Word: lula
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...former metalworker who lost a finger to a job accident, Lula at times seems uncomfortable with the notion that he's had to move Blair-ward to make himself electable. But even though Lula's high school education doesn't match the Ph.D. milieu of Cardoso and the ruling party's smug technocrats, he seems to be aware enough of one of the root causes of Brazil's (and Latin America's) new economic crisis. The free-market reforms relied too addictively on foreign capital, which in turn kept local interest rates inordinately high - and eventually snuffed out the very...
...Instead, in a nation rife with corruption, Lula is known for his probity: The main reason he's ahead in the polls is his pledge to add a sorely lacking social-justice component to the capitalist project. He'd start, he says, with a crackdown on Brazil's epic tradition of tax evasion - especially among the nation's venal elite - a reform that Lula argues also makes good business sense. Brazil suffers from the worst concentration of wealth and governmental power on a continent whose economic and political inequality is rated the world's worst. "Every Real (Brazil's currency...
...Lula and the U.S. ever warm to each other? "Our elites still have the mentality of colonists," Lula told TIME. "Latin America has to quit treating the U.S. as an empire." In the interview, the PT candidate made it clear that, if he's elected, George W. Bush may have to wait beyond the current 2005 deadline to achieve a hemisphere-wide free-trade pact - especially since, as he notes, Bush preaches free trade to Brazil yet still maintains high tariffs against Brazil's most competitive products, steel and frozen orange juice. Which means the only choice Washington seems...
Traditionally the Cinderella candidate in Brazilian elections, this time the socialist leader Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva is the favorite to win. Indeed, the Workers' Party (PT) candidate's current 25 point lead over his closest challenger, Jos? Serra of the ruling Social Democratic Party, suggests that Lula may already have amassed enough support to win the presidency in the first round of balloting on October 6. And the prospect of his victory has the international community paying more attention than ever to Brazil's fourth election since the country's returned from military dictatorship to democracy...
...Still, international investors are skittish about the possibility that a Lula victory may result in a default on the country's foreign debt obligations. The PT candidate had, in fact, called for such a default in his early years on the campaign trail in the late 1980s, but since then has, like many erstwhile socialists from the developing world, accepted the basic ground rules of the international financial system. Still, investor anxiety has sent Brazil's currency, the Real, into its sharpest decline since it was allowed to float freely against the dollar...