The Editor

The Economist Magazine

Dear Sir,

I was very interested to read the article Lula’s leap in your last issue and would like to make a few comments. I bought the issue at Heathrow Airport after spending a week in London, as the city was preparing itself for the presidential visit this week.

Some background information seems to be in order, as I would not like to sound like a hysterical sectarist reacting to a different point of view. I am a 50-year-old Brazilian sworn translator (English-Portuguese/Portuguese-English) and language teacher for the last thirty odd years. I attended law school and got my degree from the University of Sao Paulo in the 1970s, still in the midst of the military regime and all its misdeeds. As a law student I took active part in student movements against that regime, albeit, admittedly, not as fiercely as some of my colleagues. As far as politics go, I have always voted for people and not for political parties, since because of our misguided electoral and representation system, politicians are allowed to change political parties as they please, and some do as often as they change into a new shirt.

It is perhaps my background in the English language that makes me wonder about your report. And since the articles are not signed by one specific journalist, I wonder about the writer or pool of writers involved in it, especially concerning nationality and political views. At times, your report seems more of a propaganda piece than an unbiased report about one important (if nothing else) market in today’s world. If, as a lawyer (though not a practicing lawyer) I choose to give your editorial the benefit of the doubt, then the report demonstrates blatant ignorance and, perhaps, disregard for the reality of the facts.

A professor from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), the very important business school in Sao Paulo cited in the report, whose name fails me, once said that Brazil does not have an economic problem. Our problem is actually a political one. At the time I remember not agreeing with that statement, but over the years, and especially after President Lula took office I could not agree more. Rampant corruption sweeps the government of the once champions of morality and the “dirt poor poverty-stricken north east” where our president was born, continues as dirt poor and poverty stricken as ever before, while the dirt poorly born president spends millions of dollars on a presidential airplane and further spends thousands of dollars more on shelves for bar fittings on that plane. All this while education, child labour, child prostitution, homelessness and unemployment sit and wait.

In education the only major issue has been the apportionment of quota in public universities for black students. I wonder how many of us Brazilians do not have some black blood running in our veins and, at any rate, the problem cannot start being solved at college level when elementary education is insufficient, inefficient and ineffective. What does a university degree matter with sweeping unemployment, and while children are still begging in the streets.

Your report mentions that the president has “done much of what he set out to do”. I wonder what that is. Seriously. The piece also, en passant, talks about the corruption scandal that shocked even the most skeptical citizens, as “a sea of supposition dotted with islands of fact”. If nothing else, this statement is offensive and demonstrates, once again, either ignorance or disregard for our country. The major tenet of Lula’s government – the Fome Zero - was concocted by no other than marketing manager to the president Duda Mendonça weeks before the president’s coming into office, as a marketing strategy aimed at positively impacting the early months of the new government, with no planning, no strategy, no method, even no fact. And this because Brazil does not have a famine problem. It has housing, education, health, social security and other problems galore, but not famine. Let me remind, or inform you that the same Duda Mendonça was the marketing manager of the notoriously corrupt Paulo Maluf in the past and who holds – as the parliamentary inquiry committees have managed to prove - a number of illegal, undercover bank accounts in fiscal havens all over the world with transfers of millions of US dollars from the president’s Workers Party at and around the time of the elections and further. The same marketing person who dressed Lula up in designer outfits to make him more palatable to the Brazilian middle classes.

Another unmentioned and extremely relevant point was the exit of a great number of major names from the president’s party, people of recognizably untainted reputation, seriously led by ideology, founders of the workers party at a time the president and his entourage have long forgotten. Again, I repeat. I do not belong to the Workers Party, but praise be given where praise is due.

I could go on and on pointing out the inaccuracies found in the report, but I seriously doubt this will be fully read or published. As a Brazilian, I see the current situation in the genius of George Orwell’s Animal Farm with the constant modification of commandments and the noise from the sheep at critical moments. I never thought of your magazine as noisy sheep, but now I wonder…

I would love to live in the Brazil as depicted in the pre-election campaigns or in the Brazil as described in your report. Unfortunately, neither of them exists.

Yours Faithfully,

Maria Rita Guedes Queiroz Lopes

São Paulo, Brazil