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 Brazil's presidential election passed with very little notice here in the United States, where attention is focused on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, illegal immigration, and our own elections. Re-elected president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is viewed as an example of a "soft left" leader, the other clear example in Latin America being Chile's Michelle Bachelet.
The "hard left" is represented by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales. Even the hard left has a hard time getting Washington's attention. So long as Chavez sells us oil, he only makes himself look silly by calling George Bush a devil, as he did recently at the United Nations' General Assembly in New York. He also makes Lula look great by comparison. Lula and Bush get along famously on the rare occasions when they meet. But Bush really has very little interest in Latin America beyond Mexico, which is a priority because of the tremendous flow of illegal immigrants into the United States. Beefing up the Mexican economy is a priority in the hope that more Mexicans will find good jobs at home. The Mexicans, in fact, are not so secretly relieved that Brazil has not pressed for entry into the proposed FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. They have enough trouble competing with Chinese imports. The Florida orange growers and Ohio valley steel producers are also grateful for any delay in having to compete with more efficient producers in Brazil. Economists who follow the global software industry have a hard time understanding why Brazil has not developed a major outsourcing industry to compete with India and other places. Brazil is in the right time zone and has the skills to compete, and yet for some reason Brazilians have taken very little initiative. Corruption and high tax barriers are cited as possible explanations, and stories about the many corruption scandals that plagued the Lula administration reinforce this image. Brazil has received some attention in my home state of New Jersey because of the flow of illegal immigrants, many of whom have settled in the old industrial town of Riverside on the Delaware River. Most of them seem to be carpenters from the state of Minas Gerais and they are hard working and well behaved. They have revived a dying town, but there are so many of them that local residents are feeling displaced. The general feeling seems to be that Brazilian immigrants are welcome, but only in modest numbers. And we know Brazil is a very big country. Washington appreciates Brazil's lead role as a peacekeeper in Haiti, because that took the Haiti problem off Washington's hands. The U.S. is glad that Evo Morales is Brazil's problem. Americans hope Brazil's economy does well enough that most Brazilians are content to remain at home. Brazilian leadership in South America is welcomed, especially as a counterweight to Hugo Chavez. Right now the United States has more foreign policy problems than it can handle, and it is happy that Brazil takes care of its own problems. Commentators do not expect Lula to change much in his second term. A claim by Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who stated shortly after Lula's victory that Brazil is tired of impunity for corruption, has been reported. But so was the fact that Lula's main opponent in this year's presidential race, the former São Paulo State governor and member of Cardoso's social-democratic PSDB party, Geraldo Alckmin, was unable to make corruption charges stick to Lula during the second round of the elections. The consensus in the United States seems to be that Brazil is not likely to cause much trouble in the next for years, either by turning to the hard left or by really asserting itself as an economic power. Ted Goertzel, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. He is the author of a biography of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, available in English and in Portuguese. He can be contacted at
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and his WEB page can be found at http://goertzel.org/ted. This article appeared originally at InfoBrazil - www.infobrazil.com.
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