In the trial, on Wednesday 1/24, there is nothing at stake that directly affects our class. Yes, there is a fight between big-hungry sharks that used to swim in the same pool and now devour each other to later return to hunt us. Our quilombo cannot be divided by settling scores between lords and foremen.By Hertz Dias – PSTU Brazil.
The leaders of the organizations that will be in Porto Alegre will defend a democracy that the favela [1] does not know about. They will defend a fictional Lula that the favela does not know either. They will defend a Lula and a democracy that only exists in the head of the organizations that reason with the same logic in the polls of bourgeois elections. The Lula they will defend was already a dream in the heads of our class, but the real one is that of class conciliation, betrayal, cynicism and cowardice
Those who shout until aphonic that Lula and the PT are being victims of a “coup” orchestrated by imperialism and conservatism, will not have the courage to say that Lula and the PT politically and militarily supported a real coup that the United States and France carried out in the Haitian bourgeois democracy.
It was too fast. Lula took office in 2003 and a phone call from Washington in 2004 was enough for Haiti to be invaded and occupied. Among so many atrocities, more than two thousand black sisters were sexually abused by Minustah soldiers, a military force commanded by the PT government. Where were the heralds of the PT and Lula defense when Haitian sovereignty was stolen by Chirac, Bush and Lula?
Democracy as a hollow, empty, universal and petty-bourgeois concept is easy to manipulate, it was difficult to defend the sovereignty of a black nation attacked by Lula and PT in the name of imperialism. And it seems that this democracy of “luxury condominium” is not valid for a country of blacks that for centuries has defied the same imperialist forces that sent the PT to kneel on the ground. Is it not like this?
It is necessary to tell the truth: the Lula that they will defend is not that worker who faced the military dictatorship but the former president who strengthened the increasingly authoritarian character of the Brazilian State. It is the Lula that in 2005 passed the Anti-drug Law that helped imprison hundreds of thousands of blacks, poor people and women (600,000). It is the Lula of the PT that gave a hand for the female prison population to grow 567% in only 15 years (2000 to 2015), of which 67% are black (data from the DMF / CNJ).
While our people were killed and imprisoned, the PT freed Sarney from prison in retribution for the “helping hand” that Sarney extended to free Lula from an impeachment after the scandal of the mensalão [2005] where PT paid to buy votes from corrupt parliamentarians and, thus, guarantee approval of the pension reform. Friendly hand of the “Left” for the “Right”, friendly hand of the “Right” for the “Left”, and all of them stained with corruption and black blood.
This Wednesday, Rafael Braga will certainly not be remembered as a victim of the Anti-Drug Law sanctioned by Lula in 2005, and the Anti-Terrorism Law, sanctioned by Dilma in 2013. On the contrary, there is an inordinate attempt to compare Rafael Braga’s via crucis with the trial of Lula. It is at least rude to compare an innocent young man who was condemned for being black, poor and “favelado,” with the one who created the conditions for his condemnation. Rafael Braga is a political prisoner of the PT and PMDB governments. It was the PT of Lula and Dilma, as well as the PMDB of Temer and the PSDB of Fernando Henrique Cardoso [FHC] that packed the jails of this country with our “Rafaeles Bragas” from the periphery. Do not exploit the misfortune of others to cover up your political rottenness!
The “coup agenda” to which they refer is above all part of the political and economic agenda that imperialism imposed on Lula, Dilma and Temer. Some more, others less, but all were foremen of imperialism. After all, wasn’t Lula “the man” in Obama’s words, and the owners of the sugar mills “Brazilian heroes” in the words of Lula himself?
Blacks, women and LGBTs were attacked by the PT in a spurious alliance with the Right. Dilma withdrew the anti-homophobia kit from the schools in an agreement made with the reactionary evangelical [parliamentary] bench, just as they did with the DEM [Democrats of the center-right] to derail the Statute of Racial Equality. And the funny thing is that none of that caused concern on the left, to defend the sacrosanct bourgeois democracy.
In 2008, real-world Lula came to sign an agreement with Pope Benedict XVI ( Brazil-Santa Fe agreement) to include religious education in the curriculum of public schools, in total lack of respect for the secularity of the Brazilian State, which opened even more doors for religious racism in our country. None of that was part of such a “conservative wave”. Neither the genocide of 556,000 people, mostly black, occurred during the PT government, generated so much commotion in the left.
Only we can take care of ourselves!
By fighting the corrupt, liberal and pro-imperialist “Right” it is also necessary to unmask the liberal, corrupt and equally pro-imperialist “Left”. Worms like Bolsonaro attack the workers securing a dagger in each of the hands, Lula did that by offering a bouquet of flowers with one hand, while the other, hidden behind his back, he secured a razor-sharp dagger. To say: “Lula has to be judged by the workers in the elections” is not a serious argument, because if it depended on bourgeois elections judgment many corrupt will never be condemned.
It is necessary to tell the workers who is the Lula of today and the role that the PT fulfilled as an agent of imperialism and the national bourgeoisie while it was in power. In Angola, another black nation, the PT and Odebrecht became involved in a corruption scheme that deepened the misery and infanticide of that people, while helping to sustain a dictatorship controlled by one of the richest families in the world, the clan of José Eduardo dos Santos. For the people of Angola and for Haiti, we do have to demand democracy.
As for the Brazilian “Big House,” let them resolve their wrongs, or better, not solve them, divide them even more, leave them without direction, without an alternative. If it were not for the above mistakes and the resistance from below, the pension reform would have already been approved. And it is this resistance from below that the PT and the CUT tried to weaken in the name of the 2018 elections, given the betrayal of the General Strike on June 30 and the one on December 5, 2017.
Lula already has other defenders, including many corrupt from the “Right” as FHC, Aécio Neves and Temer. His condemnation or acquittal is not a criterion for measuring the class content of our bourgeois democracy. Looking at the peripheries, quilombos, factories and prisons is much safer to do any characterization.
The immediate task of each one of us is to unite our class to once and for all incinerate all the rottenness emanating from the Big House, before that damn Big House definitively takes away all our rights, including the right to live.2018 cannot begin as a farce, but as a strong demand to the Brazilian State for Historical Reparations for blacks and indigenous people, since this year will be 130 years of the abolition of slavery, abolition that left us in conditions of life of the most degrading possible. All the governments of the last thirteen decades are responsible for the maintenance and deepening of that situation.
We are going to save our energies to mobilize our class against the pension reform that Temer will try to approve in February. Those two struggles – against the reforms of Temer and for historical reparations – are some important battles that we have to take in our hands in the coming months, instead of patting the oppressor’s whip that part of the Big House wants to expel from the political life by a kick in the butt.
***
Translation: Corriente Obrera, LIT-CI.
Notes:
*In slave Brazil, “Big House’” was the property of the family that owned large rural areas and had control over the slaves. By extension, today is called the institutions of the ruling class, as opposed to the poor and oppressed. Quilombos were the houses where the slaves who fled the ranches in search of freedom took refuge.
[1] Favela: emergency villas, irregular settlements that house very poor and deprived people, and who occupy areas in the urban space, usually in the center of large cities.
