousseff’s ouster, Temer would face a daunting task to steer Latin America’s largest economy out of its worst recession since the Great Depression and plug a budget deficit that topped 10% of GDP.

Rousseff is charged with spending without Congressional approval and manipulating government accounts to disguise the extent of the deficit in the run-up to her 2014 re-election.

Financial markets have rallied on prospects of a more market friendly government, with the real currency rising around 30% against the dollar this year. Still, investors and members of Temer’s fragile coalition are concerned he has yet to unveil measures to drastically curb the deficit.

A draft budget for next year is not expected in Congress until August 31, after the Senate vote, by which time Temer could have more political leverage to push through unpopular austerity measures.

Temer’s team has sought to speed up the trial so he can set about restoring confidence in a once-booming economy and remove any doubts about his legitimacy as Brazil’s president.

If Rousseff is removed, Temer must be sworn in by the Senate. He is then expected to address the nation before heading to the summit of the G20 group of leading economies in Hangzhou, China on September 4-5 on his first trip abroad.

In her last rally before the trial, in the auditorium of a bank workers union in Brasilia on Wednesday night, Rousseff supporters chanted “Out with Temer.” Rousseff said she has refused to resign to make the point that she is being ousted illegally.

“I committed no crime. To stop this happening again, I must go to the Senate to defend Brazil’s democracy, the political views that I advocate and the legitimate rights of the Brazilian people,” she said.

Yet even Rousseff’s Workers Party, hurt by corruption scandals and her dismal economic record, has distanced itself from her last-minute call for new elections to resolve Brazil’s political crisis.

A sign that Rousseff is not expecting a favorable verdict next week is that she has begun to move her personal belongings out of the presidential residence in Brasília to her home in Porto Alegre.

Metal Barricades

Brazilian Senators launched the impeachment trial of suspended president Dilma Rousseff on Thursday expected to end 13 years of populist rule in Latin America’s biggest economy.

The friendly spirit of the Rio Olympic Games faded and tension returned as the emotionally charged affair neared its climax, with Rousseff facing removal from office within days.

Chief justice Ricardo Lewandowski declared the trial open and later briefly suspended it as senators yelled at each other while debating procedural matters.

The media calculate that a majority of Senators will find Rousseff, 68, guilty of cooking the budget books to mask the depth of economic problems during her 2014 reelection campaign. If she is removed from office, her center-right former vice president turned rival Michel Temer will be sworn in to serve until 2018.

“Senators, now you must turn into judges and set aside your ideological, partisan and personal positions,” Lewandowski told the house. But the impeachment affair is heavily politically charged.

Rousseff’s rivals blame her for economic chaos and are out to crush her Workers’ Party (PT).

“I am going to vote for impeachment, which is a political instrument that permits us to remove from power anyone who is misusing it,” said Simone Tebet, a senator from Temer’s PMDB party.

Rousseff’s ally and predecessor, PT founder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said in a speech in Rio: “Today begins a week of national shame.”

Rousseff has sworn to resist what she calls a coup. “We will fight to reinforce democracy in our country with the same force that I fought against the military dictatorship,” she told supporters in Brasília.

In Thursday’s opening session, her allies voiced procedural objections in vain before the first evidence was heard.

The trial will climax Monday when the president, who was suspended from office in May, addresses the Senate herself for the first time.

A vote is then expected within 48 hours, with a two-thirds majority of the 81 senators required to bring Rousseff down.

A huge metal barricade was set up on the esplanade outside Congress to separate rival demonstrators, with large protests expected Monday.

Inside the chamber, many senators can barely disguise their eagerness to finish Rousseff off.

The charges against her focus on her use of unauthorized state loans to cover budget gaps. She argues that the practice has long been accepted by a succession of governments.

Unofficially, Rousseff is taking the blame for Brazil’s slide into economic decline, mixed with a giant corruption scandal over state oil giant Petrobras.

Temer, who has served as acting president since May, is hardly more popular than Rousseff. A recent opinion poll found only 14% of Brazilians thought he was doing a good job.

