Brazil in the Latin American Context

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen extraordinary political developments in the Latin American Left. Indeed, there is no historical precedent for the simultaneous election across the region of governments that can be identified with the political Left.Footnote ² From Tabaré Vasquez in Uruguay to Martín Torrijos in Panama; from Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina to Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; from Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa no Ecuador—as well as Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and, more recently, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay—representatives of nearly all of the region's formative leftist currents have reached power in governments of large, medium, and small countries.

In an unexpected development, those governments have issued from a Latin American Left that traces its origins from the moderate socialism of the middle class, to trade unionism and peasant movements, Liberation Theology activists, radicalized nationalist military men, and former guerrillas. As they became the chief shapers of international relations on the subcontinent, Latin American leftist leaders carried with them the hopes of real regional integration as well as the pain generated by often conflicting national interests, both historically and in the present day.

Taking a look at the social backgrounds of these emerging leaders, we find that diversity was a common trademark. In regard to ethnicity, many of them were the first members of historically marginalized segments of people of mixed blood to reach the presidency in their countries. Some, like Lula and Morales, began their political lives as trade-union activists, becoming the voice of the vast majorities of poor working people in societies with some of the highest rates of income inequality in the world. Even though she is still an isolated case, Bachelet's election in Chile—a country in which the sexism that still plagues the region is particularly evident—can be seen as the more visible expression of a slow incremental transformation in the relationship between socially-ascribed gender roles and political participation. These connections between the current tide of left-oriented governments and deeper social changes can explain, for example, Lula's support for affirmative action, in a frontal confrontation with a conservative common sense that has historically presented Brazil as a “racial democracy.”

If some have seen the defeats of Ollanto Humala in Perú and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico as a sign of the end of the “leftist wave,” evidence to the contrary can be seen in the reelections of Lula and Chavez with 60 percent of the national vote. In the Brazilian case, Lula's victory came despite a political crisis generated by the scandals in 2005 that affected his government. The survival of Chavez—despite attempts at a military coup and a nationwide oil industry shutdown—also guaranteed political and economic breathing space for the Cuban regime sixteen years after the fall of its ally and patron, the Soviet Union, and, at least up to this moment, has made it possible for Fidel Castro to withdraw from a leadership position without precipitating a breakdown of the regime.

How are we to understand this singular historical moment? The distinguished Mexican intellectual Jorge Castañeda has recently proposed that in reality there are two Latin American Lefts today.Footnote ³ From his point of view, the first Left has “radical roots” but has today become “modern and open,” while the second one remains “closed and strongly populist.” Yet such Manichean schemes fall apart when applied to the complexities of contemporary Latin American reality.Footnote ⁴ As historian Kenneth Maxwell reminds us, Lula and his Workers' Party (PT) were considered by most Northern observers in the 1990s as exemplars of the “mistaken” or “retrograde” Left, while Lula and the PT's decision, once in power, to maintain an orthodox economic stability program, has now lead them to be classed as the heroes of the “sensible” and “modern” Latin American Left.Footnote ⁵

Yet taking a closer look at Castañeda's thesis, despite its insufficiencies, can serve as a fruitful avenue of approach if we go back to the arguments he advanced in the early 1990s. In his influential 1993 book Unarmed Utopia, Castañeda analyzed the evolution and prospects for the Left following the defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the collapse of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁶ One of his key arguments was that the neoliberal option had, even at that time, reached a point of exhaustion in Latin America. Even in those countries governed by the right, a reformist program of the left was judged essential, given the exacerbation of deeply-rooted social problems and deepening of socioeconomic inequalities and, likely, as a result of the unprecedented adherence to democratic and electoral forms throughout the region.

However, what unfolded over the 1990s was the opposite of what Castañeda had forecast. Those countries like Brazil, that had resisted an indiscriminate adhesion to neoliberal ideals in the 1980s, saw their implantation between 1990 and 2002 under a party that defined itself as social democratic and whose leaders included intellectuals of renown, like Fernando Henrique Cardoso, with a Marxist background and, in some cases, past participation in armed struggle. In Argentina, the destruction of what remained of nationalist and developmentalist ideals came from within Peronism at the hands of Carlos Menem. Menem was dedicated to the maintenance of “carnal relations” with the United States. And even Castañeda, as foreign minister in the government of Vicente Fox, achieved little more than burying once and for all the tradition of diplomatic independence maintained since the Mexican Revolution.

