Nazi and Fascists were literally captured, judged, and executed by the end of WW2. You really think Bolsonaro is a monster? Have you even seen what he was saying during his campaign? He got elected on the promise of eradicating corruption and stopping the extreme left wing insanity. He cowered and tried to lure alongside the people he said he would fight. This is why this witch hunt is happening. It's because he thought we could negotiate with the left. Now he is probably going to die. That stabbing really got into his head.
Stop pretending you guys know shit about Brazil or Latin America. Most of you think we are uncultured cavemen. I bet if I did a quiz here doing basic questions about some history, cultural references, and so on, most of you would fail badly. Brazil has the same cancer that Venezuela and other nations down here have left. The left is an evil ideology. Period. History proves my point. Nobody went after the Communists of the Soviet Union. No Nuremberg trials for the left. They were untouched and unpunished.
Lula speech about the inauguration of the Foro de São Paulo( Aka Latin America):
https://www.gov.br/planalto/pt-br/a...a-na-abertura-da-reuniao-do-foro-de-sao-paulo
Speech by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the opening of the Sao Paulo Forum meeting
Transcript of the speech of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on the occasion of the opening of the Sao Paulo Forum, on June 29, 2023
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Published in 30/06/2023 07h46
If at that time I had realized that I was so beautiful, I would not have aged
Well, the first thing I wanted to apologize for was not having to read a nominate here with the names of the companions who are on the table, because it has already been read by three people who spoke before me and I would then take my time to talk to the nominate. Since no one here is a candidate for anything, you don't need to repeat the names.
One thing I wanted to remind you is that who is 43 today, I was only 10 years old when we did the first meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum. I want to believe that many of you who are participating in this forum were no more than 10 years old in 1990.
And I wanted to tell a little bit of the story of why we created the Sao Paulo Forum, why we discussed creating a forum. The first thing is that in 1985 I was aware that we could never come to power through voting, through democracy. That was something I had in my head at the time: it is not possible for a worker to reach the Presidency of the Republic by means of a vote.
I had been a candidate for governor of Sao Paulo in 1982, I imagined that I would win the elections by the amount of people we put on the street, but when it came to the election result, I had only 10% of the vote. I was very disappointed, because I believed that worker voted worker and found that it was not so true. We needed to create a mechanism to evolve people's political consciousness so they could vote for us.
And there were elections of '89. The PT made the decision to launch me as a candidate for president in 89, in an election in which all the great public and historical figures of my country were vying for the presidency of the Republic.
I was, among all the candidates, a very small thing, I was a metal worker, creator of a political party of only 8 years old, competing in the elections against important figures like Leonel de Moura Brizola, a great companion who had been impeached in 1964, who was in exile and who returned to Brazil exactly close to the time of contesting the elections.
Against Dr. Ulysses Guimaraes, who was president of the largest political party in Brazil, he was president of the Constituent Assembly and had a party that had 23 state governors and 306 deputies and senators. There was a former governor of Sao Paulo, Mario Covas, who was a very important public figure in Brazil.There was the vice president of the Republic, Aureliano Chaves, and there were many important people from Brazilian politics vying for the elections.
And I imagined that we would have no chance to contest that election, no chance. And a surprise happened: I went to the second round of the elections. And for the first time, a metal worker from a leftist party in Brazil, which had only the PC B as its ally, we got almost 47% of the vote and almost won the elections.
From the result of the elections of 89, on a trip to Cuba, I and comrade Marcus Aurelius began to talk with the comrades of the Cuban Communist Party and with comrade Fidel Castro and we ventured the possibility of holding a meeting with the entire latin american left, which many at the time fought in very small parties trying to make the revolution.
And so we decided to invite all the organizations so that, together, we could discuss, through a lot of organization of the workers and the people in general, the democratic way to win power in our countries. This is how the idea of us convening the first forum in Sao Paulo was born. We wanted the left of Latin America to talk to each other again and we wanted the left of Latin America to once again dispute the democratic spaces existing in their countries.
And the first meeting took place in Sao Paulo, at a time of the World Cup. He had a country that had 15 left-wing organizations, all very small, but all very full of truth, all very aware that it was through them that the revolution was going to happen in his country. And then we started talking for the first time. Few people knew each other, few people had a relationship of friendship, and we established a way to gain trust between us, so that we could build what we call today the Sao Paulo Forum.
It's important you remember. Comrade Chavez, in the second meeting we had in El Salvador, Chavez wanted to participate in the Sao Paulo Forum and we did not leave. We did not leave because at the time Chavez had tried to deliver the coup in Venezuela, he was a colonel, he was a professor at the military academy in Venezuela. There had been Caracazo in Venezuela, 300 people had died, Chavez had tried to strike a blow and when he arrived and in El Salvador, Chavez wanted to participate.
We do not let Chavez participate because “look, you are not democratic, you tried to give coup, you will not participate in the Sao Paulo Forum”. And it was not just us no, the whole Forum of Sao Paulo had this awareness. Well, then the story you know.
