Red Axis of Evil
Posted on 07/09/2003 4:29:47 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
"Richard Nixon famously remarked, ‘As goes Brazil, so goes Latin America,’" recalled Brazilian political activist Gerald Brant in the May issue of Brazzil. Under the reign of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — commonly called "Lula" — Brazil is fulfilling "Fidel Castro’s wildest revolutionary ambitions … right under the nose of the Bush administration," Brant warns.
According to Brant, "anti-American sentiment has grown so high in Brazil that President Bush received a lower approval rating among Brazilians than Saddam Hussein...." While there are many sound reasons for opposing the war in Iraq, Brazilian public opinion appears to be following "the Brazilian Workers’ Party (known as the PT) regime’s attitudes toward the U.S.," opines Brant. Marco Aurelio Garcia, the hard-core Marxist who serves as Lula’s chief foreign policy advisor, describes the PT as "radical, of the left, socialist." The vision of Lula’s administration "is clear," Garcia declares: "If this new horizon which we search for is still called communism, it is time to re-constitute it."
Garcia is founder and executive secretary of the Sao Paulo Forum, "an organization of leftist parties and revolutionary movements dedicated to ‘offsetting our losses in Eastern Europe with our victories in Latin America,’" continues Brant. Last December the Sao Paulo Forum held a four-day conference in Havana. Present at that revolutionary summit were delegates from such terrorist groups as Colombia’s FARC, Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and Chile’s MIR. Zuhair Daif, head of the Latin American Division of Iraq’s Ba’athist Party, also attended, as did an unnamed Libyan representative.
Even as Lula’s foreign minister networks with terrorist and revolutionary groups abroad, Lula follows a subtler strategy at home. "Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s articles are particularly influential in PT circles given his recipes for achieving revolutionary goals while placating business interests and the middle class," comments Brant. As noted earlier in these pages (see the Insider Report item "Marxist Axis in Latin America" in our November 18, 2002 issue), Lula’s ascent has been applauded by the globalist Council on Foreign Relations. And in the Bush administration, "Clinton administration holdovers such as [State Department official] John Maisto seem to be calling many of the shots on Brazil policy," notes Brant.
While Washington’s attention has been on the Middle East and North Korea, "Brazil’s government [has gone] back and forth on abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and building nuclear weapons; back and forth on offering exile to Saddam Hussein; refused the Colombian government’s request to consider the FARC [as] terrorists; shored up [Marxist] President Hugo Chavez with oil shipments during the height of [the] Venezuelan opposition’s strike; declared a ‘strategic partnership’ with Communist China; abandoned scientific cooperation agreements with the U.S.; … [and] abstained from condemning Castro’s crackdown on dissidents at the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva," reports Brant.
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Marxist Axis in Latin America
November 18, 2002
Nearly 40 years ago, as Brazil teetered on the precipice of a Marxist coup, that nation’s middle class arose in a peaceful counter-revolution preventing the takeover. Ravaged by inflation and subversion, Brazil — the largest nation in South America — appeared doomed. Guerrilla teams had been organized, trained, and armed; Communists had infiltrated the lower echelons of the military; "liquidation lists" of prominent anti-Communists had been drawn up. Communist Party chieftain Luiz Carlos Prestes defiantly declared: "We already have the power; we have now only to take over the government!"
But in typical fashion the Communists had neglected the most important potential obstacle: timely, organized opposition from the Brazilian people. The focal point of the uprising was Doña Amelia Bastos, a tiny, 59-year-old housewife and former schoolteacher, who organized Brazil’s housewives to educate their friends and neighbors and to mobilize against the Communists. Inspired by this mass movement, military and political officials still committed to the rule of law took decisive action to prevent the coup. That action resulted, thankfully, in minimal loss of life. The people of Brazil, "working against hardened communist revolutionaries … [proved] that communism can be stopped cold, when people are sufficiently aroused and determined," observed the November 1964 issue of Reader’s Digest.
The memory of this victory for freedom is bittersweet in light of the election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as "Lula") to Brazil’s presidency. A semi-literate veteran of the radical left, Lula had never won more than a quarter of the total votes in his three previous campaigns. After his most recent loss in 1998, Lula "began to moderate the Workers’ Party platform and his own image," noted the October 28th New York Times. A number of cosmetic changes were instituted to make Lula and his Marxist party more palatable, but the candidate pointedly kept "his ever-present lapel pin with his party’s emblem, the red star."
Fidel Castro hailed Lula’s ascent. "We are friends and I admire his perseverance," declared the Cuban despot. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Castroite ruler, "spoke of Mr. Da Silva joining him in a Latin American ‘axis of good,’" reported the Times. One of Lula’s most interesting endorsements came in a September 27th Financial Times op-ed by Kenneth Maxwell, director of the Latin American program for the Council on Foreign Relations. Writing just before the first round of the Brazilian presidential election, the CFR’s Maxwell condemned Lula’s opponents for running "a negative campaign" focusing on the Marxist politician’s revolutionary past.
"[T]he red flags and red stars of Mr. da Silva’s Worker’s Party notwithstanding, someone should tell Wall Street and the IMF that the cold war is long over," wrote Maxwell. Brazilians old enough to remember the nation’s heroic stand in 1964 are entitled to ask: If the cold war is "long over," which side truly won?
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