Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil

Though little attended to by the North American media in the run up to the Iraqi invasion, the election in Brazil on the 27th of October 2002 of Luis Inacio da Silva (known as""Lula"") and the PT (Pardito dos Trabalhadores, or Worker's Party)--the first democratically elected (62 percent of the vote) socialist government in Latin America since Salvador Allende in 1973--could eventually have an equally powerful effect. One year later, BBC and Financial Times reporter Branford and Brazilian journalist and Lula confidante Kucinski have written not only a concise guide to the persons and events behind the PT's ascent, but a progress report on the its first tumultuous months in office. Broadly sympathetic but clear-eyed, they recount the slow and difficult rise of the poor boy from the north-east to power, and go on to admirably illuminate the complexities of the Brazilian political system in which Lula and his party struggled. Along with the firsthand material culled from interviews with Lula, what will most interest readers here is the snapshot it gives of a country and a people beginning to come to terms not only with what they see as the disastrous legacies of recent short-sighted economic policies, but with the long-term racial and economic disparities that have divided them. Brazil's economy is the tenth-largest in the world, and its rejection of the American neo-liberal/IMF model of development, amply demonstrated by its stymieing of the recent Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations, is sure to have further wide-reaching implications.