The concrete fact is that the Sao Paulo Forum was the first Latin American experience in which the left decided to join without having to take away their differences or end their differences, but it decided to discuss, from the point of view of democratic organization, dispute the political spaces of our continent.
And you know that the victory was a lot in that period. You know that Latin America, and especially South America, lived its best moment in 500 years from 2002 to 2010. It was the victory in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador. It was the victory even of more progressive people in the other countries that were on our side, in addition to the victory of our comrade Chavez in Venezuela.
We live in a period of great expansion, social conquest and political participation in our continent. I do not believe that there was another historical moment in which the society of South America and Latin America had as many achievements and as many social inclusion policies as they had in this period from 2000 to 2010, 2012, until 2015, when they impeached fellow Dilma Rousseff.
And you know how many times we have been accused, you know how much defamation and how many pejorative attacks are made against the left in South America. We are not seen by the fascist far right, neither in Brazil nor in the world, as democratic organizations. They treat us as if we are terrorists, they accuse us of communists, thinking that we are offended by it.
We would not be offended, we would be offended if they called us Nazis, neo-fascists, terrorists, but communist, socialist, never. This does not offend us, it makes us proud, often and often we know that we deserve these attacks.
Usually, when a person comes to the presidency of the Republic, people do not dare to participate in the Sao Paulo Forum. The truth is this, our comrades, even our comrades did not like to participate in the Sao Paulo Forum, because we are often elected president of the Republic and we do not like to hear criticism.
The same people who applaud us during the campaign are often the same people who boo us. And instead of asking why they are booing, we treat them as enemies. And often they are booing because we did not do what we promised during the election process.
So we need to learn to exercise democracy as much as possible that we can exercise. Because democracy, it is very important to the extent that you establish an alternation of power. Democracy is a constant exercise, I always say that democracy is like marriage. A marriage, if the husband and wife do not make concession to each other, every holy day, the marriage ends.
If in a family, the father and mother do not make concessions to their children, the relationship is bad. So democracy is this, democracy is you making concessions all the time, conquering all the time, defeating all the time, but establishing a democratic way of living democratically in adversity. And we can't create problems for each other.
It is important for us to be clear about this. I, here in Brazil, is the first time that a president governs this country for the third time, it is the first time. I certainly, if I had judgment, would not have been a candidate for president of the Republic again, because I had left my second term with 87% good and great in this country. I could use this historical capital for the annals of history and not go back.
After all, I am 77 years old. It doesn't seem like it, you're seeing that I'm here very young. And I say every day, for me to believe, I do not tell you to believe, I say for me to believe, old age only happens when a person does not have a cause. If every human being has a cause for him to dedicate himself, for him to fight, old age does not happen, old age, wrinkles may appear the face, but it does not appear within his consciousness. And then you're always new, always willing to fight.
And I returned to govern this country, first to reestablish the democratic process of this country. We like democracy, we like to have people protesting against us, we like it when we have a strike against us, we like it when we negotiate. None of this is against democracy, all of it is the result of democracy. Democracy is not a pact of silence, democracy is a society in motion, in search of better days, better achievements and better quality of life.
So democracy cannot bother any leader. And I know how much we've lost on our continent. I know how sad it was for Argentina to have a right-wing president a short time ago. I know how sad Rafael Correa's departure was. I know how sad the Chilean right has been. I know how sad the coup in Bolivia was. I know how sad it was for us to have our partner Dilma Rousseff impichada here in this country.
And we, instead of being sorry, have to take lessons. Where do we go wrong? What we can't do? Why did such a thing happen to us? Why after 30 years trying to make the revolution, the Farabundo Marti front loses the election to the right and in re-election has only 14% of the vote?
One cannot criticize others all their lives. Every now and then we have to look inside ourselves and know what we did wrong. Why did that happen? Why was President Dilma impeached? Was it just a mistake of the far right or do we have mistakes as a political party? From time to time, we have to think, we have to meditate, so that we can prevent new mistakes from hindering our walk by achieving the quality of life of our people.
I've come back to rule this country because I have a mission. It's not even a government program commitment, it's a mission. We need to end inequality in the world, it is not possible to continue with inequality in food, wages, education, housing, gender inequality, racial inequality, that is, every holy day we see increasing the number of poor on the planet. Children starve as the rich try to pay for rocket or submarine passage to search for a new world, when their world is this.
So, companions and companions of the Sao Paulo Forum. Among us, there are no longer many people who helped found the forum. Even from the PT, I was watching, Ze, appears there in that movie, I appear, Marcus Aurelius, you and Gushiken. Marcus Aurelius is dead, Gushiken is dead, we both have left. As I intend to live to 120 years, get ready, because I will continue preparing my speeches here.
