Olavo de Carvalho explains Lula and the Sao Paulo Forum
October 22, 2009
Alek Boyd: Perhaps you remember Olavo that, in
November 2005, we were part of a small group of people who were invited to
brief former US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom
Shannon, about the political situation in our respective countries. I do
remember, very vividly, your warnings about Lula during that particular
meeting. With the passing of time, I must say how pleasantly surprised I am
with the turn of perception vis-a-vis Hugo Chavez. Mind you, in November 2005,
the DoS still harboured the notion that he was a democrat, purportedly just
like Lula. However, recent developments in Honduras show that Lula is as keen
on interfering in other countries internal affairs, as his Venezuelan
counterpart. Yet one would be hard pressed to conclude, by way of how mass
media portrays the Brazilian president, that such is in fact the case. For this
reason, taking into account that you are Brazilian, and that you have been
following your country's politics for longer than most reporters are aware of
Lula's very own existence, I would like to ask you a few things about him,
starting with: why do you think the media is given him such benign treatment?
Most analysts and media types believe that Lula is a moderate, a democrat. How
do you reconcile that with, for instance, the foundation by Lula, at Fidel
Castro's personal request, of the Foro de Sao Paulo (FSP)?
There is nothing there to be properly
reconciled. The image and the reality, in that case, are in complete
contradiction to each other. The legend of Lula, as a democrat and a moderate,
only holds up thanks to the suppression of the most important fact of his
political biography, the foundation of the São Paulo Forum. This suppression,
in some cases, is fruit of genuine ignorance; but in others, it is a
premeditated cover-up. Council of Foreign Relations’ expert on Brazilian
issues, Kenneth Maxwell, even got to the point of openly denying the mere
existence of the Forum, being confirmed in this by another expert on the
subject, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, also at a conference at the CFR. I do not
need to emphasize the weight that CFR’s authority carries with opinion-makers
in the United States. When such an institution denies the most proven and
documented facts of the Latin American history of the last decades, few
journalists will have the courage of taking the side of facts against the
argument of authority. Thus, the São Paulo Forum, which is the vastest and most
powerful political body that has ever existed in Latin America, goes on unknown
to the American and, by the way, also worldwide public opinion. This fact being
suppressed, the image of Lula as a democrat and a moderate does indeed acquire
some verisimilitude. Note that it was not only in the United States that the
media has covered up the existence and the activities of the Forum. In Brazil,
even though I published the complete minutes of the assemblies of that entity,
and frequently quoted them in my column in the prestigious newspaper O Globo,
from Rio de Janeiro, the rest of the national media en masse either kept
silent, or ostensibly contradicted me, accusing me of being a radical and a
paranoid. When at last President Lula himself let the cat out of the bag and
confessed to everything, his speech, published on the president’s official
website, was not even mentioned in any newspaper or TV news show. Shortly
afterwards, however, the name “São Paulo Forum” was incorporated into video
advertisements of the ruling party, becoming thus impossible to go on denying
the obvious. Then, they moved on to the tactic of harm management, proclaiming,
against all evidence, that the São Paulo Forum was only a debate club, with no
decisional power at all. The minutes of the assemblies denied it in the most
vehement manner, showing that discussions ended up becoming resolutions,
unanimously signed by the members present. Debate clubs do not pass
resolutions. What’s more, the same presidential speech I have just mentioned
also disclosed the decisive role that the Forum played in the sense of putting
and keeping Mr. Hugo Chávez in power in Venezuela. Nowadays, in Brazil, nobody
ignores that I told the truth about the São Paulo Forum and the rest of the
media lied.
On the other hand, it is clear that Lula and
his party, being the founders and the strategic centre of the Forum, had to
keep a low profile, leaving to more peripheral members, like Hugo Chávez and
Evo Morales, the flashiest or most scandalous part of the job. Hence, the false
impression that there are “two lefts” in Latin America, one democratic and
moderate, and the other radical and authoritarian. There are two lefts, indeed,
but they are rather the one that commands, and the other that follows the
first’s orders and thereby risks its own reputation. All that the Latin
American left has done in the last nineteen years was previously discussed and
decided in the Forum’s assemblies, which Lula presided over, either directly
until 2002, or through his deputy, Marco Aurélio Garcia, afterwards. The
strategic command of the Communist revolution in Latin America is neither in
Venezuela, nor in Bolivia, nor even in Cuba. It is in Brazil.
