Brazil’s president addresses WCC; Communist flags flank Lula’s entry
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman Online, February 20, 2006
PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL – Surrounded by scores of demonstrators, flags bearing “PT,” his Workers’ Party, and flags of the Communist Party, which also supported him, gyrating students, dark-suited security guards and well armed soldiers, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president of the Federative Republic of Brazil made his way to the podium, greeted by a wildly enthusiastic World Council of Churches.
“For many years, Brazil was known for its Amazon, rainforests and carnivals,” said WCC President Aram I in his introduction of the Brazilian politician. “Now it is known for active social reform, sustainable economic development and combating violence and corruption.”
“Mr. President,” continued Aram I, “you come from your people, out of your existential identification with their suffering and aspirations. You know the role that civil society must play in the nation, to create a people-oriented government.”
The WCC’s press handout was equally laudatory, pointing to Lula’s birth into a poor family, his leadership in the metalworkers’ union and founding of the Workers’ Party, his imprisonment, his role in impeaching a political opponent on corruption charges and his ultimate electoral victory after three unsuccessful campaigns.
Learning from their losses, Lula’s political advisors helped him move his image more toward the middle of the political spectrum by forging strategic business alliances, but the Brazilian president continues to show an affinity for Marxist social analysis, a connection underscored by the role that his Cuba-trained assistant plays in his administration.
Thirty-six months into his administration, despite his socialist rhetoric, Lula appears to be maintaining the support of Brazilian business interests, for there is little evidence of capital flight, a major problem for other Latin American countries where socialists have taken control of the government.
Lula’s speech consisted primarily in a recitation of the reforms that he claimed for his administration, particularly in the areas of government subsidies for the poor, low interest loans for workers, greater access to medical care, and state supported education.
Lula referred to the decade between 1970 and 1980 as being especially difficult for his country “in defense of freedom and human dignity.” In this regard, he singled out the WCC with particular words of gratitude. He said that during this period, Paulo Freire, whom he called an internationally respected Brazilian educator, “had been persecuted and compelled to leave our country.” According to Lula, Freire was hired as a consultant at the headquarters of the WCC in Geneva where, “he was able to develop important projects of education for freedom in Europe, Asia, America, the Pacific, and, above all, in Portguese-speaking African countries.”
What Lula did not say about Freire, but what is a matter of record, is that he was a Marxist whose “important projects of education for freedom” included the drafting of educational materials for the propagation of Communist social theory. One of the countries that made use of Freire’s work was Nicaragua during the regime of Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega.
Freire is not the only refugee to be rescued by the World Council of Churches. In 1998, Presbyterian Church (USA) staffer Mary Ann Lundy was fired from Presbyterian headquarters for her role in planning, funding and promoting a WCC-sponsored Re-Imagining god conference. Strongly defended by the denomination’s stated clerk, Clifton Kirkpatrick, who at that time was executive of the Worldwide Ministries Division, Lundy was given a job at WCC headquarters in Geneva. “I’ve been fired up,” she announced to her supporters.
President Lula said that in his rise to office and in his continuing work to “foster indefatigable individual and collective militancy, in solidarity, for the common good,” he was and will be indebted to the churches for their “irreplaceable role in this process of transformation in Brazil.” “We are confident,” he said, “that this cooperation will become closer and closer.”