Brazil elections
Revolutionary candidate refuses to stand alonside her mother's old bosses!
Heloisa Helena is coming to the end of her term as Senator for the north-eastern Brazilian state of Alagoas. Until a few weeks ago she was standing as the Workers Party (PT) candidate for Governor of the state. To most people’s surprise, she looked like having a serious chance of winning.
But then the PT’s presidential candidate, Lula, and the majority leadership, decided to impose an electoral alliance across the country with a minor but distinctly right-wing, bourgeois group, the Liberal Party (PL). It’s a rag-bag organisation, which likes to lean on its nationalist credentials.
It includes a multimillionaire textile magnate, the founder of the main yellow trade union confederation, and the owners of a second-rank media empire – loosely bound together by an allegiance to the evangelical Universal Church of God. This cast-list was too much for Heloisa. She resigned as candidate for governor.
All of these manoeuvres from the majority leadership of the PT are in the context of the forthcoming election – the first round of which will take place at the beginning of October. Opinion polls show Lula likely to win the second round. The multi-millionaire textile magnate is now standing as Lula’s running mate for vice president.
Then there was the IMF bail out of Brazil’s flagging economy – when the much more acute situation in Argentina has been constantly turned down for funds. But three quarters of the money will only be paid out after the elections – a clear message that anyone who deviates from current austerity measures will be punished.
Heloisa’s stand hardly came as a surprise. She had built a formidable reputation in her home state as the scourge of the local oligarchy. In 1997 she became the figurehead of a campaign of mass demonstrations to oust one particularly corrupt governor.
Her surprise election to the senate a year later, on the back of this campaign, turned her into one of the best known figures on the left of the Workers Party. She regularly crossed swords on the national news with the grandees of the Brazilian political establishment, many of them from the old sugar planting families of her own north-eastern region.
Her exposure of malpractice by the most powerful of these figures – then the President of the Senate – led to his expulsion from the Senate and helped break up the governing coalition earlier this year.
Heloisa Helena is a member of Socialist Democracy, the tendency of Fourth International supporters within the PT.
Below we print a part of the moving speech she made in the Brazilian senate to explain why she could not stand for election alongside the local representatives of the PL.
It illustrates the deep tensions within the Brazilian Workers’ Party – between the leaders who are so desperate to project an image of themselves as "responsible" candidates for power, and a large part of the membership and wider public, who expect a Lula victory to bring fundamental social and political change to Brazil.
"I need to speak very directly today to the people of Alagoas, because I love that state. Everything I am I learnt there.
"When girls like me are born in Alagoas, they are already marked out either for prostitution or the maid’s quarters. Yet the people of Alagoas made it possible for me to reach this Senate. I was lucky. I never had to walk the streets of my state and sell my body for a plate of food.
"But I did frequent the maid’s quarters, and it was there, from my mother, that I took my first lessons in honesty. I remember my mother staying up late into the night, sewing those beautiful blue sequins onto Madame’s dresses. I begged her to let me have just one to put on the dress of my only doll. But my mother ticked me off because any sequins left over had to be returned to Madame.
"I learnt a lot in Alagoas. The geography of the houses for example. We lived in the maid’s quarters. We weren’t allowed beyond the kitchen. I remember peering down the length of the corridor at a beautiful shelf of books, which no one ever touched, and trying to make out what they were about.
"It was in Alagoas too that I found my first real sources of knowledge, from a communist and from the history of the people of God. The communist was that great Brazilian novelist, Graciliano Ramos.
"The other I learnt from the Dutch nuns and Brazilian priests in my home town. They all taught me the persistence and courage of the oppressed, the excluded, the humiliated, of the survivors. …
"Everyone has followed the endless debates in the PT over a possible alliance with the PL. That chapter is now closed. We will submit to the decision of the majority of the National Leadership. We will be there, working as hard as we can, to promote Lula’s campaign, because we have no doubt that this is a chance to make this wonderful country a real homeland for the great majority of Brazilians.
"But unfortunately, in Alagoas, it will not be possible to implement this alliance. …It’s not that we are masochists in Alagoas, and want to go it alone. But there are limits. We cannot, and will not, ally ourselves in Alagoas with a group of low-life lackies of the local sugar mill owners, who look down on and insult me and my comrades in the PT.
"We will not ally ourselves with people who have been named by the parliamentary inquiry into drug trafficking, "investigating the existence of organised crime in various Brazilian states, involving businessmen, politicians, magistrates and police officers, all connected to the narcotics trade, theft, murder and other crimes". …
"If this alliance is imposed in Alagoas, albeit with a broken heart, I will not be able to stand for Governor of the state. We will continue to campaign, with passion and joy, for Lula.
"But the day that I – in order to stand as candidate for Governor – have to ask for permission, permission from the mill-owners’ to step out onto their varanda, or permission from their hired gunmen to leave the kitchen, then I will lose all moral authority to look my children in the face and tell them that "the greatest satisfaction of any thinking person is to be utterly scrupulous in all they do and all they think".
"Let me use more popular language, so that people in the backlands of Alagoas can understand the situation.
"The day that the state’s sugar barons put a halter round my neck and tell me which way to go, that day I will lose the right to teach my children what I have taught them all their lives, to face the world with pride on their faces and love in their hearts."