Brazil Turns Left

...The massive deforestation now taking place there deeply concerns people like Pressburger...

...The wealthy sit in their big, modern apartment houses and enjoy the view, from a distance...

...The case has been complicated by the reaction that immediately followed the killing...

...The military let the economy run full throttle, but brutally suppressed political rights until the early 1980s, when the economy faltered again because of the high price of crude oil and a worldwide recession...

...Lula and Brizola hope to capitalize on the resurgence of the democratic Left in a country whose democratic traditions are, at best, spotty...

...In 1984, he campaigned widely for a direct presidential election, and in 1986, he was elected to the 487-member lower house of the Brazilian congress...

...Campos agrees Brizola is "more mellow" and considers him "able but slippery...

...It's a political position...

...In Italy, wages represent 32 per cent of a car's cost...

...That ended in 1930 with a military coup, putting Getulio Vargas in power until 1945, and from 1945 until 1961 there were four elected presidents, including Vargas...

...High inflation and economic stagnation afflicted Brazil during Goulart's term, and the Brazilian military, worried by Goulart's "radical" philosophy, staged a coup on March 31, 1964...

...Campos says Brizola's ideas are "vaguely social democratic...

...That was called 'modernization.'" As an example, Pressburger cites Fiat, which "produces motors in Brazil for cars in Italy...

...Not until 1889 were the emperors ousted, to be replaced by a constitutional democracy offering a limited voter franchise...

...W.S...

...In the northeast, that proportion is 54.4 per cent...

...Wage "freezes" and "thaws" have diminished the purchasing power of the cruzado—the currency that replaced the cruzeiro in early 1986—more than 25 per cent under its 1986 level...

...The Pinheiro case, says Pressburger, "is still in a very preliminary stage, even though everyone knows who did it...

...This was a way to exterminate the Indians...

...The people emerging in Rolls Royces and Mercedes-Benzes from their guarded underground garages in high-rise apartment houses will turn to the Right...

...But the tactic also has impelled the big landowners to use their private armies...

...The World Bank estimates that 31.4 per cent of Brazilians earn less than that...

...Pinheiro was president of the Rural Workers Union and "the spiritual father" of Francisco (Chico) Mendes, in Brazil's Wild West state of Acre, more than 1,200 miles west of Rio...

...In exile, Brizola, an engineer by training, spent most of his time in West Germany...

...Pressburger, a native of Rio, finished his studies at the University of Rio de Janeiro in 1959, moved to the capital, Brasilia, in 1961, and began legal work for peasants, including organizing unions and farmworker associations...

...The urbanization hasn't done much to upgrade living standards...

...The people who live on Avenida Atlantica's meridian strip, the hookers in front of the glitzy hotels, the minimum-wage workers in the favelas, the undernourished in the northeast, will turn to Lula or Brizola...

...Mendes's murder, as far as Pressburger is concerned, "was not an ecological crime—it was because he was a union leader...

...Meantime, "the great enterprises were buying enormous tracts of land at cheap prices," says Pressburger...

...In municipal elections last year, leftist candidates swept to power in many of Brazil's biggest cities...

...it was much cheaper than General Custer...

...He was, in fact, an originator of the empate, a tactic used by rubber tappers to blunt the incursion of big ranchers and lumber firms into the Amazon...

...Two leftist candidates—Luis Ignacio (Lula) da Silva and Leonel Brizola—are ahead of the pack now and will probably stay ahead...

...When news of the death came over the radio, 3,000 to 5,000 people gathered in the streets of Brasileia and swiftly were joined by national union leaders, including the Metal Workers Union president, charismatic Luis Ig-nacio (Lula) da Silva, now a candidate for Brazil's presidency...

...Lula had four years of primary school, attended a vocational school, and went to work as a teenager in a factory...

...Lula stands to the left of Brizola...

...When Janio Quadros—who is still around and running for president—resigned the presidency in 1961, leftist Vice President Joao Goulart succeeded him...

