They call it the ”red community”, and on Sunday, when the world’s fifth-largest democracy goes to the polls, there is little doubt which way Vila Irma Dulce will vote.
Posters of a grinning Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are plastered on most shacks in this dusty settlement in north-ÂÂeastern Brazil, home to 20 000 of the leader’s most avid fans. Red stars flap from virtually every street corner.
”No president has ever done as much for the poor,” said 40-year-old Edileusa da Rocha, sitting near the shack she shares with her husband and three children.
Vila Irma Dulce, a sprawling settlement on the southern limits of Teresina, one of the poorest corners of Brazil, is where Lula’s presidency began. It was here, on the first stop of his inaugural presidential trip, that he set out his project to haul millions of impoverished Brazilians out of poverty.
”You can be sure that we will define our priorities in the poorest regions of the country, because it is the poor people who need the government and not the rich,” he said during the ”misery tour” in January 2003 — a pilgrimage through the underbelly of Brazil on which he led 29 of his ministers.
In Vila Irma Dulce, the tour’s first stop, Lula received a hero’s welcome as he promised an ethical revolution; redistributing land and wealth and eradicating government corruption.
Nearly four years on, however, and many Brazilians are starting to wonder if there was anything ethical or revolutionary about Lula’s first term in office. Allegations of corruption, bribes, tax evasion, intimidation and blackmail have blighted the Workers’ Party (PT) for much of his presidency, costing him his chief of staff, finance minister and, last week, his campaign manager.
Critics complain, too, that conservative fiscal policies have stifled Lula’s quest for social justice and that land reform, another important election promise, has proceeded at snail’s pace.
Before his victory, Lula was a seen as a radical; a bogeyman for foreign investors and a poster boy of the left. He threatened to default on Brazil’s foreign debt and constantly railed against the International Monetary Fund.
In power, the reality has been less dramatic. Lula has honoured debt repayments, reined in spending levels and been labelled a traitor by disillusioned supporters who expected more from Lula’s ”peaceful revolution”.
Yet, despite the criticism, he looks assured of a second term, possibly even winning the election in the first round. His reputation as an ethical crusader may be in tatters, but in places such as Vila Irma Dulce, the streets are still decked in bright red propaganda.
”I’ll vote for him forever,” said Antonio da Silva, a 64-year-old resident, who received a surprise visit from his namesake two years ago when the president came to check up on the social projects he put in place when he came to office.
”Before [Lula], all of the houses here were made of mud. People would come to your house and wonder how someone could live like that,” he said, gesturing towards a newspaper cutting in which he appears next to the president. ”How can you speak badly of someone who does all that?”
Lula’s re-election has not always been a foregone conclusion. Mired in corruption scandals, for periods last year there were doubts about whether he would run for a second term.
His ability to bounce back, says historian Denise Parana, author of Lula: The Son of Brazil, the president’s only authorised biography, is down to his talent for speaking the language of the masses. ”He says things that wouldn’t be appropriate in the mouths of the elite, but he says exactly what the people want to hear,” she said.
”Lula is a perfectly finished portrait of Brazil,” she added, arguing that the poorer sections of society could identify with the president’s life. The son of an impoverished family, Lula’s family has experienced every kind of misfortune common to the country’s poor: alcoholism, infant mortality, industrial accidents, disease, a broken home, child labour and gun crime.
”Lula really knows the soul of the people better than any theorist because he has lived this all,” said Parana.
Since the election campaign started in June, Lula’s adversaries have been working hard to destroy this reputation as the ”father of the poor”. Rivals have repeatedly attacked him over corruption levels, with Heloisa Helena, a former PT member now placed third in the race for power, referring to the president as a ”gangster” at the head of a ”criminal organisation”.
Lula’s main rival, Geraldo Alckmin of the Social Democratic party, is focusing on what he calls economic stagnation. ”Brazil has not grown,” he said during a recent visit to the Rocinha shantytown in Rio de Janeiro. ”It has grown a third as much as other emerging economies,” he said. Brazil’s growth rate of about 2,6% of GDP is about half the South American average.
Yet in Lula’s key electoral bases in the shantytowns and land invasions such as Vila Irma Dulce, voters are more concerned with the price of rice than they are with global economics.
Central to Lula’s success in such places has been the Bolsa Familia, a benefit system by which families receive a monthly grant of R$65 on the condition that their children attend school. Figures from the social development ministry claim that more than 11-million families, about 45-ÂÂmillion people, have benefited from the scheme.
”They will vote for Lula because of the Bolsa Familia,” said Isabel das Dores Costa, a health worker in Vila Irma Dulce, whose 20 000 residents have just one health clinic, one school and 12 police officers. ”The unemployment rate is huge and very often it is a family’s only source of income … There are people crying from hunger here.”
But even the ”red community” has its dissidents. Costa said that the construction of social projects in her area owed more to Lula’s skills in marketing than to achievements in social reform. ”Of course everything was lovely when Lula came back here to visit; they spent seven days doing all the roads up for the cameras to see,” she said.
”We are living in a fantasy world, not reality … By the time winter came all the roads had fallen apart again.”
Yet Costa is virtually a lone voice in this part of the world. Lula remains a hero, she said — albeit for what he represented not what he had achieved. ”People think: if Lula isn’t doing it, it’s because it wasn’t possible. If there’s corruption it’s because politicians always steal,” said Dr Parana. ”He has an aura of honesty.”
Da Rocha points to a series of concrete houses — the result of a housing project put in place after the president’s first visit to Vila Irma Dulce in 2003. ”After he came here things got much better,”she said. ”It was a 100% improvement. People could never have lived like this before.” — Â