Reformist Betrayal in Brazil

Last month’s impeachment of Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, is a sharp reminder that capitalist reforms and sell-out politicians can never serve the needs of the international working class. The political coup against Rousseff and her fake-left, deceptively named “Workers’ Party” points to an escalation of the fight between two camps of Brazilian finance capitalists (see CHALLENGE, 4/16): the pro-China wing represented by Rousseff, and the pro-U.S. wing that orchestrated her ouster and installed her replacement, Michel Temer.
Regardless of the outcome of Rousseff’s trial in the country’s Senate, the workers of Brazil are sure to be the losers. Like arch-imperialist Hillary Clinton and gutter racist Donald Trump in the U.S., Rousseff and Temer are two sides of the ruling-class coin. Along with phony “socialists” like French President Francois Hollande or failed U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, these liberal reformers are all willing agents of the capitalist bosses. Until they are unmasked, our class will stay bound by the exploiters’ chains.
Brazil: Imperialist Prize
With a population of more than 200 million, Brazil is the largest nation and largest economy in Latin America. It lends critical military support to U.S. imperialism, with a lead role in providing troops for the United Nations MINUSTAH forces occupying Haiti since 2004.
A financial, industrial and agricultural powerhouse, Brazil ranks first in the world for exports of sugar cane, coffee and oranges, second for iron ore and soybeans, third for beef cattle.
The country’s enormous wealth is matched by enormous inequality, racist and sexist oppression, and the staggering poverty of Brazil’s working class—“well above the norm,” as the World Bank notes, “for a middle-income country.” Child labor and human trafficking remain rampant. In the rural North and Northeast regions, one of four children under age five suffers from chronic malnutrition (worldbank.org). In the urban favela shantytowns, where residents are predominantly Black or “mixed-race” (like 51 percent of the country’s population overall), murderous cocaine gangs operate with impunity and police kill children as a matter of routine (New York Times, 5/21/15).  
As the U.S. bosses “pivot” to Asia to confront China in the South China Sea, China’s ruling capitalists are challenging the dominance of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, which dates to the mid-19th century. In Brazil, the biggest prize is offshore oil. In 2014, Brazil pumped 2.95 million barrels of petroleum per day, nearly as much as Iraq, Iran or the United Arab Emirates (U.S. Energy Information Administration). Billions of barrels in potential reserves lay off the Brazilian coast, ready to be tapped by the state-run oil operation, Petrobras, the largest company in Latin America.  
In 2009, in exchange for oil import rights, China invested $10 billion in Petrobras. By 2012, Brazil’s annual trade with China had swelled to $75 billion, as compared to $6.7 billion nine years earlier (BBC, 3/27/13). Along with inroads by the Chinese bosses with other fake-leftist regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia, the rise of their influence in Brazil forced U.S. imperialism into action. (Another unreliable Latin American regime, in Honduras, was eliminated in 2009 in a military coup defended by Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State.)
Lies of the Workers’ Party
The Workers’ Party came to power in Brazil in 2002 under populist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula was adept at bribing workers with crumbs from Brazil’s oil wealth to fund the Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program that gave poor families an average of $54 (U.S.) per month and temporarily lifted millions out of extreme poverty. Meanwhile, a faction of Brazilian bosses used the Workers’ Party to pacify the country’s militant trade union movement and win allegiance from Black and indigenous workers. They coopted the anti-racist slogan, “Outro mundo e possivel”: “Another world is possible.”
In 2010, these bosses found a seemingly perfect misleader to succeed Lula as president: Dilma Rousseff. A former guerrilla fighter, she represented the many thousands of workers and students who were abused, tortured and executed after a U.S.-backed, anti-communist coup in 1964 ushered in an openly fascist military regime that ruled Brazil for two decades.
Behind the scenes, however, the real winner in Rousseff’s election was the Chinese ruling class, by then Brazil’s top trading partner. In 2013, capitalizing on the instability that followed the financial crisis of 2008, China agreed to swap billions of dollars of its currency as a reserve against future crises–a direct challenge to the U.S. dollar (BBC). Alarmed by this development, U.S.-connected finance capitalists in São Paulo struck back in the 2014 Brazilian presidential elections. Wealthy ruling-class families threw their support behind Marina Silva, the Socialist Party candidate. As Maria Alice Setubal, heiress to the Itaú Unibanco banking fortune, the largest financial conglomerate in the Southern hemisphere, explained, “The market is against Dilma” (Bloomberg, 9/14/14).
