Tchau, querido
Brazil’s President Waves Goodbye to Human Decency
In the summer of 2004, I moved to Brazil. I had spent most of the previous four years reporting on Haiti, including the despotic second term of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as the country’s president, and his overthrow in February 2004 in a rebellion started by formerly loyal street gangs. I stayed on for a couple months after that, trying to process the death and destruction I had witnessed, still enraptured by the warmth and grace of the Haitian people and the colour and vibrancy of the hemisphere’s second oldest republic. Living on a bougainvillea-wreathed street and traveling for weekends to a beach cottage on the south coast, I tried to banish the images of the violence I had witnessed from my head.
They never entirely went away, but eventually I headed back to Brooklyn, where I stayed for several weeks and began working on a piece of writing that would eventually become my first published book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle For Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005). I couldn’t afford to live in New York for any length of time, though, and was casting about for a place where I might be able to work on the project without going broke due to overhead costs. I ended up emailing with a Brazilian journalist, Ricardo Bonalume Neto, whom I had met in Haiti. It turned out that he had a friend who had a friend who had an empty apartment in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Santa Teresa. I had visited Rio before, for two weeks in the summer of 1999, and had been fairly smitten by the city. The price was right and, seeking renewal, I was on a plane by the end of the summer.
Immediately, it felt like the right decision. Santa Teresa in those days was an extremely bohemian neighborhood of artists, writers and musicians, skirted by favelas like Morro da Coroa (where I would later live for a month to get the flavour of things there), where you could go buy your bread at the local mom-and-pop grocery store on the Largo dos Guimarães and on weekends sometimes be lucky enough to find someone selling vatapá, a shrimp and coconut stew, from a pot. I would write in the cool of the mornings. One could take the bondinho (trolley car) to Lapa, where I was first introduced to the joys of freshly-made açaí and venues like the samba club Democraticos. The South American spring rains gave way to a glorious summer, and I would take the bus or the metro out to the beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon, the sun and wind and salt air as seductive as a kiss, gradually learning more and more of the lovely lilt of carioca Portuguese. On nights in the runup to Carnival, I would head up watch the Acadêmicos do Salgueiro samba school practice in the Andaraí neighborhood of Rio’s Zona Norte, where I also sometimes went to report from tangled, violence-wracked areas like the Complexo do Alemão. On weekends I would occasionally go to observe another samba school, the Grêmio Recreativo Escola de Samba Portela, and there I once shared a meal and a drink with an erudite engineer named Carlos who I only later discovered was the father of the singer Marisa Monte. I would lay in the hammock in my flat and read books like Caio Fernando Abreu’s Onde andará Dulce Veiga? and Caco Barcellos’ Abusado. It was years later that I would have the joy of discovering one of Brazil’s greatest writers, Clarice Lispector, who was in fact, born “Chaya” in Chechelnyk, along the Savranka River in Ukraine, and arrived in Brasil with her family shortly after her first birthday. I felt a warm welcome from almost everyone I met, and the honeyed late afternoon light that fell on the streets of Santa Teresa, half colonial cobblestones, half jungle spilling into view, as I sat nursing an icy chopp and chatted with friends are among the best memories of my life.
My time in Brazil coincided with the first presidential term of the former union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, elected as the candidate for the left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (Worker’s Party or PT). It was a heady era, with a representative of Brazil’s underclass finally in the Palácio da Alvorada and hope that Brazil, which had shaken off dictatorship less than 20 years before, would finally begin to thrive as its gifted, industrious people, so long badly-served by their leaders [there were exceptions], knew that it could. I was among those who held out great hopes for Lula during this time, praising his efforts to create a more just and equitable society in an article I wrote for The Guardian shortly after my arrival.
There were signs that Lula’s sheen of social democracy might not be quite as it was portrayed, though. He never missed an opportunity to praise Castro Inc™, the dictatorship in Cuba that sat atop a violently homophobic, racist and reactionary collection of a handful of families that have squatted over the island since 1959. He defended Venezuela’s autocratic Hugo Chávez long after the latter had slid away from democratic norms with practices such as the Lista Tascón blacklist of government opponents and the arming of violent civilian paramilitary supporters. After the brutal crackdown on Iranian protesters in 2009 following the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the families of political prisoners wrote to Lula before his 2010 visit to Tehran begging him to intervene on their behalf. He ignored them. Nor was Lula the environmental champion many like to portray him as, during his second term signing off on a hugely destructive Amazonian dam.
In Brazil itself, however, there was hope. Lula’s government created Fome Zero, a national anti-hunger programme, implemented policies that helped drag more than 29 million Brazilians into the middle class and saw direct foreign investment triple by nearly $30 billion a year. Brazil even won the bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics [which proved to be something of a mixed blessing].