However, his center-right coalition and choice of market-friendly ministers have raised expectations that he can get the economy back on track.

Mercopress

This year’s event is being called a “compact version,” and will consist of celebrations, an analysis of the balance sheet of the last decade and plans for future forums. Only 30,000 participants are expected. Last year, in Belém, Pará state, there were 130,000.

The forum started with its traditional Opening March through the central streets of Porto Alegre. Among the guests invited this year are the Portuguese sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the American thinker Immanuel Wallerstein, the British geographer David Harvey and the Egyptian economist Samir Amin.

Although the Social Forum boasts that it is non governmental and not connected to political parties, there will be some politicians. On Tuesday, January 26, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will join the presidents of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, of Bolivia, Evo Morales, of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, and Uruguay, Jose Mujica, for a special commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the forum.

The World Social Forum took to the streets of Porto Alegre in what has become a traditional and eclectic march for opening that megaevent. The happening, attended by about 10 thousand people – according to estimates by the Municipal Guard – started downtown and played host to all kinds of protests and demonstrations, which went up to the Guaíba river.

In front of the procession, a group of representatives of religions with African roots opened the way to a pilgrimage of labor unions, political parties, students, environmentalists, representatives of the black movement, of the gay and lesbian community, of defense of the Palestinian cause and even protesters calling for the impeachment of Rio Grande do Sul’s governor, Yeda Crusius.

“This walk summarizes the Forum. The great feeling here is this diversity, sharing with other movements. And this gives a lot of energy to work throughout the year,” said student Calimério Júnior, from Citizen Education Network.

Among the flags and banners around the way, slogans against neoliberalism, union claims and defense of Brazilian sovereignty in the pre-salt oil exploration. Carrying a big red banner, the representative of the Marijuana March, Laurence Gonçalves, use the march to defend the “public control of the use of drugs.” With the revision of legislation in and outside Brazil.

“Several countries prohibit the consumption, production and even the possession of some drugs, when, however, the institutional forces work with the illegal trafficking as well: the police, the governments. The control has to be done by citizens, and not as it is now, with chaos, with people dying without medical care,” he argued, surrounded by supporters excited about the cause.

Among the new hippies of alternative community Village of Peace, a man covered in mud drew attention. “It is an expression of our love relationship with mother earth,” said one of the members of the movement.

Congresswoman Luciana Genro (P-SOL party) celebrated the return of the WSF to Porto Alegre, a city where it was created in 2001, and advocated more coordination among the various social movements and organizations in attendance.

“It’s a great honor to receive in Porto Alegre all those people who still insist on believing that another world is possible,” Genro said.  “We need social movements to unite around their ideals, regardless of whether people belong to different parties. Our struggle is the same.”

As eclectic as the march, the manifestation’s soundtrack had from pagode and axé music, played on the Workers Union Confederation trio elétrico (sound truck) to the drums of religions of African origin.

As counterpoint to the march members of the anarchist punk movement got together at the end of the demonstration. With their faces covered, defending “autonomy”, the participants questioned the funding of society’s organizations and social movements with money from corporations.

“The Forum has lost its combative character and autonomy. Another world will not be possible financed by foreign companies,” said professor Daniela Dias.

ABr

The forum will be attended by approximately 5,000 people from over 40 countries, including state ministers, businessmen, third sector leaders, academicians and students.

"This is an ongoing action event aimed at promoting quality tourism, which caters to basic issues such as social development, the valuing of cultural diversity, the preservation of biodiversity and the search for peace," claimed Felipe Cruz, president of Instituto de Hospitalidade (Hospitality Institute), who is also one of the event’s creators.

During the forum, there will be a presentation of 120 case studies of countries that managed to use tourism to promote peace and sustainable development. The idea is to promote worldwide exchange of experiences, strategies and innovative solutions.

