|
|
Mister
President:
I
happen to be one of the so many Spanish citizens
that are extremely happy for your electoral victory.
I want with all my soul that you can make of Brazil
and, by example, of all Latin America, a land
of progress and social justice. Nevertheless,
I am afraid.
I
have spent longer than forty years observing,
studying and living the efforts of Latin American
people to overcome oppression and poverty, and
my experience intervenes like a shade before my
eyes when I try to look to the future. I lived
many years in El Salvador, where I almost lost
my life by being on the side of those that now
have chosen you. Later, as an employee of the
Interamerican Bank of Development I worked in
Brazil where I could make up a technical opinion
on the complexity and the imbalances of its economy.
Now, I do write to you because in the middle of
my enthusiasm for your victory, it assaults me
the fear that traditional oligarchy, those 5%
of Brazil's population that possesses more than
half - God knows how much is that… - of the
wealth of the country receiving every year 60%
of its national income, will not allow you to
carry out your projects of social reform.
I
remember when president Allende began his reformist
experiment in Chile, a Jesuit priest at that time
representing Unidade Popular, went to our
university in El Salvador to explain to us such
a project. After hearing him delighted, one of
the professors, "molded" by the political
experience of Central America, asked him without
doubt and ingenuously: "But, don't you fear
a Coup D'Etat...?" The Chilean Jesuit
looked him with a certain superiority showing
disdain and responded: "You see, Chile is
a mature democracy. We are not, with your pardon,
in a banana republic." Few months later,
we knew they were in one. Do you understand my
fears?
In
El Salvador, the smallest country in Latin America,
where social phenomenons are given in reduced
scale and, therefore, they are easier to be observed
and analyzed, I learned by first hand how oligarchy
thinks, analyzes and conspires. Brazilian oligarchy,
to which you will have to face sooner or later
to develop your project, will be more wide, complex,
sophisticated, politic and negotiator than the
one at El Salvador in the seventies, but actually
they are not different to Venezuela's. Their members
are moved by the same stimuli: avarice, a limitless
appetite of power, and the decision of maintaining
entire their possessions and privileges besides
an extreme determination to defend them until
the last consequences. For that reason, Latin
American oligarchies - and the Brazilian one is
not an exception - have resisted with success
all social originated intents of change whether
at the center or at left. The "dual society,"
of what Brazil is an example stays intact through
the times.
Currently,
Brazilian oligarchy is not in a hurry, because,
although you have won the presidential elections,
they preserve very stingy the levers of real power
that is, the economic power. In addition, you
do not have majority in Congress and they are
counting and reorganizing their forces to make
a decisive opposition when the time comes. They
will already have begun to study one by one the
components of your government's staff and technical
team, to detect who can be more "accessible"
and more "reasonable."
Their
first strategy will be, as we are already seeing
that: their "associations." They tried
to erase the enormous differences that separate
the demands of your voters on the projects that
they would be willing to accept. They praised
your moderation and your good sense hoping to
take you little by little to accept that defending
oligarchic interests is a task that characterizes
a good government. They allowed you to make progressive
expressions, as the one of giving up the purchase
of war airplanes, which does not really affect
them, and they will support you on measures to
increase civic safekeeping, the combat of mendicancy
in the streets and the alleviation of the most
visible misery in big cities. They probably support
your negotiating position on the Treaty of Free
Trade for Latin America (FTAA-ALCA), because it
assures to Brazilian companies the protection
that are enjoying now, actually because they know
the United States does not have a vital interest
in that treaty. They will applaud the desperate
efforts of your Government to renegotiate the
foreign debt, whenever you do not mention your
rejection, because most of the debt is private
since it consists on funds and in any event, it
will be very difficult of renegotiating. In a
few words, at the beginning, the oligarchy may
give you the impression that is stuck with you.
But,
as soon as you dare to touch the property of land,
or the urban one, taxes, social security, labor
laws, and in general, as soon as you would pretend
to impose the redistributional measures that are
normal in socially advanced market economies,
you will have to face them. Do not doubt it, because
in almost two hundred years of independence, oligarchy
has not allowed to happen anything that would
eliminate feudal and semifeudal conditions in
which great part of Brazilian population lives,
why shall it take place now when cold war has
finished and no longer exists the danger of an
armed revolution as Bolshevik's...?
When
that moment comes, the oligarchy will undertake
the way of media campaigns, the economic desestabilización,
the parliamentary blockade, the mobilizations
and "caceroladas" of their employees,
the noises of sables, the managerial closings
and everything that is necessary to give the mismanagement
sensation and ungovernability that will drive
to other elections or to a bloody or bloodless
coup. We have seen it so many times... The incognito
aspect would be the attitude of the United States,
since they can no longer fear that Brazil joins
with the missing Soviet Union. However, they can
fear your union with Chávez and Castro
to limit the North American economic power in
the continent. They may not like it and then will
put in movement their specialized hand-labor in
popular subversion inside elected regimes. My
dear friend Lula, do not lose the armed forces
from your view, they constitute the fifth column
of the empire in all Latin America.
You
will have a hard fight. Make your followers see
that hope is compatible with patience and wisdom,
needed attitudes to govern. Do not let anyone
to corrupt your Government´s high positions,
because corruption, with fanaticism and the arrogance
of vanguards, are the cancer that can eat greedily
your project of progress. Organize the bases that
have raised you to the presidency so that they
defend all projects that benefit them. Negotiate
with decision and firmly with economic powers
and make them see that a desestabilización
of Brazilian economy (by means of a capitals runaway,
for example) would sink the country into a financial
crisis of serious consequences for everyone.
In
short, Mister President, I wish you better luck
that the one of Arbenz, Allende, Torrijos, Bishop
- and the one Chávez is having now - and
that of all the reformist rulers whose projects
collapsed as victims of the "alliance against
progress" among them national oligarchies,
betraying armies, multinationals and cold war
agents.
The
whole world contemplates you full of hope. Do
not defraud us. Moreover, if once again they try
avoiding that something changes in Brazil, I promise
you I shall join the universal mobilization that
will happen in defense of your democratic project
of progress and reforms.
Yours
heartily,
Luis de Sebastiáan
(*)
Luis de Sebastián is a professor of Economics
at ESADE. 1/17/2003
Text
in Spanish emailed from Lima by Peruvian journalist
Guillermo Tejada Dapuetto and translated into
English by Guillermo
Ortega
|
Letter to Lula