And this would have been right. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 58, is the genuine article, a walking fable, democracy's classic story, the poor boy who grew up to be president. He, too, had a mother who cried and no father to raise him. He, too, had nothing to eat. He, too, suffered all the indignities of privation. But from destitution Lula would become a metalworker and then a union leader and then the nation's most celebrated firebrand, the man who took tens of thousands out on strike in defiance of a military government, opening the body politic to some of the first cross-breezes of democracy. He then led the creation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers' Party, an amalgam of the Brazilian left, including trade unionists, radical intellectuals and progressive Catholics. He won Brazil's presidency on his fourth try, in October 2002, getting an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote.
Each time Lula's political star went into ascent, so did Brazil's ''risk factor'' on the bond market. Weeks before the election, the nation's bonds were trading at a pitiful 48 cents on the dollar.
This is not an unfamiliar problem for leftist leaders throughout the world. Lula views Fidel Castro as an iconic presence; he dined with him in Brasilia on Inauguration Day. But in Latin America, exhortations to a people's revolution today seem as out of fashion as the red-and-black flag of the Sandinistas. Leftists in developing nations find themselves working within the margins of the global financial schematic. Their urge for reform is most often constrained by a dependence on international creditors. Default would be a debacle. Investor confidence would plummet, capital would flee, the poor would take an abrupt beating. The left may criticize the so-called Washington consensus, an economic model that largely leaves the fight against poverty to the efficiency of free markets, but it is hard pressed to veer off the trodden course without facing uncontrollable consequences. Extremism is out; pragmatism is in.
Not long before Lula was elected, the government negotiated a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund, agreeing to maintain a budget surplus of 3.75 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Lula cinched the belt tighter yet, increasing the target to 4.25 percent, in effect making a decision to spend more on servicing the debt and less on directly assisting the people. This was done to calm the markets and yank back the reins on galloping inflation, he said.
He has also crusaded against the extravagant agricultural subsidies given to farmers in wealthy countries. In this battle, he has successfully played by the international rule book. Two months ago, Brazil won a preliminary judgment against the United States at the World Trade Organization in a case involving subsidies to American cotton growers; another pending claim, against the European Union, concerns sugar. These proceedings, seemingly arcane, are vital to agriculture in poor countries. If price-distorting subsidies were wiped away, farmers would suddenly have a fair shot at being competitive in lucrative foreign markets. Tens of millions could be lifted out of poverty.
Brazil, so goes a common gibe, is the country of the future -- and always will be. With 175 million people, it is the world's fifth most populous nation, and its territory is slightly larger than the continental United States. In the 16th century, Portugal claimed this immensity as a colony, and the crown soon divided 2,500 miles of coastline into a dozen captaincies, some of them larger than the mother country itself. Sugarcane was introduced, and Brazil today still lives with the legacy of a plantation culture that consumed four million African slaves and left land ownership hideously askew. An elite 1.7 percent of the landowners continue to own nearly half the arable land; the top 10 percent of the nation earns half the income.
''The Brazilian elite never had a vision for the whole society; they never wanted to share even a little bit of the money,'' Lula told me, answering a question about how he might redress the disparities in wealth. ''Remember, Brazil is a country that had slavery until almost the end of the 19th century. Even then, the end of slavery was only a law written on a piece of paper. The mind-set continued for many years. Income concentration is a disease, and it's much stronger in South America and the third world.'' But he knew of no swift cures, he said. Brazil has a history of major economic schemes that woefully failed. ''What is new here about what we are doing?'' he asked rhetorically. ''The novelty is that we do not want to -- and we will not -- introduce a Lula Plan. Brazil cannot have another president who invents a new plan, achieves a certain amount of success for the first year and then leaves us paying the bill for 10 years after.'' The bankruptcy of neighboring Argentina served as a warning about defaulting on debt, he said. ''What we want is to do things in a sustainable fashion. Each day, even if we advance a centimeter, we are going forward -- without any miracles, without breaking away from our international commitments, simply doing what needs to be done.''
