Lula's Dance With the Despots

The president of Brazil is preserving his country's unfortunate image as

a resentful, Third-World ankle-biter.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY - JUNE 14, 2010

It probably wasn't long after we all got kicked out of the garden that
Brazil began dreaming about becoming a serious country and a player
on the world stage. Now, just as it seemed like the eternal Brazilian
dream was about to come true, President Lula da Silva is snatching
defeat from the jaws of victory.

Brazil may be gaining some respect on the economic and monetary front
but when it comes to geopolitical leadership, Mr. da Silva is working
overtime to preserve the country's image as a resentful, Third-World
ankle-biter.

The latest example of how Brazil is not yet ready for prime time in
international circles came last week when it voted against sanctions on
Iran at the United Nations Security Council. Turkey was Brazil's lone
partner in this embarrassing exercise. But Turkey at least can blame the
complexity of its Muslim roots. Lula is driving Brazil's reputation into the
sand for his own political gratification.

Brazil defended its U.N. vote on the grounds that the "sanctions will
most probably lead to the suffering of the people of Iran and will play
into the hands of those, on all sides, that do not want dialogue to
prevail." Unpack that statement and there's nothing inside. The
sanctions are directed, not at civilians, but at Iranian nuclear and missile
proliferation ambitions. As to "dialogue," it should be obvious by now
that what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needs is a little less
conversation.

Brazil's Lula da Silva (l.) with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran,

May 16.
If Brazil considered its vote a principled stand in defense of the
righteous, it sure gave in fast. After making a stink about the sanctions,
it quickly announced it would honor them. This suggests that it may
have some appreciation for the diminishing returns of its lunatic foreign
policies.

Lula's Worker's Party is hard left, but no one should mistake him for a
committed bolshevik. He is merely a clever politician who came up from
the streets and loves power and limousines. As Brazil's first Workers'
Party president he has had to balance the useful things he has learned
about markets and monetary restraint against the ideology of his base.

His answer to this quandary has been to use his foreign ministry—where
a genetically left-leaning foreign service bureaucracy is headed by the
notoriously anti-American, anticapitalist intellectual Celso Amorim—to
burnish his leftist credentials. With his friendship with the "nonaligned"
providing a shield, he has been able to keep the collectivist ideologues
out of the economy.

But Brazil's reputation as a leader among emerging economies has

suffered greatly. To satisfy the left, Lula has been asked to defend and
elevate its heroes, who are some of the most egregious human rights
violators on the planet.
A review of his two-term presidency reveals a trend toward defending
despots and dissing democrats. The repressive Iranian government is
only the latest example. There is also Lula's unconditional support for
Cuba's dictatorship and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. In February, Cuba
allowed political dissident Orlando Zapata to starve to death the same
week Lula arrived on the island slave plantation to hobnob with the
Castro brothers. When asked by the press about Zapata, Lula dismissed
his death as one of many by hunger-strikers in history that the world
ignored. He obviously never heard of the Irish militant Bobby Sands.

Lula also has stuck by Mr. Chávez as he has destroyed democratic

institutions in his country and collaborated with the drug-trafficking
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). A grown-up Brazil
would have used its influence to lead a push back against this state-
sponsored terrorism. But under Lula's political cost-benefit analysis, the
victims of FARC violence don't count.

Hondurans have not fared any better during Lula's power trip. Brazil
spent a good part of last year trying to force their country to reinstate
deposed president Manuel Zelaya, even though he had been removed by
the civilian government for violating the constitution. Brazil's actions,
including harboring Mr. Zelaya at the Brazilian Embassy for months,
created immense economic hardship for Hondurans.

Last week U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for letting
Honduras back into the Organization of American States (OAS), noting
that the country has held an election and returned to normalcy. Brazil
objected. "Honduras's return to the OAS must be linked to specific
means for ensuring re-democratization and the establishment of
fundamental rights," Brazil's deputy foreign minister, Antonio de Aguiar
Patriota said. Note to Brazil: Don't you mean Cuba?

Brazil will hold a presidential election in October and though Lula will
leave office popular, the Workers' Party candidate is not guaranteed to
ride his coattails. So he is now feeding red meat to the party base by
holding hands with Mr. Ahmadinejad and voting against Uncle Sam.

Will it work? A lot will depend on whether those Brazilians who view him
as squandering the nation's emerging prominence outnumber those
backing his dance with the despots. As former razilian President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso has warned, Lula's policy has Brazil
"switching sides" but it's far from clear that Brazilians are in agreement.