Once the fact of the existence of the São
Paulo Forum was suppressed, what has given even more artificial credibility to
the legend of the “two lefts” was that the Lula administration, very cunningly,
concentrated its subversive efforts upon the field of education, culture, and
custom, which only affect the local population, prudently keeping, at the same
time, an “orthodox” economic policy that calmed down foreign investors and
projected a good image of the country to international banks (a double-faced
strategy inspired, by the way, in Lenin himself). Thus, both the subversion of
the Brazilian society and the revolutionary undertakings of the São Paulo Forum
managed, under a thick layer of praise for President Lula, to pass unnoticed by
the international public opinion. Nothing can illustrate better the duplicity
of conduct to which I refer than the fact that, in the same week, Lula was
celebrated both at the World Economic Forum in Davos, for his conversion to
Capitalism, and at the São Paulo Forum, for his faithfulness to Communism. It
is quite evident, then, that there is one Lula in the local reality and another
Lula for international consumption.
Alek Boyd: Could you expand a bit on the sort
of organization the FSP is, and the democratic credentials of some of its
members?
The São Paulo Forum was created by Lula and
discussed with Fidel Castro by the end of 1989, being founded in the following
year under the presidency of Lula, who remained in the leadership of that
institution for twelve years, nominally relinquishing it in order to take
office as president of Brazil in 2003. The organization’s goal was to rebuild
the Communist movement, shaken by the fall of the USSR. “To reconquer in Latin
America all that we lost in East Europe” was the goal proclaimed at the
institution’s fourth annual assembly. The means to achieve it consisted in
promoting the union and integration of all Communist and pro-Communist parties
and movements of Latin America, and in developing new strategies, more flexible
and better camouflaged, for the conquest of power. Practically, since the
middle of the 1990’s, there has been no left-wing party or entity that has not
been affiliated with the São Paulo Forum, signing and following its resolutions
and participating in the intense activity of the “work groups” that hold
meetings almost every month in many capital cities of Latin America. The Forum
has its own review, America Libre (Free America), a publishing house, as well
as an extensive network of websites prudently coordinated from Spain. It also
exercises unofficial control over an infinity of printed and electronic
publications. The speed and efficacy with which its decisions are transmitted
to the whole continent can be measured by its ongoing success in covering up
its own existence, over at least sixteen years. Brazil’s journalistic class is
massively leftist, and even the professionals who are not involved in any form
of militancy would feel reluctant to oppose the instructions that the majority
receives.
The Forum’s body of members is composed of
both lawful parties, as the Brazilian Workers’ Party itself, and criminal
organizations of kidnappers and drug traffickers, as the Chilean MIR
(Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria) and the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia). The first is responsible for an infinity of
kidnappings, including those of two famous Brazilian businessmen; the latter is
practically the exclusive controller of the cocaine market in Latin America
nowadays. All of these organizations take part in the Forum on equal
conditions, which makes it possible that, when agents of a criminal
organization are arrested in a country, lawful entities can immediately
mobilize themselves to succour them, promoting demonstrations and launching
petition campaigns calling for their liberation. Sometimes the protection that
lawful organizations give to their criminal partners goes even further, as it
happened, for example, when the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul,
Olívio Dutra, an important member of the Workers’ Party, hosted a FARC
commander as a guest of state; or when the Lula administration granted
political asylum to the agent of connection between the FARC and the Workers’
Party, Olivério Medina, and a public office to his wife. Sometime before,
Medina had confessed to having brought an illegal contribution of $5 million
for Lula’s presidential campaign.
The rosy picture of Brazil that has been
painted abroad is in stark contrast with the fact that from 40,000 to 50,000
Brazilians are murdered each year, according to the UN’s own findings. Most of
those crimes are connected with drug trafficking. Federal Court Judge Odilon de
Oliveira has found out conclusive proofs that the FARC provides weaponry,
technical support, and money for the biggest local criminal organizations, as,
for instance, the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital), which rules over entire
cities and keeps their population subjected to a terror regime. Just as I
foretold after the first election of Lula to the presidency in 2002, the
federal administration, since then, has done nothing to stop this murderous
violence, for any initiative on the government’s part in that sense would go
against the FARC’s interest and would turn, in a split second, the whole São
Paulo Forum against the Brazilian government. In face of the slaughter of
Brazilians, which is more or less equivalent to the death toll of one Iraq war
per year, Lula has kept strictly faithful to the commitment of support and
solidarity he made to the FARC as president of the São Paulo Forum in 2001.
Alek Boyd: Why do you think worldwide media
didn't pick up on the fact that Lula's presidential campaign was illegally
funded, to the tune of $3 million, by Fidel Castro, as exposed by Veja?
