Word: lula
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from shampoo to public-transit tickets. "I didn't have a bank account before," says Da Silva, 37, standing beneath graffiti-covered walls and pirated power lines. "I never had a car. I bought a Fiat Palio." Does she fear the global recession will quash her dreams? "I trust Lula. I don't think we'll be hit that hard...
...Lula" is President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (no relation to Efigênia), and most Brazilians believe he's the reason their country is surviving the current downturn better than other places. In past crises, Brazil was usually the nation in need of the largest life preserver. If it wasn't drowning under fiscal recklessness, it was being held under by draconian austerity plans. Brazil, the old joke goes, is the country of the future - and always will be. Now, in the middle of the worst global downturn for decades, Brazil could finally be the country...
...whose jets sell to scores of airlines, and which has become a symbol of Brazil's newfound confidence, recently announced plans to lay off 4,000 employees, almost one-fifth of its workforce. Commodity exports - soybeans, steel - are weak. The main stock market is down 25% since September. But Lula, a former shoe-shine boy who heads the leftist Workers Party (PT), has so far kept the good times from becoming a hellish bust. In Brazil, that's nothing short of miraculous...
There may be another miracle in the making. Because unfettered capitalism is widely blamed for the global meltdown, economists and laborers alike say Brazil has become an example of what Lula likes to call "the financial strategy of the future." By that he means a postideological approach that is equal parts wealth creation for corporations such as Embraer and wealth redistribution for underdogs like Da Silva. All this under the kind of prudent financial regulation that seems to have gone missing in the developed world of late...
What's more, though they may not admit it, the more moderate Latin leftists who dominate the region's politics today - including Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whom Obama has invited to the White House in March - know that their own electoral paths were opened in no small part by Chávez's victory in 1998. So it should have come as no surprise that many Latin American Presidents took issue with Obama's suggestion, in a Univision interview last month, that the Venezuelan leader aids terrorists. After all, last summer...