CAR WORKERS in Sao Paulo and the surrounding area have gone on strike against a government wage freeze, as the country prepares for a decisive presidential election in a few weeks time.
Car workers' unions, led by the radical CUT, itself linked to the Workers Party, want a sliding scale of wages to compensate them for the declining buying power of their wages.
It is estimated that more than 80,000 workers took strike action.
The car unions want monthly cost-of-living increases because of massive inflation. Monthly increases were common before the new currency, the Real, was introduced on July 1.
Then the government insisted that workers should only have wage increases once a year.
But union leaders say that price have gone up nearly 12 per cent since then. Car production has been badly hit because of high demand and low stocks.
At the country's largest carmaking company, Anfavea (a joint venture between Ford and Volkswagen), production was said to be at a near-total standstill.
The country's right-wing controlled media, especially the reactionary TV Globo which is always used against the left, is using the car strike to launch a smear campaign against Lula, presidential candidate of the Workers Party.
Lula has been trying to run a "moderate" campaign, distancing himself from workers' radicalism, and giving guarantees to big business.
By Charles WitU Mullet Restoring democracy, ending human rights abuses and upholding international law: these are the arguments used Clinton to justify sending a massive military force to remove the ruling junta in the Caribbean island of Haiti.
Desperate last-minute
negotiations led by former President Jimmy Carter appear to have extricated Clinton from having to mount a frontal military onslaught in the teeth of US opposition But anybody who believes that a US-led occupation of the island will fulfil the initial highflown promises must have been on another planet for the last few years.
• PANAMA 1989: where the US replaced one corrupt and brutal regime (headed by a former American agent) with another, at the cost of massive destruction and loss of life.
• THE PERSIAN GULF, 1990-91: Operation Desert Storm did indeed kick Irag out of Kuwait, but Saddam Hussein continues his reign of terror in Iraq and the Kuwaiti ruling family continues to treat the oil-rich country as its own preserve.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis died in the war, many more as the result of sanctions.
•SOMALIA, 1992: this intervention was meant to protect aid efforts and end civil war.
While relief effort was inUSA itially protected, the US presence has just been wound up. According to a report in the Guardian, "UN officials said Washington did not want public attention drawn to its officials leaving Somalia in chaos under can wariors "...aid workers •.. are retreating from all outlying garrisons, abandoning areas of the country to gunmen."
UN backing
America's gunboat diplomacy in Haiti has the backing of the UN Security Council and a number of Caribbean states are sending troops contingents.
However, the US policy's main source of credibility at the outset is given by Haiti's JeanBertrand Aristide.
Elected by a two-thirds majority with a popular mandate to carry out radical social and economic change, Aristide was driven from power in September 1991 by the Haitian army and a reign of terror followed. No, but we'd be happy to give you a lift back to your Sno!
By aligning himself with US intervention, Aristide has turned his back on the poor of Haiti who brought him to UN sanctions against the island have already inflicted terrible suffering on them; and indeed its seems a reasonable assumption that the hope of seeing sanctions ended is one of the main reasons for alleged popular support for intervention on the island.
According to as leading US foreign policy analyst "all the US wants from Aristide is his legitimacy, not his policies".
Reforming the Haitian army and police will be in the hands of the same US services who have aided murderous ultra-right formations throughout Central America.
US-trained
Along with hundreds of other Haitian officers, the current Haitian chief of police, Colonel Michel Francois, was trained at the US Central Intelligence School for the Americas. A huge US-led force on the island would be on hand to suppress movements for social justice. Asylum seekers It could also prevent Haitians fleeing the country to seek asylum in the US far more efficiently than the present military government. Once in Haiti, the US will not find it easy to leave. Haiti is the US's back yard, and unlike Somalia, failure there would not go unnoticed by the voters.
On the other hand, according to American Haiti expert Walter Fauntroy, at least ten years would be needed to reshape Haiti to US designs.
US-dominated
Even if the Haitian junta retires from power next month as agreed, a 6000-strong USdominated force wearing United Nations headgear will remain to "install and maintain a secure and stable climate".
Among its tasks will be modernising the armed forces and creating a separate police force, and it is scheduled to stay until 1996.
If far-reaching social and political engineering is envisaged then this has major implications for the sovereignty of all nations in the region.
From this angle, intervention in Haiti looks like marking a new watershed in the 150-year battle between US imperialism and the rest of the Americas.
Will Cuba be next?
MISS LIBERTY