Today, after more than a decade, Lula is once again president of Brazil, having been inaugurated this past January, but those days seem like a long-time ago, indeed.
Brazil has endured a fairly wrenching 13 years since Lula was last in office. He was succeeded as president by the PT’s Dilma Rousseff, who had been an anti-government guerilla during Brazil’s era of dictatorship and who found herself engulfed in a sprawling corruption investigation involving multiple political parties called Operação Lava Jato (memorably if not entirely accurately dramatized in the Brazilian series O Mecanismo). In a highly questionable impeachment procedure, Rousseff was ousted in August 2016. During the vote on whether the procedure should proceed, a far-right congressman from Rio de Janeiro named Jair Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to a notorious dictatorship-era torturer, one of many grotesque gestures he had made in his long political career. Rousseff was succeeded by Michel Temer, who himself would be arrested in a corruption investigation and who served as interim president until December 2018, after Bolsonaro soundly beat the PT’s candidate, Fernando Haddad, 55.13% to 44.87% in the second round of presidential elections and ascended to office.
What followed was a chaotic four years of bellicose populist provocation as Bolsonaro’s tenure turned out to be every bit as catastrophic as anyone could have predicted. His government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic was destructive to the point of Brazil’s senate recommending criminal charges against him, he was stalked by allegations of corruption, and he promoted violent settler colonialism in Brazil’s fragile Amazon. Bolsonarismo itself was marked by violence, as was vividly illustrated by incidents such as a right-wing federal deputy and Bolsonaro ally chasing a man down a São Paulo street while pointing a loaded gun at him or Bolsonaro ally and former congressman hurling grenades and shooting at police as they came to take him to prison in connection with threats he had made against a Supreme Court justice.
While much of this was going on, from April 2018 to November 2019, Lula himself sat in prison, ensnared in the same Lava Jato investigation that had brought down Dilma Rousseff. Eventually freed from prison and seeing his sentence annulled so he could run for the presidency, Lula faced off against Bolsonaro in elections last year.
In the prelude to the vote, Bolsonaro frequently engaged in harsh incitement, but many people who didn't agree with Lula or his party - in the first round a majority of voters voted against him - voted for the former president in the second round because they thought stopping Bolsonaro trumped any other concerns they might have. These voters behaved with great maturity and selflessness and put their country first in the hopes that the former president would justify their support. I myself argued last October that, while I was no fan of Lula, there was simply no logical choice except to hope he won over Bolsonaro as, for all his very severe negative qualities, he didn’t in my view represent the existential threat to Brazilian democracy that Bolsonaro did. I also warned, however, that, though it was good that Bolsonaro would lose, it was not necessarily good, given his negatives, that Lula would win. Lula triumphed but, before his inauguration, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters in Brasilia attacked and vandalized the Palácio do Planalto (the country’s presidential office), its congressional building and its Supremo Tribunal Federal in the Praça dos Três Poderes (Plaza of the Three Powers).
Throughout all of this, the world’s democratic leaders were clear in their support of Lula. Joe Biden immediately congratulated Lula for winning a third term in a “free, fair” election. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that “the people of Brazil have spoken…Congratulations, Lula!” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted “Congratulations, dear Lula, for your election which opens a new page in the history of Brazil. Together, we will join forces to meet the many common challenges and renew the bond of friendship between our two countries.” Biden also spoke out forcefully against the violence by Bolsonaro supporters in January, calling it an “assault on democracy.”
But the Lula of 2023 proved to be angrier, more intolerant, more conspiratorial and far less skilled than his earlier iteration, surrounded by veteran PT apparatchiks licking their chops at the prospect for another turn at the trough. The PT is, and has been for years, a bloated, patronage-heavy entity with little more commitment to idealism than any of Brazil’s other political parties. During one of those rare, unguarded moments that one sometimes gets from a politician after she acrimoniously parted ways with Lula during his first tenure as president, Marina Silva, an environmental activist and former senator who had served as Minister of Environment from 2003 to 2008, said Lula and the PT “didn’t do what was necessary for the country, but what was necessary to remain in power.” Apparently the lure of that power was too much for such antiquated principles, though, and Silva is now back at her old job in Lula’s new administration. I sometimes recall the words of Ricardo Bonalume Neto, the journalist who had facilitated my arrival in Brasil and who sadly passed away in 2018, who once wrote to me that “I never voted for Lula or Dilma, and I never will. Their so-called Workers Party has been successful in making lots of people believe that they were the only honest ones.”