Here in Brazil I usually call the death of Caetana and where Caetana is I'm far away. And I even made a decision not to visit more cemetery, not to visit more sick people in the hospital, I now want to visit only child being born, only new thing sprouting, you know, because if I raise my hand it may be that someone wants to take me and take me, and I will not allow it.
I want to say to you that the Sao Paulo Forum is a blessing that we have managed to create in Latin America. The left has problems all over the world. I do not know how many European comrades there are here at this meeting, but we need to rediscuss the discourse of the left. We need to rethink what we want and what we have to do to achieve.
Often the right has more ease than we do with fascist discourse. Here in Brazil, we face the discourse of custom, the discourse of the family, the discourse of patriotism, that is, here we face the discourse of everything that we have historically learned to combat.
In Europe, for example, the left has lost the discourse on the issue of migration. The left does not know how to defend the issue of immigrants. It is the right, which is really against it, and often the right, like Angela Merkel, has a correct political position of accepting thousands of immigrants in Germany.
We need to try to discuss our mistakes so that we can correct them. I do not think, comrade Gleisi, that we among the left here, can one be criticizing the other. Often we have the habit of talking “ah, such a guy is wrong, so we need to punish, we do not need to talk, we do not have to talk”. No, among friends, we talk in person. We do not make public criticism because criticism is of interest to the far right, it is of no interest to the people.
If we have a problem with a partner, instead of criticizing them publicly, we have to talk in person. I am president of the Republic, but none of you, neither of the PT, nor of the Brazilian parties and nor of the allied parties of the Latin American left, is forbidden to criticize me or to call the PT to attention for any mistake I may make.
Because otherwise, we are not a companion. Otherwise, we are not really allies. Ally is not the one who is always pleasing and smoothing, often the true friend is the one who says you are wrong. Often, the true companion is the one who catches your eye.
And that is why I have learned, throughout my life, to respect and admire fellow Fidel Castro. Because since 1985, in all the relationship I had with Fidel Castro, he never stopped doing the criticism he had to do personally and never stopped praising publicly. He acted differently, he personally criticized and publicly praised.
Often, we on the Latin American left self-destruct. Because we often use our adversaries in the media to speak ill of us, to try to destroy us, to show our faults. Because virtues are never shown.
So, dear companions, I wanted to end my speech by saying to you. I, although I am 77 years old, my energy to do politics is 30. And you know the tasks that we have at the international level. This year, we have many tasks. First, we have the BRICS in South Africa, then we have the G20 in India. Then we have the Celac meeting with the European Union in Brussels this month.
Then we have the first Amazonian meeting held in the state of Para, with all the Amazonian countries, including we are inviting French Guiana to participate. We are inviting Indonesia and we are inviting the two Congos.
What is more, we will now have in Leticia next week a meeting with experts and scientists to prepare the so-called Bethlehem Meeting. And more importantly, in 2025 we will have for the first time, a meeting to discuss the climate issue about the Amazon within the Amazon, in an Amazon state, for people to know what the Amazon actually is.
And we want to build with the 8 countries of South America a unitary policy, so that we can arrive in December or perhaps even earlier, in the UAE, for COP28 with the right position in defense of the countries that keep the forests standing like South America, Congo, Democratic Congo and more Indonesia. Our task is very big, it is very big and we cannot waste a minute of time, much less space, otherwise we lose.
Brazil was out of the world for almost six years, six years in which Brazil was not taken seriously anywhere in the world. We came back and we want to go back, not to Brazil to be highlighted again, we want to go back so that South America and Latin America will be highlighted again.
We return to fight for the autonomy of the United Nations. The UN cannot continue with the same size it had in 45. We need to increase the membership of the UN, with Africa, with Latin America, with the Asian countries, and we need to change the permanent members of the Security Council. Because they are the ones who produce weapons, they are the ones who produce war, without going through the decision of the Security Council.
So we are in a trench, in addition to taking care of our country, we have to take care of strengthening the role of the progressive and democratic sectors of society in this world, because the fascist right, it has grown. It has grown in many places, in places that we imagined it would grow again. She's grown back up.
So I wanted to make an appeal. Comrade Gleisi Hoffmann, president of the PT, companion of the PC do B, comrades of the Latin American parties. We do not have time to fight for minor things. Who was critical of fellow Tabare or who was critical of fellow Pepe Mujica knows how much they lack in power for us to be able to make criticism.
Therefore, it is much better to have a companion of us making some mistakes for us to criticize than to have someone from the right governing, which does not even allow us to have space to criticize. In Brazil, we learned. Four years of the far right in this country has been a lesson for all of us.
But either we create judgment, or we organize ourselves and we work to solve the problems of Brazilian society, especially with social inclusion, or the extreme right is there, as long as lies, using fake news, violating any parameter of dignity to return to power.
So I want you to know that you can count on me. As long as this young heart is pulsating, I will be fighting for us to achieve respectability, the dignity of the working people of our beloved Latin America.
A hug, dear, and good congress for you.