Among the case studies to be presented are those of the Hotel Casuarina Beach, in Barbados, which works towards accessibility in tourism; the Indian communities in Ecuador; the Tourism for Peace course at the University of Sydney, Australia; the Campi Ya Kanzi, in Kenya, the Route of the Ksours, in Algeria, the desert areas in the Sahara, Africa, the Rio de La Plata, between Uruguay and Argentina, where controversial industrial plants are being installed, and the Kerala Spice Tour, in India.

On the Brazilian side, the Brasil das íguas (Brazil of the Waters) case will be presented, including the Ibicuí­ River, in Rio Grande do Sul, and other examples of sustainable tourism in the Pantanal (the world’s largest wetland area, mostly within the midwestern Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul).

Another issue to be discussed during the forum is the confrontation and prevention of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents in tourism. Issues related to gastronomic tourism, the rescuing of culture, and the strategic management of new destinations will be tackled as well.

According to Cruz, one of the main themes will be the promotion of peace through tourism. "Peace is one of the focuses of the program. Tourism brings people closer together, therefore it favours the creation of peace-oriented initiatives," he said.

One of the cases to be presented is about tension zones in the Middle East, and about how tourism might contribute for peace in that region.

The forum program will also include the 2nd Meeting of South American Tourism Ministers and High Authorities, to be attended by 25 Ministers of Tourism from several countries; the Meeting of Affiliate Members of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the Meeting of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). All lectures, conferences and panels will be held at the campus of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS).

Created in Brazil in 2003, the World Tourism Forum is a global initiative that attracted more than 6,000 people from 86 different countries in two years of events.

The first forum was held in Salvador, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, and the second one in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro.

During the two editions, 142 case studies were presented and discussed in 347 panels, reporting experiences in 53 different countries. The next forum, Destinations 2007, will be held in another country, which has not yet been defined by the organizers.

"The meeting has increasingly attracted more people with each new year. Our goal is to make this movement grow even further, and to make people aware of the need to have quality tourism," Cruz said.

The World Tourism forum is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Tourism and of the Tourism for Peace and Sustainable Development Foundation, of the United Nations, through the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (Unesco), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The plant will be located in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul and will produce 85% of the technology that exists today in semi-conductors.

The chips to be manufactured by the unit may be used in many industrial segments, from the production of computers to television sets, cellular phones, automobiles and washing machines.

The only technology, in the area of semi-conductors, that the factory won’t produce will be capacity memory, like pen drives and micro-controllers, which are the brain of the computers. The unit will work throughout the chain, from research to manufacture.

The project for the factory is by the Excellency in Advanced Electronic Technology Center (Ceitec), of Porto Alegre, capital city of Rio Grande do Sul, and will have an implementation cost of US$ 84.6 million. The money will come from sectorial funds.

The factory will work in the city of Porto Alegre, in a complex of 13,659 square meters. In the complex, as well as the industrial unit, there will be an operational center and a research center.

The factory should make the state a reference in the field of microelectronics in Brazil. According to information from the president of Ceitec, Sérgio Dias, Brazil imports today US$ 3 billion per year in microelectronic products.

According to remarks made by the minister of Science and Technology, Sérgio Rezende, the initiative will be important for the industries that have to buy the chips abroad. "It will also serve to show that Brazil has human resources and technology in the field of microelectronics, which will end up influencing the installation of other companies," he said.

The Ceitec, which is taking the project ahead, is a center of excellency in electronic technology created from a partnership between the federal, state and municipal governments with teaching and research institutions and entrepreneurial entities, especially from the Rio Grande do Sul. As well as the state in the South of Brazil, Minas Gerais, in the Southeast, also has a project in entrepreneurship in the field of semi-conductors.

According to the president of the Federation of the Commercial and Services Associations of Rio Grande do Sul (Federasul), José Paulo Dornelles Cairoli, the intent of the meeting is to help in the globalization of companies from Rio Grande do Sul, opening new fronts for enterprises in the state.

Organized with the support of the state’s representative office of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, the encounter will include the presence of minister João Inácio Oswald Padilha, head of the Africa 2 Division at the Brazilian Foreign Office (Itamaraty).

