International
Tough choices as Brazil’s Lula gets down to business
| By AFP | Marcelo Silva De Sousa
Fresh off a celebratory beach holiday, Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva got down to uglier business Monday: figuring out how to govern with a hostile Congress, nasty budget crunch and impossible-looking to-do list.
The political horse-trading of the transition period now starts in earnest for the veteran leftist, who will be sworn in for a third term on January 1, facing a far tougher outlook than the commodities-fueled boom he presided over in the 2000s.
Lula, 77, celebrated his narrow win over far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in the October 30 runoff election by escaping last week to the sun-drenched coast of Bahia in northeastern Brazil.
He joked he needed a belated honeymoon with his first-lady-to-be, Rosangela “Janja” da Silva, whom the twice-widowed ex-metalworker married in May.
His other honeymoon — the political one — could be short, analysts say.
Lula is meeting Monday with advisers in Sao Paulo. On Tuesday, he will travel to the capital, Brasilia, to finish assembling his 50-member transition team and start negotiating with members of Congress, two allies told AFP.
He faces a battle to get bills passed in a legislature where conservatives scored big gains in October’s elections.
Lula’s coalition has around 123 votes in the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies, and 27 in the 81-seat Senate, meaning he will have to strike alliances to get anything done — and even just survive, given the threat of impeachment in Brazil, where two presidents have been impeached in the past 30 years.
Into the shark tank
Lula is expected to meet in Brasilia with lower-house speaker Arthur Lira, a key Bolsonaro ally from the loose coalition of parties known as the “Centrao,” a group known for striking alliances with whoever is in power — in exchange for feeding on the federal pork barrel.
Lula will be under pressure from the Centrao not to oppose the so-called “secret budget”: 19.4 billion reais ($3.8 billion) in basically unmonitored federal funding that Bolsonaro agreed to allocate to select lawmakers to boost support for his reelection bid.
Meanwhile, money will be tight for Lula’s campaign promises, including increasing the minimum wage and maintaining a beefed-up 600-reais-per-month welfare program, “Auxilio Brasil.”
Bolsonaro, who introduced the program, did not allocate sufficient funding to continue it in the 2023 budget.
“We can’t start 2023 without the ‘Auxilio’ and a real increase in the minimum wage,” the leader of Lula’s Workers’ Party, Gleisi Hoffmann, said Friday.
“That’s our contract with the Brazilian people.”
Facing the impossible math of funding such pledges without breaking the government spending cap, Lula’s allies are exploring their options, including passing a constitutional amendment allowing exceptional spending next year.
But they are racing the clock: it would have to be approved by December 15.
Markets watching
Lula, who ran on vague promises of restoring Latin America’s biggest economy to the golden times of his first two terms (2003-2010), faces a bleaker picture this time around.
“The challenge is… how to balance fiscal responsibility with a highly anticipated social agenda,” in the face of high inflation and a possible global recession, said political scientist Leandro Consentino of Insper university.
Markets are watching closely — especially his pick for finance minister.
Lula is expected to split Bolsonaro’s economy “super-ministry” into three portfolios: finance, planning, and trade and industry.
Analysts predict a political choice for finance minister, a technocrat for planning and a business executive for trade.
Names floated for the finance job include Lula’s former education minister Fernando Haddad and his campaign coordinator, Aloizio Mercadante.
COP27 stage
Other closely watched portfolios are the environment and a promised new ministry of Indigenous affairs — both sore spots under Bolsonaro, who presided over a surge of destruction in the Amazon rainforest.
The former job could go to Lula’s one-time environment minister Marina Silva, credited with curbing deforestation in the 2000s.
In a key gesture, the president-elect will make his return to the international stage at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt, where he will arrive on November 14, advisers said.
Silva, who will travel with him, told newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo: “The climate issue is now a strategic priority at the highest level.”
International
Court sends Keiko Fujimori to trial for money laundering in Peru
December 3 |
Judge Víctor Zúñiga issued on Friday an order to prosecute former Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori for money laundering to the detriment of the State.
“The Fourth Court of National Preparatory Investigation issued an indictment against Keiko Fujimori, 38 natural persons and two legal entities: Fuerza Popular political party and MVV Bienes Raíces, for money laundering to the detriment of the State,” the entity said.
In 2021, the Peruvian Public Prosecutor’s Office requested more than 30 years in prison for Fujimori in the Cocktails case.
The entity pointed out that the former presidential candidate used cocktail parties, raffles and voluntary contributions to finance electoral campaigns.
Vicente Silva Checa and Pier Figari will also attend the trial as defendants, according to the magistrate.
Fujimori has not yet made any statements regarding the judge’s decision to send her to trial for money laundering.
International
President Lula calls Israel’s attacks on Gaza genocide
December 3 |
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva on Friday described Israel’s continuous aggressions against Gaza as genocide.
Before the media Al Jazeera, Lula stressed that this is not a conventional war, but a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
The South American president denounced the murder of more than 15,000 civilians, including 7,000 Palestinian children.
On the other hand, Lula affirmed that the operation carried out by Hamas against Israel did not give the latter the right to kill thousands of innocent people.
In addition, the president singled out the United States for complicity in Israel’s ongoing crimes.
It is worth mentioning that Hamas indicated in a communiqué that Washington gave Israel the green light to continue the attacks against Gaza, following the visit of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
International
Fire reduction trend noted in Brazilian Amazonia
December 2 |
The Brazilian Amazon recorded 13,943 forest fires in November 2023, a figure 26 percent higher than the same period in 2022 and the highest for this month in the last six years, although with a tendency to a gradual decrease compared to indicators of last September and October.
According to a report issued this Friday by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the number of hot spots measured by satellites was not so high for this month since the 14,105 measured in November 2017.
The agency specified that they decreased compared to October this year (22,061 hot spots) and were almost half of those of September (26,452) However, they remain at a high level.
According to INPE experts, this annual increase is due to a severe drought in the Amazon which, according to the Center for Monitoring Natural Disasters and Alerts (Cemaden), could be historic.
This situation is a consequence of the El Niño phenomenon, which generates abundant rainfall in some parts of the planet and strong droughts in others. This year was more intense than in 2015 and 2016, when the biome experienced its worst water crisis.
Despite this, thanks to the efforts made by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government to stop the devastation, the number of fires accumulated in the Brazilian Amazon between January and November this year (93,945) was down 16.3 percent compared to the data for the first 11 months of 2022 (112,077).
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