With the voters who had entrusted him to bring their country back from the brink that Bolsonaro had taken it to and the other democratically-elected leaders who gave him a vote of good faith, it is fair to say that, in just four months in office, Lula has spat on their naïveté and brought Brazil’s international diplomatic reputation to a nadir that even Bolsonaro was unable to drag it down to, no small accomplishment. Far from horoing the country he represents, Lula has covered Brasil in shame and disgrace as he has rushed giddily into the embrace of Vladimir Putin’s regime in the Kremlin - now more than a year into its genocidal, imperialist invasion of Ukraine - and prostrated his nation before the dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing.
It is hard to think of a more clearly defined villain than Russia’s current diminutive, depraved would-be tsar. During the Second Chechen War at the turn of the millennium, Putin directed a seemingly-endless series of atrocities against Chechen civilians. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, where it indiscriminately attacked and murdered civilians there, as well. Beginning in 2015, Russia has intervened in Syria on behalf of dictator Bashar al-Assad, both with its conventional forces and via its government-sanctioned mercenaries, The Wagner Group, relentlessly bombing civilian targets in Idlib, using bunker-busting bombs against helpless non-combatants in Aleppo, blowing up hospitals and pumping out - with the help of fringe useful idiots in the West - a campaign of slander against the heroic first responders of the Syria Civil Defence, better known as the The White Helmets, with racist and Isalophobic conspiracy theories. From Syria, Putin’s Wagner Group proxy army has moved on to Mali, where that country’s military dictator, Assimi Goïta, has allowed them to massacre civilians as he lavished state resources on them; the Central African Republic, where they have been accused of massacring and raping local troops; and Libya, where they have been busy laying banned landmines outside the capital, Tripoli.
Abhorrent views on Russia and Ukraine were in fact something that both Lula and Bolsonaro shared. As Putin prepared his invasion in February 2022, Bolsonaro flew to Moscow to meet with the dictator and proclaimed Brazil’s “solidarity” with Moscow as Putin said Brazil was Russia’s most important partner in Latin America. Three months later, in an interview with Time Magazine, Lula brayed about Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy - who refused an offer of evacuation, preferring to stay and defend his country - “sometimes I sit and watch the President of Ukraine speaking on television, being applauded, getting a standing ovation by all the [European] parliamentarians. This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war. Because in the war, there’s not just one person guilty.” This observation followed Lula’s November 2021 comments about Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega - whose regime the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI) concluded had “committed crimes against humanity” - where Lula opined “why can (then-Chancellor of Germany Angela) Merkel stay in power for 16 years and Ortega cannot?” as if the democratically-elected leader and the blood-soaked tyrant were somehow equivalent. Earlier this year, he defended Venezuela dictator Nicolás Maduro by comparing Venezuela's opposition congress - which as an elected body in 2017 was subject to a far more violent assault than his own incoming government was - to the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Even so, the last few months and especially the last few days have been something to see. When he met German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Brasilia just after taking office, Lula used a joint press conference between the two to suggest in banal fashion that “if one doesn't want to, two can't fight,” as if the world had not watched Putin attack a peaceful country. It was “she shouldn’t have worn that short skirt” school of foreign policy analysis writ large. He later suggested that Ukraine should given up Crimea, which Putin illegally invaded and annexed in 2014, in exchange for “tranquility,”
Arriving last week for his meeting with Xi Jinping - whose dictatorship has committed crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China - Lula told reporters that Brazil’s “interests in the relationship with China are not just commercial. We have political interests and we have interests in building a new geopolitics.” Speaking in China on 16 April, Lula claimed “the decision to go to war was taken by two countries,” that Zelenskyy “doesn’t take any initiative to stop the war” as he battled to save his nation from extermination and that Europe and the United States “end up contributing to continuing the war” by supplying Ukraine with weapons with which to defend itself from annihilation. As Lula spoke in China, a Russian missile attack on a residence in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk killed at least eight people, including a toddler.
As Lula was feted by Xi Jinping, his proxies were busy catering to the man who ended that toddlers' life, Vladimir Putin. Romênio Pereira, head of the international relations section of the PT, spoke at a “Forum to Combat Imperialism” in Moscow blaming the U.S. for a “coup” against Dilma Rousseff and NATO for the war in Ukraine. Celso Amorim, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs during Lula’s first tenure as president and now is designated as Chief Advisor of the Presidency, traveled to Moscow to meet with Putin (but not to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy), praising the “relaxed” atmosphere of the imperial capital, the fact that Putin “laughed” and “was always in a good mood” and said it “did not look like the capital of a country at war.” As Lula’s surrogates ran interference on behalf of Putin abroad, at home Brazilian police have been busy investigating whether Russia has systematically used Brazilian territory for its spies to construct elaborate false identities as cover for their information-gathering missions abroad.