Other ambassadors expected are Lindiwe Daphne Zulu, from South Africa, Alberto Correia Neto, from Angola; and Murade Isaac Miguigy Murargy, from Mozambique, as well as minister Claudio Lyra, head of the ministry’s representative office in Rio Grande do Sul.

There will be presentations by productive sectors in Rio Grande do Sul focussing on the markets of the three countries represented.

In the seven prior editions, the meetings opened business opportunities with the economic blocs like Central American and the Caribbean, the European Union (EU), Asia and Oceania, the Nafta (United States, Canada and Mexico), the Latin-American Integration Association (Aladi), the Arab countries and Eastern Europe.

The shop, which is functioning in the Marist Social Center (CESMAR) in the northern zone of the city, was set up in partnership with the federal government. The plan is to receive, fix, and redistribute 5,000 computers per year.

"Most of the machines sent here for recycling come from federal government agencies, which get rid of more than 250 thousand computers each year," affirms the director of the CESMAR, Miguel Antônio Orlandi.

Orlandi reports that, after the center was inaugurated, they have received telephone calls from people who want to donate computers and other defective or idle equipment.

"There have been donations from communities close to the state capital," he says. 70 young people are responsible for fixing up the old machines. Most of them are from the Mário Quintana Villa, one of the areas in Porto Alegre where young people are most socially vulnerable.

The Brazilian Recycling Center is based on the Canadian Computers for Schools (CFS) project which began in 1993. "The project envisioned a computer factory. In our negotiations, we proposed that a school be developed first," Orlandi stated. Another model for the program was the Colombian Computers for Education Program (CPE), which got underway in 2000.

The institutions and communities interested in receiving recycled computers should send their digital inclusion requests to the Department of Logistics and Information Technology in the Ministry of Planning.

"The proposals will be chosen by a council in Brasí­lia comprised by representatives of the Ministries of Planning, Education, and Work and Employment," informed the secretary of Logistics and Technology, Rogério Santanna.

Santanna went on to say that other reconditioning and recycling centers will be inaugurated this year in Brasí­lia, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Recife.

ABr

“When there is such an overwhelming disaster and you see yourself as part of this disaster, you begin to question your whole life. Why so many years of sacrifice and struggle?” Congressman Fernando Gabeira expresses the feelings of many petistas – members or supporters of the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party / PT) – when they heard that the party they built or supported as an instrument of democratic, ethical politics, was governing on the basis of systematic corruption.

The Brazilian Left is in a state of profound shock and confusion. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of people have devoted their lives to creating the PT as a principled and forceful instrument of social justice against one of the most corrupt and unjust ruling elites in the world. Now they are being forced to come to terms with their own party’s lack of principle.

I had been to Brazil several times in a mood of hope, to write about the participatory political experiments of the PT and to engage in the World Social Forum hosted by the then-PT government of Porto Alegre. My most recent visit to Brazil, after months when a “money-for-votes” scandal and wider evidence of financial wrongdoing have exposed the malpractice of leading PT officials, was an attempt to find answers to two troubling questions:

a.. how could the party of participatory democracy have followed the example of its political adversaries to the right and become the party of corruption?
b.. has the democratic creativity the Workers’ Party displayed in the years before the election of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2002 survived the waterfall of scandal engulfing it?

The Corruption of Reform

In its almost four years in office, Lula’s government – which came to power committed to achieving social justice by building on the power of popular movements – has pushed through neo-liberal reforms of which Tony Blair himself would be proud. These included what amounts to the partial privatisation of an extremely unequal public-pensions system, which has left Brazil’s extreme social inequalities almost untouched; and the amendment of the country’s relatively radical (albeit contradictory) 1988 constitution to facilitate the creation of an independent bank with the freedom to raise interest rates as high as it wants.

There have also been social reforms – for example, a basic (but very low) income for all poor families – which are hardly adequate to the problems they seek to address; moreover, many of them, along with the relatively progressive aspects of Lula’s foreign policy, have not needed the congressional approval that the PT finds difficult to acquire. (Lula received 67% of the vote in 2002, but the PT – although the largest party – won only a fifth of the seats in congress).