Those forces on the Left that attained power at the end of the 1990s, especially in countries that achieved greater political stability, faced a situation that was the opposite of what Castañeda had prophesied. Their central dilemma was how to meet the expectations for change expressed by popular support, gained by long years of militancy, and how to reconstruct democracy, given neoliberalism's weakening of the power of nation-states in the face of the global market. How could governments of the Left avoid being reduced to applying neoliberal policies only slightly mitigated by the Left's greater sensitivity to social needs? How could necessary structural transformations be achieved given the rigorous fiscal restraints dictated by their country's insertion into international financial markets?

The Latin American Left reached power through electoral processes at a peculiar historical juncture. As Naomi Klein emphasizes, just as nation-states were becoming more democratic worldwide, they had at the same time less and less power to make vital national decisions with the shift of power to supranational markets and institutions.Footnote ⁷ However, even considering those limitations, the importance of this recent achievement of democratic stability in Latin American countries should not be underestimated. Nothing is more alien to the region's history than embracing the North Atlantic assumption that the electoral form of politics is the “natural” terrain of political action. Yet, thinking of democracy as a conquest also means that one cannot understand the transformation or significance of the Latin American Left today solely in terms of political and governmental formations. Rather, it must necessarily include the complex relationship between the institutional dimension of politics and governments and the multifaceted world of social movements and civil society.

In a process that gained visibility in 1994 with the indigenous insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico, Latin America has been the scene of a complex process of articulation between both old and new social actors united in their resistance to globalization under neoliberal hegemony. The passage of these movements from protest and contestation to the creation of alternatives has been linked to local experiences of democratic innovation in some of the region's most important cities. It is not by chance that in 2001, when the global struggles against neoliberalism seemed to move ahead from resistance to a more proactive position, the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, was chosen to host the World Social Forum. After sixteen years of Worker's Party (PT) governance, Porto Alegre had witnessed the creation of a unique process of participatory budgeting that inspired many reformers.Footnote ⁸ In a similar fashion, the Left's control of the city governments in Montevideo and Mexico City played a fundamental role in transforming the Uruguayan Frente Amplio (“Broad Front”) and the Mexican Partido da Revolución Democrática (PRD) into viable national political alternatives. It is not accidental that both of these political formations, like the PT, share a common characteristic as spaces of convergences for the many trends within the Left.

A more detailed analysis of the case of Brazil under Lula's government offers us an excellent opportunity to explore the relationship between these various dimensions of the region's Lefts: the social and the institutional, civil society and the state, the national and the international, and stability and transformation. Indeed, the election to the presidency of a survivor of the extreme poverty and harsh droughts of northeastern Brazil, a one-time metalworker with little access to formal education had a profound impact on both the country's social movements and the political party that he founded and led. By examining the hopes and frustrations, dilemmas, and accomplishments of Lula's government, we can better achieve a denser and more nuanced understanding of the larger historical process through which the Latin American Left has reached power.

For many reasons, Brazil has frequently been at the center of the attention of the international Left in the last thirty years. Since the 1978 wave of metalworkers strikes, the country has been swept by highly innovative experiences of mass activism and radical democracy, such as the new unionism, the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT), the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra—MST) and Participatory Budgeting—a set of democratic processes for generating urban spending. In this context, it was not surprising that the election of the former union leader Luis Inácio Lula da Silva as president of the Brazilian Republic in 2002 raised very high expectations. Predictably, the results produced by his government, which operated under the severe restraints imposed by the international and national balance of economic and social powers as well as by the peculiar perversions of the Brazilian political system, would be a matter of bitter debate among traditionally contentious leftist groups.