...In 1982, when Brizola won the Rio de Janeiro State governorship, he claimed he was "not so radical" as he had beei} in his earlier days...

...Electric shock was common...

...The generals who ran the dictatorship, says Pressburger, "worked with the very rich and with people in businesses like banks, manufacturing enterprises, and the multinationals...

...In the early 1970s, Brazilians acted as if they'd discovered the formula for long-lasting growth," says Dionisio Carneiro, an economist at Rio's Catholic University, but there was "an undesired part of the experience, a highly uncivilized income distribution and political oppression...

...in Brazil, wages represent 7 per cent of a car's cost...

...Lula, forty-three, was born in Pernam-buco State in the northeast and was brought to Sao Paulo by his parents when he was four years old...

...And how many cases have there been...

...Da Silva, the Workers Party candidate, is president of the Metal Workers Union, and Brizola, running under the name of the Democratic Workers Party, was once the governor of Rio de Janeiro State...

...Mendes received at least a dozen death threats before he was murdered last December...

...Brizola was governor of Rio Grande do Sul, in the Southeast, when the 1964 military coup overthrew President Goulart...

...It's right there on the beaches...

...In those years, Pressburger says, about 30,000 political prisoners were behind bars and "the army 'disappeared' about 2,000 people...

...The country's legal minimum wage is sixty-three cruzados per month—about $37...

...Neves, from the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, never served...

...Campos says that last November's municipal elections, in which leftist candidates swept the big cities, were "a protest vote against government at all levels...

...Lately, he has been currying the favor of the business community, saying he's "capitalism's candidate...

...Forty thousand were left homeless in Acre in February 1988 by floods resulting from soil erosion, a consequence of cutting the forests...

...The gap is even more striking in the cities of the northeast, Salvador, Recife, Natal, Fortaleza, cities whose populations have grown nearly to the size of Chicago in the last two decades...

...They seem to be the only ones who ever pick anything up off the beach...

...The "top" 1 per cent of Brazil's 145 million people pull down as much money as the "bottom" 50 per cent...

...he talks about nationalizing Brazil's banks, noting that those banks had their most promising year in 1988, despite the year's dismal effect on working people...

...Literacy is 74 per cent nationwide, 53.3 per cent in the Northeast...

...As in many South American countries, voting is obligatory in Brazil, and it isn't tough to figure out in the early morning which way the votes will go...

...He made his first electoral campaign for Sao Paulo State's governorship in 1982, receiving about 10 per cent of the vote...

...In 1982, the military permitted direct elections for state and some federal offices, but not for the presidency...

...All of Rio's beaches—Ipanema, Flamengo, Leblon, Botafogo—are the same...

...He was arrested in 1969, at the height of Brazil's military dictatorship, and imprisoned until 1974...

...In 1974, Lula "began to appear as a leader in the Metal Trades Union as a member of the union directorate, negotiating wages and conditions," says Francisco Weffort, a Sao Paulo University political-science professor and Lula's political adviser...

...Poor farmers from the drought-stricken Northeast and gold partners—galimpos—streamed into the Amazon Basin, pushing aside indigenous peoples and rubber tappers who had made their livelihoods in the area for generations...

...Brazil is becoming more and more urbanized even as settlers, especially from the Northeast, pour into the Brazilian Wild West, the Amazon River Basin, in efforts to improve their lives...

...She now supports Lula for the presidency...

...That's why organizers such as Pinheiro or Chico Mendes represent a threat...

...Infant mortality—death in the first year of life—is 68 per 1,000 live births and 107 per 1,000 in the Northeast...

...There are the big landowners, and they worked to attract the multinationals through tax exemptions, low wages, and the possibility of having large landholdings...

...A 1988 Poverty Task Force of the World Bank put the situation this way: "Despite periods of strong, export-led growth in the post-World War II era, Brazil is characterized by one of the most skewed income distribution patterns in the world...

