President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva this week urged left-wing leaders from across Latin America to refrain from criticizing each other and presented Brazil’s next major foreign policy initiatives as being informed by a partisan project for Latin American integration.
Lula made the remarks Thursday at the opening of the 26th meeting of the São Paulo Forum, a loose coalition of some 120 Latin American leftist parties. Treated by the Brazilian right as a kind of conspiratorial boogeyman, the forum is indeed a relevant organization.
The São Paulo Forum was founded in 1990 in an effort led by Lula and the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. At the time, Lula had just lost the 1989 presidential election, and Castro was grappling with the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on Cuba. Both men were looking for new allies and ways to organize the regional left.
The forum became even more important in the early 2000s when Latin America experienced the so-called “Pink Tide,” that is, the rise to power of left-leaning leaders throughout the region. Several of them — such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua — moved to extend their terms in office by changing the rules of the game, with mixed results.
This year’s meeting was the first to be held in Brasília and the first since the Covid pandemic. Lula said in his speech that the idea for the forum actually came from a trip to Cuba in 1989, shortly after he lost the election, when he began talking with Fidel Castro.
“I learned throughout my life to respect and admire comrade Fidel Castro,” the Brazilian president said. “He never avoided publicly expressing the criticisms he had to make, and he never avoided paying compliments in public.”
Lula’s message was largely...
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