In the first years of Lula's presidency, the maintenance of orthodox economic policies strongly contrasted with the Workers Party's reformist program; at the same time, corruption scandals blemished its public image. Those two factors significantly alienated the party from the educated middle class in Brazil's largest southern urban centers—one of its historical strongholds—and produced the first significant split of its trajectory, leading to the creation of the Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade—PSOL). The profound disenchantment caused by the contrast between what the government was expected to be and what it really was led many sectors inside the Left to view Lula's approach as a simple continuity of the neoliberal policies engendered during Fernando Henrique Cardoso's terms of office. Lula was portrayed as only the most recent example of a long tradition of leftist leaders' betraying their former beliefs once they arrived in power. Little attention was paid to the combined effects of incremental transformative policies his government began to implement on many different fronts.

Since 2003, Brazil's long-predominant tradition of diplomatic independence has been strengthened. The country played an active role in blocking the imposition of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) under the terms determined by the United States and in rescuing the Mercosur (Southern Cone Common Market) project and widening its scope towards a broad-ranging South American integration that recently took on institutional shape, with the creation of the South American Nations Union (União de Nações Sul-Americanas—UNASUL). Brazil also took the lead in the creation of the G-20 group in WTO negotiations and frontally opposed the US-British intervention in Iraq. In regard to economic policies, there were no new privatizations, and the country's external vulnerability was dramatically reduced. Brazil has not renewed the signature treaties with the IMF, as had been done for more than twenty years, and the country's financial reserves were expanded from 50 to 180 billion dollars, surpassing Brazilian total external debt. The internal debt, as a proportion of the GNP, was also reduced, and interest rates, although still very high, are, in 2008, at their lowest level in decades. Economic growth has revived, and in 2006 wage-earners' incomes increased for the first time since 1996.Footnote ⁹

What is most surprising is that while maintaining basically conservative guidelines in macroeconomics, the government gradually expanded social expenditure through measures such as subsidized access to credit for low-income populations, expansion of support for family agriculture, a program to provide universal access to electricity, the expansion of subsidized access to college education, the enlargement of the federal university system, and other such partial but nonetheless effective reforms. As a result of the economic stability established after the Plano Real in 1994 and the compensatory social programs adopted by the Cardoso Government, Brazil had already generated improvements—although modest and discontinuous—in regard to income distribution. Under Lula, this process became continuous and has accelerated through initiatives such as the conditional cash transfer program “Bolsa Família,” which currently benefits twelve million families and the annual increases in the national minimum wage. As a result, in one decade the country's inequality rates were reduced by 21 percent, as demonstrated by the Gini index.Footnote ¹⁰

Brazil is now experiencing an unprecedented situation, in which a president of working-class background, in the middle of his second term, enjoys wide popular support (almost 70 percent approval in the last polls). Yet, both the successes and the pitfalls of Lula's government challenge Brazilian leftist political groups and social movements with the need to build up a post-neoliberal paradigm in order to redirect their long-term strategies. To understand those deep changes in the Brazilian political context, we have to take into consideration certain aspects of the country's recent history.

Lula, the PT, and the Brazilian Left: The End of a Cycle?

As previously argued in an article I coauthored with John French in 2005,Footnote ¹¹ the place of the PT in the Brazilian Left can be summarized by three characteristics:

1. 1. The party constituted itself as the organic political expression of a new configuration of the Brazilian working class, deeply altered by—among other factors— the creation of modern durable goods production centers that began in the 1950s.

2. 2. Close bonds linked the trajectory of the party to the redemocratization process the country underwent after the mid-1970s.

3. 3. The party played a decisive role in reversing the organizational fragmentation of the Brazilian Left that began immediately prior to the 1964 coup and grew more intense toward the end of the 1960s.

We also pointed to the great paradox that marked Lula's government, quoting an article published at the end of 2003 by the mayor of Belo Horizonte, Fernando Pimentel: “Current macroeconomic guidelines, necessary consequences of the choices made by Brazilian society in the 1990s . . . undermine the great national goal, which is to quickly achieve full social inclusion.”Footnote ¹² This is not the place to make an overall appraisal of Lula's government, a highly complex task that would be possible only with a collective interdisciplinary effort.Footnote ¹³ As we have pointed out previously, the paradox represented by the arrival of the founder of the Workers Party to the presidency of the Republic without any significant alteration in a political system that was established to reproduce profound inequities, radically altered the scenario for the Brazilian Left's political action.