...During this time, he came under the influence of Frei Betto, a Dominican friar who is a leader of the liberation-theology movement within the Catholic Church...

...Virgin Islands...

...Stunningly white from a distance, the beach is fouled by plastic wrappers, cigarette butts, broken glass, bottle caps, dog droppings...

...Covas, a member of the constituent assembly that formulated the new constitution adopted last October, has pushed for workers' and Indians' rights and won a huge majority when he was elected to the Brazilian senate in 1986...

...Pressburger, who founded the Institute for Popular Legal Services three years ago, knows the chances for bringing Pinheiro's killers to justice are skimpy...

...They are the hot favorites in a race that also includes at least a half dozen centrist and center-right candidates, a leader of the right-wing Rural Democratic Party, and candidates from Brazil's two small communist parties, whose disagreements are tactical...

...Half of Brazil is Amazon rain forest, and the generals opened that jungle to exploitation...

...They may even face each other in the runoff scheduled two weeks after the elections if no candidate gets a majority in the first round of balloting...

...Rio de Janeiro is a world-famous city William Steif a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, is a free-lance writer based in the U.S...

...Brizola and Pernambuco's governor were the only two of twenty-three state governors who openly resisted the coup, exhorting Brazilians to engage in civil disobedience...

...In last November's vote, Luiza Erun-dina de Souza, a fifty-three-year-old Marxist who led takeovers of private property by the homeless, won Sao Paulo's mayRural Workers Face Murder Wilson de Souza Pinheiro was murdered on July 21, 1980...

...Sarney's ruling party is in disarray and threatens to split...

...In this country," says Pressburger, "it's not a question of lack of land, but all the land is private property, owned by great enterprises...

...Fifteen years later, after a broad amnesty, Brizola returned to Brazil and formed his political party...

...By January 1985, an electoral college—composed of all members of the bicameral legislature and six delegates from each state chosen by state legislative majorities—elected Tancredo Neves president...

...He calls Brizola "a populist, no ideologue, totally cynical...

...International organizations, he says, are "very sensitive about the Amazon only from an ecological viewpoint...

...he croons to the trade unions with some of that old Peronista stuff, he's a lot like Tony Benn was in the British Labor Party...

...But the case of Pinheiro, forty-seven when he was gunned down by well-known thugs in the hire of a well-known landowner at the town of Brasileia, still eats at Pressburger's gut...

...he has not come to terms with the $120 billion foreign debt piled up by the military, and he has presided over widespread government corruption...

...For most of the Nineteenth Century, Brazil was ruled by emperors from Portugal's royal family, though the first emperor, Dom Pedro I, declared the nation independent in 1822...

...Ever since, he's bee i calling for establishment of what he calis "brown socialism," a socialism adapted to Brazilian society...

...The United States covertly supported the coup...

...All have the same problem, the immense gap between wealthy and poor...

...Since the military seized power in 1984, Pressburger counts 1,605 murders "involving peasants, lawyers, priests, and nuns who work in the field with rural workers everywhere in Brazil...

...The Left may win because of the disunity of the center and right," says Campos...

...Miguel Pressburger, a lawyer in Rio de Janeiro, wants his killers brought to trial...

...If our present growth doesn't show results, right down in the favelas, the next election is going to see a clash of extreme views, Lula versus the right wing...

...Another candidate, a bit to the right of Lula and Brizola but still left of center, is Mario Covas of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party...

...But their picturesque view differs dramatically from the one a visitor gets on the beach itself at 6:30 a.m...

...of 7.5 million people, a rich city in Brazil's rich southeast, where other rich cities like Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba also flourish...

...But Brazilians like Pressburger are equally concerned about "the great inequality between landowners and the peasants...

...My own view is that the Left has 30 per cent for sure, and there may be a runoff between Brizola and Lula...

