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The Battle for Latin America's Soul

by Alejandro Bermudez 

The streets of São Paulo, Brazil’s financial capital and one of the world’s largest cities, are bursting with fancy, new cars.

It doesn’t matter that in the overcrowded roads of this city packed with 17 million inhabitants, driving a European luxury car along the bumper-to-bumper “Marginal” is no different than driving a “Fusquinha,” the eternal Volkswagen Beattle, once the symbol of Brazil’s middle class.

A fancy car means “I’ve got money,” and there is plenty of that in President Inazio “Lula” Da Silva’s Brazil.

The irony is that the most conservative, capital-oriented economy Brazil has ever enjoyed comes from the hand of the outgoing president, a self-proclaimed Socialist and former union leader who rode to political victory on the feared horse of Communism.

When Lula finally became Brazil’s president in 2003 after losing three previous elections, the late Uruguayan Catholic intellectual Alberto Methol Ferré predicted that “either Communism will defeat Brazil or Lula will defeat Communism.”

Methol Ferré was essentially saying that if Lula applied the Marxist rhetoric that brought him to power, Brazil would become a country on the brink of collapse, like current-day Venezuela. But if Lula would instead apply common sense in managing the world’s tenth largest economy, he himself would prove Communism wrong – and therefore defeat it forever in Brazil.

“Eternity” is too big a distance for the changing political tides in Latin America, but there is no doubt that Brazil is as far from Communism as it has ever been: Wealth is spreading, and the old militants of Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (the “Workers’ Party,” or “PT”) are either retiring in bitterness or happily claiming success by declaring that Brazil’s market-friendly economy is what they intended all along.

Most importantly, the two top candidates for the Oct. 3 presidential elections are equally committed to maintaining the current course, even if one of them, Dilma Rousseff – Lula’s current chief of staff – has one of the most outstanding Communist pedigrees.

In fact, during her youth, Rousseff joined a clandestine Marxist guerrilla movement, the Comando de Libertação Nacional (Command of National Liberation or COLINA), whose goal was to take down the military dictatorship and establish a Cuba-like government. She was captured in 1970 raid by the military police and spent three years in prison, accused of plotting the kidnapping and murder of several political personalities, something she has repeatedly denied.

But Methol Ferré had another prediction for Brazil: The failure of Communism in Brazil, as in other Latin American countries, will not necessarily bring a springtime of common sense. Rather, as in Europe, it will more likely usher in a political tendency that does not question the tenets of a sound economy, yet does oppose most of the moral and cultural principles of the region’s Catholic background.

In other words, Methol Ferré was predicting, the long term success of “postmodernist” governments would be more dangerous to the Latin American Catholic identity than the failure of radical ones.

In fact, despite their open, histrionic collisions with Church authorities, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia have proven to be much less threatening to fundamental values than the moderate Lula in Brazil or the “postmodern” Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, who recently legalized gay marriages.

In Brazil, Rousseff is running against the centrist PSDB party’s José Serra, the current governor of São Paulo. Incredibly, she has been able to shrink the original two-digit gap in the polls to a statistical tie because she has convinced Brazilians that, as Lula’s chief of staff, she has the right to claim part of the credit for the economic boom. 

But in mid-August, during a debate on national television, Rousseff revealed that unlike Serra, who is running on a pro-life, pro-marriage platform, she would push for the legalization of abortion “no matter how much I am personally opposed to it.”

And regarding homosexual marriage, Lula’s candidate politely responded, “I would have to consult with my party members.”

It is no secret that, after the departure of the hardliners, the PT is controlled by the “postmodernists,” massively in favor of the legalization of abortion and gay marriage.

So, while to the eyes of the rest of the world, Latin America seems to be torn by the ideological battles between Venezuela’s Chavez and Colombia’s Uribe, the real battle is between those who believe that Latin America should develop in sync with its Catholic identity and those who believe that it should become Zapatero’s Spain.

What is at stake is much more than political stability and economic well-being. It is the region’s soul.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)