Now, even the modestly progressive elements of these reforms have now been overshadowed by the corruption scandals that exploded in June 2005 after a revelatory TV interview by a member of congress from a small party allied to the PT, Roberto Jefferson (who has himself fallen victim to the process he unleashed). It is generally admitted that the cúpula (group at the top) of the PT bribed political parties of the right to join their parliamentary alliance and gave monthly payments to congressmen of the right to support their legislation.

The corruption extended also to the PT’s strategy for winning the 2002 election. This, it turns out, was based on a secret slush fund or caixa dois (literally “a second cash till”) sourced by donations from businesses contracted by PT municipal governments, public companies and private companies seeking government contacts. The publicist responsible for Lula’s 2002 advertising campaign admitted he had received money from these PT funds through an illegal account held by the PT in the Bahamas.

There is evidence, too, of personal corruption. The PT treasurer received a Land Rover; the Trotskyist-turned-monetarist finance minister, Antonio Palocci, made a suspiciously vast speculative gain on a house. But far more important than allegations against individuals – many of which circulate without definitive evidence – is the wider corrosion of democracy in Brazil that the scandal has unearthed.

Many observers attribute this to the way that an instrumental methodology of “by any means necessary” has degraded the political goals and values of the very party that offered a new, clean political project in Brazil.

The most significant figure in creating this operating model (though unlikely himself, despite extensive allegations, to be corrupt) is José Dirceu – the ex-guerrilla leader (once responsible for kidnapping the German ambassador, and who subsequently spent years in exile in Cuba) who became Workers’ Party president in 1994 and was the architect of Lula’s three election campaigns until his 2002 victory.

The evidence of corroded ends is stark. The revelations of political corruption came after it had become clear that the government had moved from a supposedly tactical acceptance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) terms to a wholehearted acceptance of neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Interest rates in Brazil are, at 19%, among the highest in the world. The government continues to generate an internal surplus far high than that demanded by the IMF, which can rely on the economists who determine policy in the presidential Palácio do Planalto to do its work for it.

Indeed, perhaps the most crucial signal that the leadership had broken the bond at the heart of the original PT project was Lula’s failure to turn his electoral mandate and huge international support into a democratic counterforce to drive a hard bargain with the IMF.

“He could have got much better terms in order to pursue the social programme for which he was elected. At that point, the people would have been on the streets behind him”, says Plínio de Arruda Sampaio, a founder of the party with Lula who now plans (in his 70s) to test “for the last time” whether the party retains any integrity by standing for election as party president.

It’s not just Brazilian leftists who are shocked and disoriented by what has been happening in the elegantly designed corridors of office (but patently not of power) in Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília. Lula and the PT are not a Soviet-style “god that failed”. But many western leftists, myself included, vested great hopes in the PT’s ability to combine, in Sampaio’s words, “the building of popular movements with occupying spaces in the political system.”

This was seen as a strategy for socialist change more powerful than the failed parliamentarism of west European social democracy, yet also more legitimate and democratic than the Leninist tradition in the way it built on struggles for the franchise and other liberal political rights.

The PT’s particular origins in mass movements resisting the military dictatorship of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, along with strong traditions of popular education and self-organisation, produced something new.

This rich popular history makes the failure of the Lula government more than just a repeat of the classic scenario of a social-democratic party that talks left in opposition and is pressured into compliance when gets to office.

The Politics of Participation

One illustration of the PT’s innovative politics is its relationship with the landless mass movement Movimento sem Terra (MST) – whose members occupied the land of the rich latifúndios and then tried to use it for cooperative agriculture. The PT’s connection with the MST was one of mutual support that preserved the MST’s autonomy.

Another example of the PT’s operating method was its civic policy, especially participatory democracy and budgeting. When the party won mayoral elections in cities like Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Branco in the Amazon, Sao Paulo, Recife and (more recently) Fortaleza in the northeast, it sought (in the words of Celso Daniel, mayor of Santo André who was murdered in 2001 for trying to stop corruption) to “share power with the movements from whence we came.”

