Political crisis deepens in Brazil: The rise and fall of Palocci

Beyond the sleazy details of the scandal, the rise and fall of Palocci—considered the government’s most important minister and a favorite of Washington and Wall Street—reveal a great deal about Brazil’s Workers Party and those who played a prominent role in its formation.

The Workers Party (PT), the party of Brazil’s president Lula, was born in the great metalworkers strike struggles of 1978-80. Lula, then the leader of the metalworkers in São Bernardo, an industrial city in the state of São Paulo, led those historic strikes that brought together mass assemblies of approximately 100,000 workers. The most significant of these strikes, which took place in 1980, extended across the state of São Paulo, affecting diverse industrial regions including Ribeirão Preto, one of the main commercial and industrial centers of Brazil.

This region was also an important center of the University of Sao Paulo, the largest university in the country. In 1980, a young Antônio Palocci Filho was studying medicine there.

In that period of the closing years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Palocci, still a young student, was a member of a clandestine group called the Organização Socialista Internacionalista (OSI—Socialist Internationalist Organization). The OSI was the Brazilian section of the so-called Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International, the faction led by Pierre Lambert, who had broken with the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1973.

While Lambert’s committee did nothing to build the Fourth International, it was without a doubt the champion among those revisionist organizations calling themselves Trotskyists in helping to build the Workers Party led by Lula. It is worth noting that within the current Lula government, various ex-Lambertist “Trotskyists” like Palocci have held senior posts, among them Luis Gushiken, the ex-minister of communications, who was also forced out over charges of corruption.

Those who knew Palocci in the 1980s recall a conciliatory student, quite timid, who was never even known to speak out in student assemblies in the name of the student tendency to which he belonged, known as Liberdade e Luta (Freedom and Struggle).

However, with the development of the PT and the opportunist and uncritical adaptation of the OSI to this centrist party, soon the mediocre Palocci began to make his brilliant career, always proving capable in behind-the-scenes maneuvers and always climbing the ladder in terms of posts and power. In 1988, he ran as a PT candidate in the elections for the city council of Ribeirão Preto and was among the candidates receiving the most votes. Two years later, in 1990, without even completing his four-year term as a councilman, he was elected as a state deputy. In 1992, again without serving out his term, he was elected mayor of Ribeirão Preto.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/braz-m30.shtml