Return of the Right
While Rousseff narrowly won re-election, the Workers’ Party was growing hated by many workers. Prior to the 2014 World Cup, working-class neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro suffered wholesale evictions and occupation by Brazil’s military police. Workers and students responded with violent mass rebellions, strikes and demonstrations in more than 100 cities (The Guardian, 6/12/14). Unrest intensified in 2015, when global oil prices collapsed and Brazilian health care and education were slashed in the name of “austerity.”
With the sell-out Rousseff administration on the ropes, China’s investments and loans became crucial lifelines for the contracting Brazilian economy. In May 2015, three Chinese banks invested $10 billion in Petrobras. In February 2016, Petrobras received yet another $10 billion from the China Development Bank (Bloomberg). The pro-U.S. wing of Brazilian finance capital began grumbling in public. Two months later, Rousseff was impeached.
Rousseff chaired the Petrobras board when scores of executives and politicians—including her mentor, Lula da Silva, and several of her most vehement accusers—were apparently using the company as their personal piggy bank. Even so, the massive bribery and kickback scandal at Petrobras, known as Operation Car Wash, has yet to implicate her. The impeachment campaign is based on minor budgetary irregularities.
Still, few observers in Sao Paulo expect Rousseff to win back her office in the Senate trial. The fix is in; the pro-U.S. bosses, many of them active backers of the old military fascist regime, are back in charge. Acting President Michel Temer was an embassy informant for U.S. intelligence (Counterpunch, 5/26/16). He has named an all-white, all-male cabinet. The new finance minister, Henrique Meirelles, once headed BankBoston, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller-controlled Bank of America, which is in turn closely interlocked with the Setúbal-controlled Itaú Unibanco. Another top financial advisor, Paolo Leme, chairs the Brazil division of Goldman Sachs, the source of Hillary Clinton’s six-figure lecture fees.
Yet another Temer ally is Brazil’s richest man, Jorge Paul Lemann, who owns Heinz Ketchup and Burger King and is close to Warren Buffett, a leading figure in the main wing of U.S. finance capital. Lemann’s apparatus organized street protest groups to rally for Rousseff’s impeachment (Counterpunch, 5/4/16).
Last year, Brazil’s economy shrank by 3.7 percent. Evictions and attacks on workers have continued as the bosses there prepare for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The new reform on the table is “pension reform”—a frontal attack on retired workers.
Brazil’s History of Fightback
From the 1500s, the workers and resources of Brazil have been crucial to the rise of capitalism and imperialism. The colonizing Portuguese bosses named the land “Brazil” after their original source of New World profits: exports of brazilwood to Europe. With the genocidal enslavement of Africans, the local rulers amassed wealth from sugar, coffee, mining, and—after gaining independence from Portugal in 1822—industry. All along, slaves, peasants and workers faced down Brazilian capitalism’s barbaric “progress” with mass rebellions and insurrections. Fightback is a proud tradition in Brazil.
Progressive Labor Party fights to earn the leadership of the masses of Brazil’s industrial, agricultural and service workers. We fight to be the successors of the rebelling soldiers, industrial workers, and landless Black and indigenous farmers who built the fledgling Communist Party of Brazil into a fighting mass movement. In the 1930s, Communist-led women and men workers waged revolutionary armed struggle against the pro-Nazi Brazilian bosses, a history whose music has survived the intervening decades of brutal repression. While the old communist movement was defeated, the masses have never stopped fighting capitalism and imperialism.
Make History: Fight for Communism
Today, PLP stands with and supports the hundreds of thousands of workers and students battling police in the streets of Brazil’s cities against the openly racist, anti-working class government of Temer. But embracing Rousseff leads only into the arms of the Chinese imperialists. Like reformist parties everywhere, the Workers’ Party long ago sold out the working class.
Another world is possible—communism, where the working class runs society, not the capitalists. We call on workers to leave the dead-end road of elections and take the other path instead—to communist revolution. We call on workers all over to smash all borders and unite with their international class sisters and brothers. Help lead us and build a mass, fighting Party to defeat capitalism. The struggle continues, fight for communism! A luta continua, luta pelo comunismo!