In any case, the cycle of social movements that began in the 1970s and was most strongly expressed in the form of the “New Unionism” was already showing signs of exhaustion during the 1990s. The displacement of the militancy generated from grassroots activism onto the occupation of an institutional space culminated with Lula's victory itself. That process led many leftwing critics to blame the Workers' Party leadership for the noticeably diminishing capacity for social mobilization resulting from the priority given to electoral politics. However, one could certainly argue that it was a consequence of a combination of changes in the structural conditions that had previously generated the cycles of struggles and the potential, however limited it might seem, for conquering civil rights offered by the budding Brazilian democracy.Footnote ¹⁴ In spite of all the imperfections of a mass electoral system that entails spending millions, both legally and illegally, on campaign financing, thereby putting the parties at the mercy of the great financial interests, the organizational bases created by the movements and the PT that emerged from them made an unprecedented degree of popular representation in politics possible, first in a few urban-industrial centers, then on a nationwide scale.

Paradoxically, the relative success of the Brazilian democratizing process gradually lessened the role of the memory of the Military Dictatorship as an organizing element of the emerging political system. During the transitional period of the “New Republic” (1985–1989), having opposed or supported the military in the recent past established a strict division between “conservative” and “progressive” forces, with public opinion strongly favoring the latter. As a result, in the long run, all factions of the Brazilian Left that had placed their bets on electoral participation took on leading political roles in national politics and presented relatively strong presidential candidates. Still, in competing with one another, they all showed themselves equally disposed to ally with different segments of the Brazilian Right. This explains why, during the presidential elections of 2002, the runoff opposed the former metalworker Lula (Worker's Party) and José Serra, the ex-president of the National Students Union and former militant of the clandestine Christian leftwing organization Ação Popular, (Brazilian Social-Democrat Party). It is also worth noting that in the first round of the same elections the other candidates were former state governors Ciro Gomes—at that time affiliated to the Partido Popular Socialista, the offspring of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) —and Anthony Garotinho of the Brazilian Socialist Party.Footnote ¹⁵

That the last two leftists supported Lula in the second round can be taken as a sign that, during the previous decade, the Military Dictatorship ceased to be the fundamental reference in the organization of Brazilian political space. What became most significant was the position taken by each politician or political group toward neoliberalism. Serra was defined not so much by his program for governing the country or his personal trajectory. Rather, he was the preferred candidate of the political and social coalition around the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and thus represented the risk of continuing or even intensifying neoliberal policies which, in addition to their huge social cost, were no longer capable of maintaining economic stability.

And what did the choice of Lula mean? As we argued in an appraisal of the prospects for his first term, the Workers Party candidate inherited a situation of accelerated disintegration of the very macroeconomic stability on which the political stability of Cardoso's governments had been based. Lula knew he would confront the destabilizing powers of the media and of international financial capital. So, Lula did not get elected on a platform of rupture. If his victory was in objective terms “a defeat for neoliberalism and the Washington policy consensus of 1989,” it must also be recognized that the “mass popular vote for Lula was not a conscious repudiation of those policies.” It should not be seen as “a definitive historical transition in Brazilian history, but only an open door to a possibly different future, and this humble claim is precisely what the PT itself has declared with due modesty.”Footnote ¹⁶

Thus, the experience of Lula's government confronted all sectors of the Brazilian left with the need to get beyond the paradigm whereby the criticism of neoliberalism is the focus of political action. The PT's main leaders headed a government that opted to conduct economic policy in a cautious and conservative manner along the lines that had been established in the 1990s, even though they were partly contradicting party resolutions like the theses put forward at its National Meeting in Recife in 2002.Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, the government tried to make those orthodox macroeconomic policies compatible with certain redistributive elements and to rebuild the regulatory capacity of the State. That effort has been described by some as building a “democratized developmentism.”Footnote ¹⁸ The same applies to the other leftwing parties that make up the governmental coalitions like the ex-Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B), which still has a significant presence among some sectors of unionism and controls the National Students Union, and the reformist Brazilian Socialist Party, presently led by Ciro Gomes, one of the possible presidential candidates in the 2010 elections.