But perhaps nothing was more shocking, clarifying or repellent than the joint address to the public this week by Brazil's Minister of Foreign Affairs Mauro Vieira and Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Brasilia. It was extraordinary and hideous, and in some ways, may have marked a turning point in the Brazilian government’s relationship with the rest of the world.
First, Vieira spoke of the “great honor” in welcoming Lavrov to Brasilia and praised the “scope of the partnership between Russia and Brasil,” going on to praise trade between the two countries and saying that Brasil would “deepen and diversify” trade and investment with Russia. Vieira touted various trade opportunities with Russia and finally spoke of establishing a “friendly group” to facilitate negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to restore “lasting, longterm peace.” Vieira went on to say that “we [Brasil] are against using unilateral sanctions” - Russia has been hit with withering sanctions since it invaded Ukraine - and spoke about how sanctions have a "negative impact" on "developing countries." He thanked Russia for supporting Brasil's quest for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and commented about how excited he was to organize Lula's upcoming “official visit” to Russia.
Then Lavrov spoke, saying the pair had “reaffirmed our commitment to productive cooperation between our countries,” saying a series of events would be organized to “celebrate” Brazil's anniversary of diplomatic relations with Russia and - I’m not making this up - wishing everyone well on “Diplomat's Day.” Lavrov went on to talk up increasing trade between Russia and Brasil (especially in the energy, agriculture, healthcare and pharmaceuticals sectors ) before saying “Russia and Brasil's approach to issues currently taking place in the world are similar" [emphasis mine] and that the two countries “are united by the desire to contribute to a more democratic world order based on the fundamental legal principle of sovereignty & equality of states.” Lavrov continued by saying again “We have a similar approach to reforming the institutes of global governance” and that “We are also united that one-sided sanctions...[Are] illegitimate.” Lavrov then mentioned “the harsh struggle going on for our Western counterparts to retain their domination in financial, economic and security-related affairs and this triggered the current situation between the Russian Federation and NATO and the European Union” and that “regarding the processes developing in Ukraine, we're grateful to our Brazilian friends for their clear understanding of the genesis of this situation,” praising “agreements based on multipolarity" because “no country should strengthen its security at expense of others.”
Lavrov then asserted that Russia “honored its security obligations” [by invading Georgia and Ukraine, presumably] but that the West “has never even bothered to observe” them.” He said Putin’s “goal is to guarantee absence from the territory of Ukraine any threats to Russia's military security” and “to protect the lives and interests of the Russian-speaking population.” [By killing them, apparently.]
All of Lavrov's lies, militarism and blood libel passed without any pushback from Mauro Vieira.
There can be no doubt or ambiguity about what this means. By now, April 2023, Brazil’s government knows, as we all know, about the women who Russian soldiers raped, murdered or drove to suicide in Bucha, the wanton destruction of cities like Lyman, the depraved killing of dozens of civilians in Izium as their homes were bombed and the dumping of others in mass graves after torture, and about the relentless massacre of civilians in Kharkiv. The day the Brazilian government hosted Lavrov, the Russian anti-corruption, anti-torture human rights organization Gulagu published a video with the confessions of two former Wagner commanders, ex-convicts who admitted to killing Ukrainian children and civilians in Bakhmut and Soledar, with one describing how “she was a little kid, 5 or 6 years old. I took a killshot. We were told to let no one out.”
Also that same day, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian pro-democracy activists who had been repeatedly poisoned and harassed by the Putin regime, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for what prosecutors claimed was “treason” and "spreading disinformation" about the war in Ukraine. At the closing sessions of his trial, Kara-Murza told the court “the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate...when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.”
No, there is no doubt. Lula and his government looked at the architects of these atrocities - within Russia itself and outside of it in places like Ukraine and Syria - and saw kindred souls and partners. They have now covered themselves in a stain that will never wash off. Brazil no longer has Bolsonaro in office, and we can all by thankful for that, but what it has in his place is a bellicose, vainglorious old man shouting his musty Cold War slogans over the screams of the dying.
Soon, summer will be coming to Ukraine, with sunflowers blooming in the fields that hold the unquiet dead. Winter will be arriving in Brasil. Someone somewhere may be discovering the work of Clarice Lispector, only dimly aware of how her genius links the two countries. In her final book, the 1977 novel A hora da Estrela, she wrote of a dying woman’s observation that “She saw among the stones lining the gutter the wisps of grass green as the most tender human hope.” One wishes that in the coming days the people of Ukraine will not lose sight of that hope, and that the people of Brasil will one day again have a government worthy of all the beauty their country has given to the world.