The PT did this by opening up the finances of the municipality to a transparent process of participatory decision-making through which local people had real power. A driving motive behind this experiment was to expose and eliminate corruption.

To assess whether the emphasis on participatory democracy had really been confined to the state of Rio Grande Do Sol, with its highly-developed civil society, I took a reality check by visiting Fortaleza – 4,000 kilometres from Porto Alegre. There, the radical PT member Luizianne Lins had won a contest in 2004 for mayor against the wishes of the leadership (José Dirceu had flown in from São Paulo to campaign against her).

I attended meetings of citizens deciding on their priorities for the city’s plan to negotiate over them with Luizianne. The participation was evident and strong, and was pushing municipal policies in a more egalitarian direction. The coordinator of the local office for participatory democracy, Neiara de Morais, told me how they were developing the politics of participation: “popular participation is about more than the budget: we aim for it to run through every aspect of the municipality”.

There is a process of formação (training) that explains the workings of the government machine, especially the finances and helping “people to become fully conscious of the process, improving, taking control over it”.

Fortaleza’s participatory administration had clearly taken the participatory process deeper than its original, renowned Porto Alegre home. The next stages of my trip were São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where dissident PT figures had long been sounding the alarm that the party leadership were bypassing this kind of grassroots radicalism.

I visited Chico de Oliveira, Marxist sociologist and a founder of the PT who comes (as does Lula) from Pernambuco. In an excoriating letter of resignation from the PT over the government’s economic policy, Oliveira had presented a comprehensive analysis of the deformities of Brazil’s political system: stressing the enormous powers of patronage it makes available (the president has 25,000 jobs in his gift; France under François Mitterrand had 150); criticising the electoral system, where the fact that candidates tend to stand as individuals makes for weak parties; and highlighting the clientelism and bribery encouraged as a normal way of passing measures through congress and through regional and municipal assemblies.

It was exactly this system that the participatory budget was fashioned to attack. The idea was that instead of bribery and patronage, the mayor or governor (and, it was imagined, eventually the president) would rely on a process of shared decision-making infused with institutions of popular participation; their legitimacy would in turn derive from processes of direct and delegate democracy that councillors and regional deputies would be unable to ignore because their voters were part of it.

A visit to Porto Alegre confirmed that this system worked. “We ruled for sixteen years without bribery”, said Ubiratan de Souza, one of the architects of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre itself and for the state of Rio Grande do Sul as a whole.

The essential principle guiding Ubiratan, Olívio Dutra and the other pioneers of participatory budgeting was the recognition that electoral success does not on its own bring sufficient power even to initiate a process of social transformation, but that an electoral victory can be used to activate a deeper popular power.

Such an approach, even without immediately developing new institutions, would have led to the kind of mobilisation that petistas expected from Lula in dealing with the IMF and a hostile congress and Brazilian elite.

Indeed, one government insider told me that bankers expected it too and were reconciled to some tough bargaining. But from Lula’s 1994 election defeat (when many had been looking forward to a PT government) to the successful campaign of 2002, the leadership of the party was not in the hands of people with a deep commitment to participatory democracy.

The Two Scandals

Chico de Oliveira stresses the emergence of a group of trade-union leaders, including Lula, whose approach was essentially one of pragmatic negotiations. He argues that under the dictatorship in the 1980s, when the independent trade-union movement was highly political even where its activity was economic or sectional in intent, union leaders appeared radical and political as well as industrially militant. But as workers, in the car industry especially, faced rising unemployment and declining influence, their union leaders’ attitude turned to caution and pragmatism.

Another group in the post-1994 leadership – for example, ex-guerrilla José Genoíno – had reacted to the fall of the Berlin wall by dropping any belief in radical change and adopting a variant of Tony Blair’s “third way”, or diluted social democracy. Meanwhile, there was José Dirceu, whose break from the Communist Party in the 1970s had been over the armed struggle, not its instrumental, ends-justify-means methodology.