To understand the tensions that crisscross the “pro-government Left,” we must address both the consolidation of the PT as a major national political party in Brazil and the crisis in its ability to perform as a focus for the construction of left-wing unity. Although Lula's electoral victories and political leadership have become progressively larger than the PT itself, it is important to underscore that the 2002 elections gave the party the largest individual parliamentary bloc in the National Congress. It was the only party to return federal and state deputies in all twenty-seven units of the Federation. Contrary to what most analysts had predicted, despite the party's severe identity crisis and the political damage done by the illegal financing and corruption scandals of 2004 and 2005, in the 2006 elections, the PT experienced only a slight reduction in the number of votes it received nationally. The growth in PT support in smaller states and urban centers, which partially compensated for its declining vote in other areas, was interpreted by many observers as a mere expression of the dependence of economically peripheral regions on the federal government. In fact, the situation is much more complex.

In the first place, changes in the voting maps resulted from the redistributive impact of many of the PT's social policies as well as from the deconcentration of public investments during Lula's first term. At the same time, the decline in support for the PT in its traditional strongholds in the center-south of the country was not particularly dramatic and was due more to the difficulty the party had in maintaining and expanding its range of electoral alliances with those parties with whom it had programmatic affinities.

The PT's gradual weakening as an articulator of Brazilian left unity also stems from the appearance of dissident movements that have come to constitute a “leftwing opposition” to Lula's government. As will be seen below, in spite of their relative fragility, those dissidents have decreased PT membership in some of its traditional social bases. Dissidence has especially affected the highly educated middle class in the country's main urban centers, which, in spite of its comparatively low numbers, has a strong influence in molding public opinion at large. As important, if not more important, is the fact that parties like the PSB and the PC do B accuse the PT of adopting a hegemonic attitude that gives priority to the growth of the party itself even when that involves damaging its closest allies.Footnote ¹⁹

That kind of tension was visible in the elections for the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies in 2007 in which Arlindo Chinaglia (PT) defeated Aldo Rebelo (PC do B). Tensions increased even further as both PSB and PC do B expanded the political space they occupied, albeit in a localized manner. The PSB, which has traditionally had a poorly defined identity and shown enormous regional diversity, has recently enjoyed significant growth in the Northeast, the region where Lula presently enjoys overwhelming popularity, and, as has already been mentioned, that party is led by a possible candidate from the government alliance for the presidential succession. In turn, the PC do B has expanded its presence in the state apparatus during the Lula government, and some of its candidates have enjoyed strong showings in parliamentary elections. It is now seeking to move beyond its still fragile presence to head local governments.

The conflicts between both parties and the PT were aggravated by the entrance of the PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) into the government coalition formed for Lula's second term. Since the 1980s, that party has become the largest national political machine, benefiting from its inheritance of the acronym symbolizing “official” opposition during the period of the Military Dictatorship.Footnote ²⁰ Presently it is characterized by its generalized lack of ideological identity. In spite of the divisions provoked by their specific interests, the parties of the “pro-government Left” have kept up a reasonable degree of unity in defending the government from the systematic attacks of the media and of the political block associated with the former Cardoso government.

While the defense of Lula's government's achievements and electoral prospects defines the political identity of the “pro-government Left” today, those sectors belonging to the “leftwing opposition” are united in characterizing Lula's government as neoliberal. The Left opposition is formed from groups that formerly represented tendencies inside the PT but which, at different moments, either opted to break with the party or were expelled from it. The first such group is the United Workers Socialist Party (PSTU), which attempted to unite in a single organization two Trotskyite factions—Social Convergence and the Workers' Cause—that refused to accept PT rules on internal tendencies, which were established in the early 1990s. Their joint-venture soon proved to be unsustainable, and the former group retained sole control over the organization and its name, while the latter broke off to found the insignificant Workers Cause Party (PCO).

The PSTU, constituted by the followers of the deceased Argentinean leader Nahuel Moreno, managed to elect some federal parliamentarians and at least one local mayor when it was still a part of the PT. Currently, however, it has practically no electoral expression at all. Its influence among workers in the private sector has also been reduced substantially although it was quite considerable among metalworkers and bank workers in some important urban centers at the end of the 1980s. Today the party is still present in the student movement, but its main bases are in those sectors of the civil service noted for their aggressive defense of their corporatist interests, such as the public university employees unions. In spite of its relatively fragile social base, the PSTU largely sets the tone of the “leftwing opposition” to Lula due to the constitutive ambiguity of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL).

