Word: lula
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...Brazil's time," President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva insisted in his pitch before Friday's International Olympic Committee vote. "It is time to light the Olympic torch in a tropical country." The IOC agreed - and that lit up a frenzied carnival in Rio de Janeiro, a city that knows how to party perhaps better than any other. As the decision was announced, the world forgot Rio's problems for a moment, especially its frightening murder rate, and watched tens of thousands of its residents, known as Cariocas, exult on Copacabana Beach, dancing to deafening music in tanga...
...part to affirm the global influence of Latin America's magical realist tradition. Now, giving Rio the Olympics sends a strong signal to the rest of the developing world that the Brazilian model - the post-ideological mix of orthodox market economics and progressive social policy championed by Lula - is the one to follow. "The IOC decision is an embrace of Brazil's practical way of doing things the past two decades," says Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He adds that Brazil is the only country among the world...
...after the Cold War, Brazil finally started tapping its vast potential, first under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002) and since then under Lula, a former São Paulo metal workers union leader. As he told TIME in an interview last year, Lula, who is also head of Brazil's leftist Workers Party, channeled his skills and philosophies as a labor negotiator into a hybrid development policy that's about "doing things right" instead of right-wing or left-wing. By eschewing the ideological polarization that has paralyzed Latin America for centuries, he's helped forge...
...burned 40 years ago by the Mexico tragedy, it's confident Brazil has matured enough to solve its headaches or at least keep them from adversely affecting the Olympics. Barack Obama reminded the IOC that Chicago is the "city that works." But Chicago lost out in large part because Lula could argue that, in Brazil, Latin America finally has a country that works. As a result, it's time to light the torch down South American...
Still, because most analysts agree that the Honduras coup sends a dangerous signal to the region's fledgling democracies, they feel that having Brazil's respected heft thrown more directly into the mix could help negotiations. Says another source close to Lula, "I think the talks are evolving now that Zelaya is back and under our protection." If an accord actually gets inked in Honduras, Brazil's image as a regional power broker will take off. And if not, Lula at least will win points with the leftist base of his Workers Party. "Even if it doesn't work...