BRAZIL: A New Chance for Old 'Social Revolutionary' Ideas

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 6 (IPS) - Luiz Inacio ''Lula'' da Silva, who was sworn in as Brazil's new president on Jan 1, kicked off his four-year term by confirming that the fight against poverty and hunger would top his agenda, and by relaunching a development model whose implementation was long blocked by coups d'etat and suppression of social activism.

Lula's first high-profile decision was to delay for a year the tender for a 760 million-dollar purchase of 12 fighter planes, with which the air force was to replace its fleet of French-made Mirage combat jets that are nearly 30 years old and were to be phased out by 2005.

The funds will go instead towards the ''Zero Hunger'' programme, the government's top priority, said Brazil's new defence minister, José Viegas, who announced last Friday that the purchase of the fighter jets was merely being postponed, not cancelled.

The measure will not have any immediate practical effects, since it will not modify this year's budget. The financing of the purchase of the jets was to be long-term in nature, and the deal was also to include the transfer of technology as well as investment in Brazil by the company that won the fighter plane contract.

But the re-assignment of funds will hold up military spending in years to come, and will give Brazil's new authorities more time to reach a decision on a controversial issue that involves strategic questions and the interests of the national aeronautics industry and of several countries as well.

The decision also has great symbolic significance. All sectors of the government are to participate in the effort to eradicate hunger in Brazil, Lula said in his first cabinet meeting, on Friday.

All of the ministries will have to cut their expenses as part of a united effort to enable the government to boost social spending, especially on the ''Zero Hunger'' programme, said Lula, a leftist former steelworker.

The foreign ministry, for example, will seek international support for the initiative, while the armed forces will mobilise troops to help carry it out, and the ministry of science and technology will put a greater emphasis on research focusing on technologies aimed at bolstering food production.

To expand the sensibility of his cabinet ministers towards poverty and hunger, Lula will take them on a Jan 10-12 tour to extremely poor, drought-stricken areas of the northeast, the poorest region in this country of 170 million.

In the words of Lula's chief of staff, José Dirceu, the government's ultimate aim is ''a veritable social revolution'' -- a phrase that would have drawn a violent response 30 years ago, when Dirceu was a guerrilla fighter training in Cuba after he was released from prison in Brazil as part of a swap for U.S. ambassador Charles Elbrick, who was kidnapped in September 1969.

Lula's administration represents a new chance to implement the ideas that revolutionaries and left-leaning nationalists tried to bring to life in many Latin American countries in past decades, in experiments that were frustrated, in a number of cases, by military coups.

''I am not the result of an election, but of a history. I am bringing to life the dream of generations and generations who tried and were unable to do so before me,'' said Lula after taking office last Wednesday.

He was especially referring to the reformists in the government of president Joao Goulart, who was overthrown by a military coup in 1964, and to ''the generation of 1968'', of which Dirceu was a prominent member. That generation lost many young lives in the struggle against Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship, and for a socialist revolution or ''national liberation.''

The dream has lost its revolutionary hues as well as its Marxist terminology. It no longer faces the obstacles put in place by the Cold War, such as the rabid anti-communism which meant the risk of death under torture for anyone who dared to speak out in favour of better conditions for the poor.

Now it is a question of putting into practice new adaptations of ideas that have been around for a long time, with the aim of putting an end to ''underdevelopment'' through a nationwide Brazilian plan.

Many of the ideals touted by Lula emerged from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the regional United Nations agency, in the 1940s and 1950s. In Brazil, those ideas were disseminated by Celso Furtado, who served as planning minister in the early 1960s.

His ideas were identified by a variety of terms, such as developmentalism, structuralism, national liberation, or the ECLAC model, in opposition to the monetarism and neo-liberalism that have prevailed in the region in the past two decades.

The strengthening of the domestic market, redistribution of the national wealth, and an active role by the state are some of the central tenets of that current of economic thought, which was nearly buried in the current process of globalisation.

Through the ''Zero Hunger'' programme, Lula's team is reviving ideas that formed part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1932-1945) New Deal. The aim is not only to fight malnutrition among Brazil's 10 million poorest families, but to expand food production while generating jobs and sources of income in the countryside.

That process will include an acceleration of land reform efforts and changes to farm policies that have historically favoured large coffee, sugar, and -- more recently -- soy and orange juice exporters in Brazil.

As part of that plan, Lula has instructed the finance ministry to encourage the creation of credit cooperatives, in order to foment small business and microenterprise by making low-cost financing available.

The old Marxist ''worker-peasant alliance with the national bourgeoisie'' is coming to life today through a multi-sector ''social pact'' proposed by Lula, and the presence of two leading businessmen at the heads of the ministry of development, industry and trade, and the ministry of agriculture.

The idea is that economic growth, which can only be sustained by reducing social inequality -- of which Brazil is a notorious world champion -- and expanding the internal market, is of interest to all, even to foreign capital and the financial world. That in turn will enable the new government to carry out a ''social revolution'' without the conflicts of the past. (END/2003)