Unlike the PSTU, the PSOL currently has a delegation in the federal parliament, made up of three deputies (a third of the nine that originally left the PT to join the new party) as well as various state and local parliamentarians. It also inherited a seat in the senate when Ana Júlia Carepa (PT) was elected as state governor of Pará because her substitute, José Nery, belonged to one of the PT tendencies that had migrated to the PSOL. The party's candidate in the 2006 presidential elections, ex-senator for Alagoas, Heloisa Helena, still shows up in some polls regarding the 2010 elections with around 15 percent of the voters' support, although that figure is probably swelled by recollection of her participation in the last elections. In those elections, she received intense positive media coverage because her candidacy ensured that Lula would not be elected by an absolute majority of votes in the first round. PSOL's nine official internal tendencies still keep up a somewhat influential presence in leftist intellectual circles, in the student movement, in some professional categories, and among the Catholic militants associated with the Liberation Theology movement, which, in spite of its relative decline both inside the Church itself and in society at large, still constitutes a fundamental social-political network with national outreach.

As one intellectual affiliated with the party has pointed out recently, the great dilemma of the PSOL at the moment is whether the party should think of itself as a “new PT,” that is, commit itself to rescue what the dissidents identify as the original project of the Workers Party, a project that they believe was gradually abandoned by the PT leadership.Footnote ²¹ However this can hardly be seen as a real option because any reproduction of the historical conditions that created the PT—such as the struggles against the Military Dictatorship and the birth of the “New Unionism”—are quite out of the question at present. Nonetheless, the discussion underlines the similarities between the political-institutional profiles of the PSOL and the PT. Among those similarities is the fact that both PSOL and PT are pluralist, secular parties that recognize the right to the formations of internal tendencies and consequently do not tie their action programs to rigid doctrinaire definitions. Both parties are involved in social movements as well as in the electoral arena, thereby implicitly taking up the challenge of reaching electoral success and, consequently, running public administration within a capitalist framework. The PSOL came into being already endowed with a characteristic that the PT only acquired after a decade of existence, namely a strong dependence on a candidature for the presidency of the Republic. In the case of PSOL, future performance in that area may prove decisive for the party's survival as an electoral force with a reasonable level of expression and for its own ability to maintain a minimum of internal unity.

One challenge that confronts the “leftwing opposition” to the Lula government is how to constitute an image for itself in the public mind clearly differentiated from that of the “rightwing opposition.” That is made more difficult by the fact that in the most relevant political episodes of the last few years these two oppositional segments have acted as a single block. That was the case with the various parliamentary committees set up to investigate charges of corruption or misspending of public money and in the defeat of the CPMF (Provisional Contribution levied on Financial Transactions), a tax whose revenues were largely used for financing the Unified Health System (SUS). This problem can be most clearly seen in PSOL's legislative action. On one hand, the party searches to affirm its own identity by attacking Lula's government as a mere continuation of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government and systematically opposes all the PT's policies which it dismisses en bloc as “neoliberal.” On the other hand, in order to achieve some degree of success, PSOL congressmen have to ally on a daily basis with the most important supporters of Cardoso's government inside Congress.

An extreme example of the paradoxical results produced by that line of intervention can be seen in the reaction of militants of the “leftwing opposition” inside the federal (public) universities, where they have a voice, to the Program for Re-structuring and Expanding Public College Education (Reuni) created by the Ministry of Education in 2007. The program foresaw investments to the order of four billion US dollars (a significant amount by Brazilian budgetary standards) to be invested in infrastructure and increasing the numbers of teachers and administrative personnel in those Federal Universities that offer plans for achieving an increase of 50 percent in vacancies and for gradually reducing the dropout rate. Within those general lines, each institution would have autonomy to define strategies as well as courses to be created or expanded. There was no obligation to seek private financing, charge tuition (public universities are still completely free in Brazil), or make any changes in the job security enjoyed by all employees in the public university system. The express goal of the plan was to widen the access of the poorest segments of the population to high quality colleges for a mere 10 percent of the population in the 18- to 24-year age group have access to a university of any kind in Brazil, and only 2 percent to public universities. Furthermore, in the case of public universities, most of the students come from the private secondary schools of the elite.