Dirceu’s end in this case was shared by every petista: “Lula presidente”. For Dirceu, it was to be achieved by playing ruthlessly the existing rules of the game. For most petistas it was by also mobilising and educating the people to be ready to take actions themselves. But the difference in methodology was overwhelmed by the desire for a PT victory. People who tried openly to warn of corrupt deals with private companies, like César Benjamin, a leading official of the party until 1994, were rebuffed as disloyal.

“We believed too much in Lula”, confesses Orlando Fantasini, a deputy for São Paulo. A radical Catholic, Fantasini is part of a “left bloc” of around twenty deputies and a few senators that was quick to demand an investigation into the corruption revelations. Many of these are now likely to join other parties, most notably the PSOL, a party formed by PT deputies who split from the party over the pension reforms.

Throughout the 1990s, Lula personified petista hopes for social justice and popular democracy. If Dirceu and the increasingly tight cúpula demanded greater autonomy, or argued for a centralisation of the party at the expense of the local nuclei in the name of a Lula victory, their demand was granted. In election campaigns, political campaigning in marketplaces and street-corners gave way to marketing on the conventional model; activist campaigning gave way to paid leafleters.

At the same time, Lula was glad-handling the bosses of Globo, Brazil’s Rupert-Murdoch-like media monopoly, thinking he could get them on his side. The PT had established Brazil’s first mass political party according to its own ethics of popular democracy, but after the disappointment of 1994 – and even more so of 1998 – it accepted the rules of Brazil’s corrupt political system.

The PT’s reputation for democracy has been based partly on the rights of different political tendencies to representation at all levels of the party. But from the mid-1990s, according to César Benjamin and others, José Dirceu started to use the slush fund to strengthen the position of the Campo Majoritário (majority camp) to build a network of local leaders who depended on him.

This, along with the autonomy demanded and granted for Lula’s group, meant that the PT’s democracy become ineffectual as the majority tendency monopolised central control and no other mechanisms of accountability were put in place.

As I listened to party activists and ex-activists at every level – from the organisers of Fortaleza’s newborn participatory democracy to a veteran leftist advising Lula in the Palácio do Planalto – it became clear how interlinked the financial and political scandals are.

The neo-liberalism of the government and the systematic corruption in the organisation of the party go hand in hand. The steady strangling of democracy from within meant that the party lost all autonomy from the government; and this in turn closed down all the mechanisms linking the party to the social movements and therefore acting as a political channel for their expectations, their pressure and their anger. Even Marco Aurélio Garcia, co-founder of the PT and Lula’s chief advisor on foreign affairs, feels he has no way of calling the economics minister Antonio Palocci to account.

What Now?

Everyone recognises that the corruption that has inundated Brazil’s political system as a whole is a huge defeat for the PT in particular. “Our strategies have to be for the long term,” says José Correia Leite, from the now-divided left tendency Democratic Socialism (DS).

If the party’s presidential elections, whose second-round result is awaited, gives victory to the Campo Majoritário – and it is assumed that even now corruption is playing a part in its election campaign – Leite and most of those who have been supporting Plínio de Arruda Sampaio will leave the party.

Some will join the PSOL but all will work to create a widely-based “socialist movement” or some such framework that will not see electoral activity as its priority, but rather will return to working with social movements.

“We must find a way of consolidating and developing the real PT traditions. We cannot let the cúpula destroy this”, says Luciano Brunet, who is supporting fellow Porto Alegren, Raul Pont, for in the election for party president on a platform of political reforms of the party and the state.

All agree that, as a group of Sampaio supporters puts it, “the situation is open – very open”. The group also stresses the importance of international discussions. Across the world, there is an experimental left refusing the idea that all that remains for the left is a kind of Blairism, or an abandonment of any engagement with electoral politics.

The disaster facing the PT requires not a turning away in search of a new political holy grail, but a deepening engagement with the political problems of Brazil and its Workers’ Party petistas and ex-petistas, in order to learn from their experience and together seek answers to questions that concern the left worldwide.

Hilary Wainwright is the editor of Red Pepper magazine and the author of Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (Verso). She is also research director of the New Politics project of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. The author can be contacted at: hilary1@manc.org.

