"President Lula is Brazilian's big traitor"

Mrs. Heloisa Helena is, at the moment, one of Brazilian politics' more important names. Her coherence, fights, anger and honesty make proud those Brazilians who want a fair nation. She also is, particularly, a reason of pride for all women. Mother of two children, she is a Senator representing the state of Alagoas (northeastern Brazil) and was expelled from the Workers' Party last Sunday. Mrs. Heloisa Helena was implacable in an exclusive interview to the journalist Marconi de Souza last Friday,

Do you feel like a woman that was devoted the whole life to her husband and later she was betrayed, or like a daughter whose father expelled her from home for not agreeing with her behavior?
Oh, for heavens sake, (Heloisa spends longer than a minute laughing). I don't have father's experience, because mine died when I was three months old. The situation would be somebody's that during a lifetime learned certain lesson and suddenly somebody rips the note because the lesson taught by the father and learned by the son doesn't serve anymore. This is a difficult question to answer (laughs). Since you are speaking of love, a very interesting sermon of Priest Antonio Vieira says that the only love that doesn't have an end and doesn't have a remedy is the love of God for us. The other ones have an end. He says there are four remedies to put an end to love: time, absence, ingratitude and improvement of the object.

How do those priest's remedies work to put an end to love?
He used to say that if time is able to defy marble temples even brass and iron, just imagine what it can make to the hearts of wax. The other remedy is the absence that moves away and when it moves away it cools, and when it cools down, one stops loving. The third one is ingratitude that is like the remedies themselves - the best ones are the most bitter ones that have a lot of efficiency. Improvement of the object, the priest's fourth remedy, means the following: to forget a love nothing is better than getting another one because love with love is paid, and love with another love goes out.

Which was the remedy that reached you?
I have repeated to myself every day: it is better a broken heart than a sold soul. To be expelled of a Party where one has dedicated the best years of life to build, in moments when obstacles were so big that one had to swallow up our own fears, facing the organized crime, the oligarchies, being marked in the body, in the soul, in the dignity, in woman's condition as a leftist militant against violence in the state of Alagoas. It is not an easy task. At the same time, when we have identified so many criminals in the Brazilian politics being preferred, not only in the division of public space but in the silence of omission and complicity. That becomes thus a very difficult succession. It is a lot of ingratitude.

Is Senator Antonio Carlos Magalhães* one of those criminals tenderized by the head officers of the Workers' Party, as it was with the tapped telephones case?
I don't have any doubts that there was a clear protection to the Senator in the Council of Ethics issue, because the performance of the Workers' Party's Senators in that case shows clearly that. By the way, the interview I gave to "A TARDE" criticizing the Workers' Party's senators posture involving the tapped telephones case was responsible for the total enclosure of the matter on my expulsion from the Party. Right after that interview, I knew I would be expelled from the Party.

Do you believe the Workers' Party government should follow the campaign promises or its guidelines?
What they are currently doing was not in the campaign promises. Look, some more sophisticated sectors, some sectors that are able to make a more sophisticated analysis could even say that there was already a programmatic flexibility in the party, so much regarding an alliance option with liberal parties, as for example, when announcing the so-called Letter to the Brazilian People that many members of the Workers' Party identified as a Letter to the Bankers. In a general way, one could point out the beautiful movies made by Duda Mendonça, media's great professional, turning more sensitive all Brazilian hearts. But, during the campaign, in no moment, the Party or the Candidate himself mentioned to the public opinion that he would give continuity to the macroeconomic politics of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government

Lula was elected with the promise of changes …
Exactly. People voted for deep structural changes, because in any moment of the electoral program, neither in the elections or in written documents, it was communicated to the Brazilian people that Lula would give a clear continuity to Fernando Henrique Cardoso's politics. Rather, it is much worse because what one can see nowadays is a deeper dispersal of Cardoso's politics, a conclusion to which his government was not able to reach. The situation is extremely serious. With all respect to transvestites, it is more or less that what happened to the Workers' Party government: A change in the condition of contrary to the neoliberal pattern into a tool for successful-like neoliberalism propaganda.

All that is documented ...
Anyone who may analyze the technical memorandums, the letters commitments, the adjustment letters with the International Monetary Fund and with other institutions of multilateral financing, can see with the most absolute clearness how the Workers' Party government became a tool of Neoliberalism success-like propaganda. It is not just for pure pleasure that the four points agreed with the IMF are the reformation of the Social Security, the Law of Bankrupts, the Nationalized Banks privatization and the Central Bank autonomy. So far, only the Central Bank autonomy is lacking and Minister Pallocci has already announced at a recent meeting of the Party's national directory he is going to implement that autonomy at any cost.

What do you approve and reprove of President Lula's government in 2003?
Think of something. Help me, be impartial (laughs).