The government's top positions are meted out to an ecumenical mix, some appointments based on ability, others on the settlement of political obligations. Most have arrived from the left. Chief of Staff Jose Dirceu once went into exile in Cuba, where he underwent both guerrilla training and the facial camouflage of plastic surgery; he has hung a photo of Fidel and himself behind his desk. Marina Silva, the environment minister, grew up in a family of Amazon rubber tappers; her nearest neighbors were a two-hour walk away, and she saw her first electric light at age 5 during a trip downriver for medical care. But on the economic side, Lula's choices have been decidedly more conservative. Henrique Meirelles, president of the central bank, used to be the head of global banking at FleetBoston Financial. Luiz Furlan, the minister of development, industry and commerce, was a millionaire poultry exporter. Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, while a petista and an ex-Trotskyite, is a dedicated convert to fiscal orthodoxy.
Lula began thinking about this at the meeting of the G-8 last June in Evian, France, he said. ''I discovered a very interesting thing. I was there with the major world leaders, people I never imagined I'd be anywhere near. Suddenly, I started to think: These men are very important in their countries, very important in the world. But none of them understand the poor -- especially the issue of hunger -- in quite the way I do. Why? It's not because they are insensitive. It's because they never experienced it.''
The windowless one-room home where Lula was born no longer exists. Another family lives on the property now. Their house is a bit larger, though most everything else is the same. Corn and manioc still struggle to thrive in the dry ground.
The property is slightly elevated, and from the front door the view is pleasant, the houses and the cacti and the palm trees unfolding as a tapestry of greens and browns.
The lady of the house is Anilda Suarez dos Santos. She stood in the doorway in the late afternoon, a tired-looking woman in a denim skirt. Like Lula's mother, she has eight children. Like Lula's family, they are paupers. They transport their water across the distance in jugs. They plant, they tend, they harvest. Sometimes they go hungry.
Lula's bolsa familia program has reached their district. That $25 a month would be a great help to a family like this, but a local official found a way to swindle the poor out of the cash. No money from the government had come their way in months.
I asked Anilda if she had voted for Lula. Her answer was so forceful a ''yes'' that I wondered if the question had been impertinent, like asking her if she believed in God.
I was satisfied with her simple, emphatic response, but as I turned to leave, she felt compelled to add something else a foreigner needed to understand.
''Of course,'' she informed me, ''nothing has changed.''
Barry Bearak is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. His last article was about Pakistan.
The United States knew of the use of chemical weapons and in choosing not to deal effectively with the problem and taking an extremely restrained view signaled that Saddam’s use of chemical weapons was okay.
-Am
Warsaw, Poland, Jul. 2 (UPI) -- The Polish military has said shells containing a chemical weapons agent found in Iraq date back to the Iran-Iraq war, Polish radio reported Friday.
Polish radio said 17 rocket shells and two mortar shells had been found by Polish forces in late June. Some are said to contain a chemical agent called cyclosarin, a substance several times more potent than sarin.
The report said the shells dated back to the 1980-88 period and were of a type that had been used against both Kurdish separatists and the Iranians.
The U.S. military is investigating.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was justified by the Bush administration as a necessary pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein's regime, which was believed to have large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
March 28, 1988 -- Uses chemical weapons against Kurdish town of Halabja, killing estimated 5,000 civilians.
[From Iraq's first use of chemical weapons in 1983, the U.S. took a very restrained view. When the evidence of Iraqi use of these weapons could no longer be denied, the U.S. issued a mild condemnation, but made clear that this would have no effect on commercial or diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq. Iran asked the Security Council to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use, but the U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to try to prevent a resolution from coming to a vote, or else to abstain. An Iraqi official told the U.S. that Iraq strongly preferred a Security Council presidential statement to a resolution and did not want any specific country identified as responsible for chemical weapons use. On March 30, 1984, the Security Council issued a presidential statement condemning the use of chemical weapons, without naming Iraq as the offending party. (Battle.)
At the same time that the U.S. government had knowledge of that the Iraqi military was using chemical weapons, it was providing intelligence and planning assistance to the Iraqi armed forces. (Patrick Tyler, "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq In War Despite Use Of Gas," New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002, p. 1.)
When Iraq used chemical weapons in March 1988 against Halabja, there was no condemnation from Washington. (Dilip Hiro, " which at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000," The Observer, September 1, 2002, p. 17.) "In September 1988, the House of Representatives voted 388 to 16 in favor of economic sanctions against Iraq, but the White House succeeded in having the Senate water down the proposal. In exchange for Export-Import Bank credits, Iraq merely had to promise not to use chemical weapons again, with agricultural credits exempted even from this limited requirement." (Rubin, "The United States and Iraq: From Appeasement to War," p. 261.)]
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