The Kaingang Indians from Brazil are mad at the way they are treated by the authorities in the city of Porto Alegre, in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.

The indigenous peoople live on the hill called Morro do Osso,  and their leader protested after an attempt by the Head of the Municipal Secretary for the Environment, Beto Moesch, to remove without a court order the shacks where they live:

“Today I’m going to get this bugrada (band of Indians) out of here”. These were the words that the Municipal Secretary for the Environment used when he came here on Friday, June 4.

“For a long time, they have used this term to say that we are forest dwellers, that we are animals and that they can kill and eliminate us. But we don’t accept this.

“We demand respect, and we want justice to prevail against all this discrimination and prejudice. And we are certain that the population of Porto Alegre does not think in this way and does, indeed, respect us.”

Some of these shacks were built within the Morro do Osso Park, but the large majority lies outside its boundaries.

The community, of around 20 families, is made up of indigenous people from various villages in the state. They reoccupied the hill on April 9 2004 and are demanding that the National Foundation for Indigenous People (Funai) studies the area.

The Port Alegre City Hall has been promoting the place as a tourist attraction, but the Indians want to search for the presence of archeological sites and indigenous burial grounds there.

Funai representatives visited the indigenous people in February 2005 and promised to send a report stating the conclusions drawn from the visit. According to the Cimi team in Porto Alegre, the Foundation has not yet sent anything. 

As for Moesch’s attitudes, the indigenous people are petitioning for those responsible for the physical violence and the crime of racism to be punished.

They have also petitioned the Public Prosecutor’s Office to take legal action against the Municipal Secretary for the Environment charging him with slander and defamation.

They are using as proof what he has said to newspapers and on television, namely, that the indigenous people camping on Morro do Osso are criminals and drug dealers.

The Kaingang have also asked Funai to immediately set up a technical group to carry out studies to identify and define the boundaries of the Morro do Osso indigenous land.

Cimi – Indianist Missionary Council – www.cimi.org.br

Imagine more than one 150,000 people from one hundred  and thirty five different countries getting together for five days in the  same city and doing more than two thousand activities.

I know it is hard to  imagine that, but I was one of those thousands of people who were in Porto  Alegre in Brazil last January for the 5th World Social Forum. It went very  well.

The World Social Forum was created by an Israelian naturalized Brazilian,  Oded Grajewm and other activists to oppose the World Economic Forum that  happens every year in Davos in Switzland.

One could find from radical  leftists to new age folks doing meditation, from environmentalists to a  gathering of Franciscans. The best thing is to see everybody “playing their  own instrument” and respecting the other “players”.

Another thing that  impressed me was the number of young people, challenging the idea that  youth are not interested in politics anymore. The Youth Camp had more than 35,000 people from all over the planet.

The 5th version of the Forum had a lot of new things in comparison to the  previous times. All the activities – work shops, debates, cultural events,  marches, rituals, lectures, etc. – were self-organized by the groups and not  by the coordination of the WSF, freeing them from small responsibilities  and helping the event to become more democratic.

Another novelty is that  this year any group could give a proposal and it would be publicized in the  Mural of Proposals. There were exposed more than three hundred proposals on  how to improve our world.

One of the major issues this year was fair trade. For that reason, most of  the goods were commercialized in the Porto Alegre area where the Forum was  happening were been sold by peasants who are organized in projects of the  Economy of the Solidarity.

Even little mementos were sold by art craft  cooperatives. Besides that, the organization made seven hundred computers  connected to the Internet available to the participants.

The Forum was  divided in eleven themes. Among the themes, Spiritualities and Cosmovision  was one included with special attention to the indigenous spirituality.

I  was impressed by the diversity of the religious groups. There is still a  lot to be done, but I could see the theme of the Forum: ‘Another World Is  Possible”, is already happening when people from so many life experiences  and political visions get together not to fight, but to say that they are  tired of oppression and injustice in our planet.

SEJUP – Brazilian Service of Justice and Peace
www.sejup.org