I am not a journalist that belongs to a Party; I'm looking for honesty.
Then, that's why I am saying that, so I valorize the intellectual honesty that always drove my programmatic convictions, my ideological convictions, my world vision, I cannot identify what could be approved in the current government. Many do consider that the government's external politics is an advance. To me, the greatest advance in the external politics would be if the Brazilian government was capable of not kneeling down cowardly before the IMF. That for sure would be the most beautiful demonstration of haughtiness, of national sovereignty and inclusively it could create new and better ways for Latin America, Africa and Asia. It means nothing to arrive to the Arab world criticizing the north-American government being at the same time an IMF's hostage, which is an American treasure agency.

Are you sorry of not having left the Workers' Party to affiliate to another party to be a candidate to the municipality of Maceio? Or did you really prefer to be fanned to the blaze?
I remember that "A TARDE" published a beautiful text on that. Between the post, as a traitor, and the blaze, I chose the blaze. There is a Rita Lee's song that says: "Only whoever was in the blaze knows what coal is". I am not sorry. If I had to make a poll-minded option, this would had happened last September, obeying my old dream of administering the municipality of Maceio . I was invited to join them by PDT, PPS and PSTU. I am sensitive with their invitations but my decision is to be together with those that have began a movement for unification of the socialist left, in the shape of a forum of debates, of a resistance pole that will be able to culminate or not with the creation of a new party. Even because a new party is not made by ordinance neither for the verbal will of some few ones. I am quite available for that voyage in the desert.

But you have left many friends in the Workers' Party …
I have many dear friends and partners that decided to stay in the Workers' Party; Walter Pinheiro is one of them. I have respect for those who made that option. I am also deeply concerned with those that are leaving the Workers' Party in order to create a socialist resistance base in Brazil.

It is commented in Brasilia's back stages that there are a lot of envious deputies and senators of Workers' Party with the projection your name has won in the national scenario and that was decisive for your expulsion.
Some people say that, but who is able to understand the complex human subjectivity? Since I'm a sertaneja** , when I was a kid I would stay on my home yard at night, there was no light and I would rest on a mat, contemplating the sky covered with stars. That's why I have always liked the sky full of stars. If people need to turn off the shine of the other ones to tempt to enhance theirs, I suggest much more a psychiatric consultation than the exercise of political militancy. Some people are commenting it but I am suspicious of an analysis on that, this to avoid contaminating it with the deep pain that I have felt in that whole process.

¿José Dirceu*** and José Genoíno**** are the traitors from the Party...?
I've never agreed, I've always rejected with a lot of vehemence an analysis of important sectors of the elite that always tempted to diminish Lula, attributing him, let's say, political weakness. I've never agreed with those that believed that he would not have conditions of administering the country, that he would be a weak one to the point of being manipulated by third ones. This analysis of mine is good whether for good or evil. Then, I don't have any doubt he is the biggest leader in Latin America, he's extremely competent, technically qualified, he's the one who runs the country and also runs the Party's decisions.

Then, President Lula is Brazilian people's big traitor?
Yes, he is. He switched sides. Do you understand? The heads of the palace broke up unilaterally with the Party's historical postulates. They have unfulfilled unilaterally the resolutions of the last national encounter and have promoted a reactionary peaceful coexistence among what there is of more rotten in the national politics, mounting a true balcony of dirty business in the National Congress in order to compose majorities artificially. I have always had difficulty of practicing politics giving names even because forgetfulness might protect some. I have always treated, therefore, with heads of the palace but I've never shared with that form of safeguarding the president. I have no doubt that, for good or evil, he is the responsible one.

Do you still believe in an equitable society? Which is your ideal of a society?
I hold up my socialist vision of the world. If I will ever get to live in a society like that, I don't know it, I don't have a magic formula neither a glass ball. But I believe in that, I fight with all my forces to turn it feasible. I want to be certain that in my passage for this life I have given the maximum of my fight capacity and of work in order to get that. A Trotsky's maxim says that to swim against the current is one of the most difficult experiences in life. I'm not joking when I say my preferential modality of swimming is to swim against the current. However, there are those that prefer the silence accomplice, the politics power banquet, the cynicism, the concealment, those that are daubed with a full banquet.

Do you dream of the presidency of the Republic?
Oh, my God, (laughs). A poor person's daughter dreams little with the future. They have already asked me if when I was girl I dreamt of my future. Then, I passed to meditate on that and discovered I have never dreamt of my future. I only want to have the certainty and the calm conscience I have made a good combat like the apostle Saint Paul said. I didn't sell my soul. I didn't sell my conscience.

Remarks
* Senator representing the State of Bahia
** Sertaneja - a dweller from Brazil's arid regions.
*** José Dirceu is the Minister of the Civil House
**** José Genoíno is currently the President of the Workers' Party.

Text translated into English by Guillermo Ortega