Lula of Brazil: The Story So Far by Richard Bourne, University of California Press (2008), 294 pp., $17.95 (paperback)
When in 2002 former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva was first elected, his victory was hailed as a dramatic political shift for Brazil. Lula of Brazil gives a compelling and critical overview of Lula’s first term as president, using his biography as a backdrop. Bourne traces Lula’s history from tough years of poverty growing up in Brazil’s northeast to his industrial apprenticeship in the country’s south, which led to his participation in the metalworkers’ trade union. Lula’s rise to become the union’s president in 1975, and his involvement in the formation of Brazil’s Workers Party in 1980, served as the springboard to his political career. The book chronicles his subsequent presidential campaigns, which led to his surprising presidency in 2002.
Nothing during Lula’s presidency goes unexamined—from social and economic policies that both reform and acquiesce to the neoliberal orthodoxy to his foreign policy initiatives, which have led Brazil to be considered an “emerging power.” While much remains to be debated about the impacts of Lula’s presidency, Bourne contends that his 2006 reelection gave him “another four years in which to end for others the kind of wretchedness that he knew as a child.” This is a timely book and will be of interest to readers interested in examining Lula’s legacy, now that he has left office.
We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States by James N. Green, Duke University Press (2010) 457 pp., $26.95 (paperback)
Humanizing what the author calls the usual “sterile analysis of political campaigns and foreign policy shifts” in late-20th-century Brazilian history, We Cannot Remain Silent gives a synopsis of political, economic, and social developments in the country, particularly the abuses of the military dictatorship that emerged after the 1964 military coup. The author documents and analyzes in detail the activities of the dedicated church and left-wing activists, exiled Brazilians, and U.S. Latin Americanist scholars who played a major role in introducing these human rights issues into the U.S. public debate. In doing so, they demanded accountability of U.S. policy, which supported the dictatorship.
These efforts created a transnational space and initiated a political shift in the United States in both official and public opinion, providing a basis for much broader campaigns against repression and torture, especially against activists, in Brazil. The more than 100 people interviewed by the author for the book provide a living backdrop of this time, when they “employed creative tactics and invented new ways to educate the U.S. public and influence Washington politicians about the situation in Brazil. . . . Their seemingly modest efforts eventually helped influence a shift (at least for a time) in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America.”
This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil by Wendy Wolford, Duke University Press (2010), 286 pp., $23.95 (paperback)
In This Land Is Ours Now, the author examines the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), Brazil’s dynamic agrarian movement. The author does not focus solely on the movement’s identity, strategy, and ideology, but instead contrasts how the movement is publicly presented with its inner workings, which aren’t always pretty or cohesive. Wolford contends that there is a difference in how the MST, like all social movements, is presented in public and its interior, where “membership is a dynamic process, not a solid category or concrete group of people.”
The book challenges simplified representations of the MST by examining the distinct groups of people who compose it—the small farmers from the south who represent the MST’s traditional members, and former sugar plantation workers from the north who joined the movement after sugar prices collapsed in the late 1990s. Many from the latter region left the movement only four years after joining. The tension between these regions allows the author to examine what she calls a “social mobilization within the movement.” “Movements,” she contends, “are more than just visible entities or structures; they are—perhaps more importantly—a set of discourses, or narratives, ways of talking about justice and injustice, ways of imagining change.”