Under the leadership of the radical corporative factions linked to the PSTU that control most of the technical-administrative employee unions in the universities and in an alliance with the PSOL, the national professors' union (ANDES), the Reuni was denounced by most of the university Left as being a neoliberal program. They argued that an expansion of that size would lead to an intolerable exploitation of college workers and to a dramatic drop in the quality of academic production. ANDES refused to negotiate on wages with the Ministry of Education unless the project and other similar ones were abandoned. The Ministry ended up conducting parallel negotiations with a set of dissident union locals with the support of the United Workers Congress (Central Única dos Trabalhadores—CUT), from which ANDES had withdrawn during the first Lula government. A few months later, all fifty-seven federal universities agreed to the expansion, and the government announced an increased in professors' wages that would reach 50 percent in three years in addition to a restructuring of the composition of payment in such a way as to guarantee that most wages would be maintained on retirement. Obviously that resulted in many teachers drawing even further away from their union, a process that had been underway for some years.

As this example clearly demonstrates, the monolithic classification of the Lula government as “neoliberal” and slamming the door on any possibility of support, even critical support, for any of its initiatives, has on several occasions led the “leftwing opposition” to adopt stances that can only be described as suicidal. A position with more subtle nuances has been adopted by some social movements like the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). In general, MST leaders tend to classify Lula's government as the result of a deadlock in the balance of political and social forces in Brazil at the end of the 1990s. The MST sees the government as indelibly marked by the presence of absolutely antagonistic interests and projects. In regard to rural issues, the MST criticizes the fact that, as a consequence of the neoliberal orientation of economic policy, the government has always favored agribusiness. Consequently the political line taken by the movement nowadays, and its principal political struggle, is against neoliberalism and agribusiness (which is seen as a vector of the former). They also continue to denounce specific policies like the reduction in targets to be achieved by the National Agrarian Reform Plan from the original proposal to settle one million families to the four hundred thousand eventually sanctioned by Lula.

Government officials defend the reduction in the settlement targets as a condition for expanding the family agriculture segment. This segment is seen as complementary to the export sector which in the present economic policy plays a vital role in macroeconomic equilibrium. Officials argue that strengthening family agriculture is fundamental to meeting the increased demand for foodstuffs created by continued economic stability. It is also important in the process of redistributing income stemming from government social policies, and also by the favorable atmosphere that exists for collective bargains.

Although engaged in these political-ideological conflicts and highly critical of many governmental policies, the MST and other similar movements that have proliferated over the last few years have obviously benefited from the greater goodwill of their historic allies in the PT left who presently control the Ministry of Agrarian Development and the National Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform. This can be demonstrated by the increase, albeit slow, in the number of settlements and especially in the creation of conditions for their economic viability. The movement's strategy in its relations with government has thus been defined by some of its leaders as “keeping the reins tight, but not to the breaking point.”

The urban union movement is living with a similar situation, and although it keeps up opposition to the government's economic policy, it also benefits from influence within the state apparatus, including control over the Ministry of Labor itself. On the one hand, it has found better prospects for collective bargaining than at any period in the previous decade due to the combination of economic growth and a more democratic political environment. On the other hand, the political division of the Left has also been reflected in the organizational fragmentation to be found in the sphere of trade unions. CUT, which had established itself as the major trade union confederation in the country in the 1990s, congregating the militancy of the PT, the PSTU, the PC do B, and the PSB, is now practically restricted to organizing unionists within the PT. At the same time, even though it has continued to encompass important rural segments (especially the unions and federations affiliated to the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers—CONTAG) and of civil servants, it has suffered a loss of penetration in both those sectors with the MST's drawing away from the PT and the creation of CONLUTAS, which was intended to work as a confederation for union and other social movements within the sphere of the “leftwing opposition” to Lula's government.