Word: lula
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Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva couldn't have picked a worse time to launch a presidential campaign. That was back in 1989, his first bid for Brazil's presidency, when he was still a radical, left-wing populist yammering for Brazil to default on its foreign debt even as Brazil - and the rest of Latin America - were embarking on a decade of free-market reforms and fiscal austerity. Lula still finished second in 1989, as he would in 1994 and '98; but nightmares of the region's "Lost Decade" of the 1980s - when Latin American socialism had produced inflation rates...
...Lula, 56, still around, spooking financial markets with the very real prospect that he'll romp home to a first-round victory when Brazilians go to the polls to pick a new president on October 6? The answer may lie in the recent failure of U.S.-backed capitalist experiments all over Latin America, which have left even more of the region's 500 million people mired in poverty. That, and the fact that the erstwhile firebrand leader of Brazil's Workers Party (PT) has in some ways repackaged himself as a Blair of Brazil, moving his party and its policies...
...former trade unionist who used to hit the campaign trail looking like the late Jerry Garcia (of the Grateful Dead) has even trimmed his beard and begun wearing suits. "Today I'm more aware, more prepared, more mellow," Lula said in a TIME interview. "That radical PT doesn't exist anymore...
...interview with TIME, Lula made it clear that if he becomes President, Bush's hemispheric trade plan may have to wait beyond its current 2005 deadline. "Latin America," he says, "has to quit treating the U.S. as an empire." Though Lula reluctantly said he would live up to the rather stringent terms of the IMF's loan if he is elected on Oct. 6, neither he nor second-ranked Ciro Gomes, the candidate of the Workers Front coalition, is regarded with much enthusiasm in Washington. A former metalworker known for probity, Lula insists he won't nix the capitalist reforms...
...Washington Consensus might have worked better had Washington preached open democracy as earnestly as open markets. In giant Sao Paulo, Lula's home base, single mother Janecleide Batista, 24, lost her job as a telephone operator when her company was sold to a foreign firm. Now she lives in a squatters' shack on a small vacant lot with eight other families. To her, free-market reforms mean that Brazil's World Cup-champion soccer team "gets free new cars, while we sit here on the street and get nothing." The Bush bailouts may buy time, but they...