...Mendes, president of the National Council of Rubber Tappers and winner of a 1988 United Nations award for his work in protecting the Amazon Basin, was shot to death last December 22 in the Acre town of Xapuri...

...There's no faith in government here...

...He got 600,000 votes," says Weffort, "more than any other candidate in the country...

...Everyone who was not in accord with the regime was considered a communist...

...oralty by 277,000 votes...

...Lula even set up a liaison office with the armed forces, though at the same time he said he wanted to "democratize" the military: "It's high time we stop treating the generals like first-class citizens at the expense of the rest of the population...

...There, early every morning, the same woman nurses her child...

...Government ineptitude and theft are the main problems of the Brazilian economy," says Roberto Campos, a Brazilian senator and former ambassador to the United States and Britain...

...Other campaign watchers feel the Left is stronger, with possibly as much as 50 per cent of the electorate, because of the futility of the last two decades of economic policy and continuing human-rights abuses...

...Brizola, in his late fifties, recently has been attacking the "extremism" of Lula's Workers Party and says he won't nationalize the banks, though he wants a moratorium on Brazil's foreign debt that would limit payments to 10 per cent of the country's export earnings...

...The homeless wander onto the beach, looking for something they can use...

...Those are functions of government ineptitude: In 1982, 85 per cent of the government's health budget was spent on curative care instead of preventive and primary health care, according to the World Bank, while half the current education budget goes to higher education...

...In 1978, Lula led his first strike and in 1980 edged into politics...

...General Motors also produces parts for GM in Detroit...

...Between 1964 and 1989, there have been only twelve trials and four convictions in cases involving the assassinations of rural workers...

...It isn't even necessary to walk into the hillside shantytowns, the favelas, to see poverty, to see the vast gaps in Brazilian society...

...It's not the disorganization of the police or the judiciary that prevents a trial," he says in his Rio office...

...One of Mendes's killers, son of the owner of a huge cattle ranch, confessed and surrendered to police early this year, but his brother and four other conspirators are still at large...

...Pinheiro and then Chico Mendes in Acre organized the small farmers and rubber tappers to oppose the new plantation owners, who were abandoning the unprofitable natural rubbertrade to fell the forests and put up profitable lumber mills...

...Three of every four Brazilians today live in cities, and the country's nine largest cities contain more than half the population...

...Everyone was tortured in prison," he says...

...I was doubled up and left hanging, bound, for hours...

...I don't ever recall such polarization of views between the extreme Left and the extreme Right," says Carneiro...

...Both Brizola and Lula recently have sought out key generals in the armed forces to reassure them they're not the "extremists" some in the business community depict them to be...

...The tappers bring their families to sit in and plead with forest-clearing crews to put down their saws...

...The generals found themselves beyond their depth in economic policy and are in no hurry to come back...

...The tactic has pushed the governor of Acre to declare more than five million acres of land "extractive reserves"—off limits to developers...

...Sarney has failed to stem Brazilian inflation (1,000 per cent in 1988...

...He fell ill before his inauguration in March 1985, died five weeks later, and his vice president elect, Jose Sar-ney, became president...

...In addition, the study says, the richest 1 per cent also own 41 per cent of Brazil's land, which is larger than the contiguous forty-eight U.S...

...He lacked the political will to take tough economic decisions," says one Western diplomat, "There was a broad consensus the government budget was the prime cause of inflation and needed serious slashing...

...Brazil seems destined to turn leftward...

...There, early every morning, the homeless begin to stir, dozens of them, some drug addicts, some just down on their luck, some professional beggars...

...More than 10,000 rubber-tapper families were tossed off their ancestors' land...

...He was expelled from the country...

...The landowners have private armies and modern weapons and kill indiscriminately...

...No one believes the military is much interested in taking over again...

...On November 15, when Brazilians will vote for a new president for the first time in twenty-nine years, they may seek to redress these grievances...

...states...

...The homeless scavenge...