In face of facts like these, it is always
recommendable to take into account the concentration of the ownership of the
means of world communication, which has happened over the last decades, as it
has been described by reporter Daniel Estulin in his book about the Bilderberg
group. Even the more distracted readers have not failed to notice how the
opinion of the dominant world media has become uniform in the last decades,
being nowadays difficult to perceive any difference between, say, Le Figaro and
L’Humanité concerning essential issues, as, for example, “global warming,” or
the advancement of new leaderships aligned with the project for a world
government, as, for example, Lula or Obama. Never as today has it been so easy
and so fast to create an impression of spontaneous unanimity. And since the CFR
proclaims that the São Paulo Forum does not exist, nothing could be more
logical than to expect that the São Paulo Forum disappears from the news.
Alek Boyd: Other analysts have made the
preposterous argument that foreign intervention, imperialism by any other word,
has never characterized Itamaraty's policy. In light of "union
leader" Lula's direct intervention in helping Chavez overcome the strike
in 2002-03 by Venezuelan oil workers, by sending tankers with gasoline, how
would you explain such blatant ignorance?
Itamaraty’s traditions, however praised they
were in the past, no longer mean anything at all. Today, the Brazilian
diplomatic body is nothing but the tuxedoed militancy of the Workers’ Party. At
the same time, the intellectual level of our diplomats, which had been a reason
of pride since the times of the great baron of Rio Branco, has formidably
declined, to the point that nowadays the intellectual leadership of the class
is held by geniuses of ineptitude, such as Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães. No wonder
then that everywhere now our ambassadors are simple agents of the São Paulo
Forum. It cannot be said that this properly expresses Brazilian imperialism,
for our Ministry of Foreign Relations does not hesitate to sacrifice the most
obvious national interests before the altar of a more sublime value, which is
the solidary union of the Latin American left. There is no Brazilian
imperialism, but rather São Paulo Forum’s imperialism.
Alek Boyd: Do you think Marco Aurelio Garcia
is behind Zelaya's return to Honduras, as has been alleged? If yes, it is
evident that is a matter of a FSP member coming to the rescue of a fallen
comrade, but what's in it for Brazil?
The Brazilian government denies having
something to do with that, but Zelaya himself confessed that his return to
Honduras had been previously arranged with Lula and his right-hand man, Marco
Aurélio Garcia. The most evident thing in the world is that this grotesque
installation of Zelaya in the Brazilian embassy is an operation of the São
Paulo Forum.
Alek Boyd: Given that Tom Shannon is now US
Ambassador to Brazil, would you reiterate what you told him about Lula, and his
partners in crime, in November 2005, or would you advise differently?
Tom Shannon did not pay due attention to us in
2005 and this was, no doubt, one of the causes of the aggravation of the Latin
American situation since then. It is likely that he read Maxwell’s and
Alencastro’s speeches at the CFR, and thought that such a prestigious
institution deserved more credibility than a handful of obscure Latin American
scholars with no public office or political party. Unfortunately, we, not the
CFR, were the ones who were right.
Alek Boyd: Finally, as in the case of Chavez,
has Lula done enough institutional damage to remain in power, or will he hand
over power democratically?
The alternation in presidential power no
longer has any great meaning, for the two dominant parties, the Workers’ Party
and the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, act in concert with each other and,
despite minor differences in the administrative economic field, they are
equally faithful to the overall strategy of the Latin American left. Lula
himself has celebrated as a big victory of democracy the fact that there are
only leftist candidates for the 2010 presidential elections, as if the monopoly
of the ideological control of society were a great democratic ideal. On the
other side, the most celebrated of the so-called “opposition” leaders, former
president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has already acknowledged that between his
party and the Workers’ Party there is no substantive ideological or strategic
difference, but only a contest for offices. It matters little who will win the
next elections, for, in any event, the orientation of the Brazilian government
must remain the same: in the social and juridical field, overpowering
subversion; in the economic field, moderation to anesthetize foreign investors.
The only difference that may arise is in the field of security, in the case
that the candidate of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, José Serra, wins,
for his party, despite being as much a left-wing party as the Workers’ Party,
does not formally belong to the São Paulo Forum, being therefore free to do
things against organized crime, which Lula himself could never do. As governor
of the state of São Paulo, Serra showed to be the only Brazilian political
leader who pays attention to the slaughter of his fellow-countrymen. It is
still early to know whether or not he will be able to do what he did in his
state, but it is certain that he would wish to do it.
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