|
The man hand-picked by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to restore trust in the ruling Workers Party (PT) amid Brazil's worst political scandal in more than a decade announced Monday that he will not seek re-election as party chairman next month.
Tarso Genro, who stepped down in June as Education Minister to take the helm of the troubled PT, said he was withdrawing from the contest because he had concluded that key figures opposed his plans for restructuring the party.
Genro was supposed to have carried the standard of the Majority Camp of the PT in September's internal election, but apparently the all powerful number two figure, former presidential chief of staff José Dirceu, effectively torpedoed his push for a thorough housecleaning.
Dirceu resigned as President Lula da Silva main advisor in June following claims in Congress that he masterminded a huge operation exchanging favors for votes and amassing financial resources, skimmed from government corporations, to fund electioneering.
Political sources said Genro wanted the PT to formally expel Dirceu along with the party's former treasurer Delúbio Soares and former secretary-general Silvio Pereira, in order to put the scandal behind and move forward.
Genro admitted he was quitting his bid for the party leadership because most of the current Majority Camp leaders "do not agree with a new leadership pact, which could lead to a renewal of the party with greater respect for the minorities".
Genro told reporters Monday that the PT can either attempt a "negotiated" transition or his proposal, which calls for a "rupture with the crisis, and turning a new page".
The conflict came to light when Mr. Genro publicly urged Mr. Dirceu to desist from seeking a seat in the PT's September 18 internal election. Dirceu responded - likewise in public - by saying that no one could take away his right to continue participating in the decision-making process within the PT.
With Genro's withdrawal from the race, the Majority Camp's candidate for PT chairman will be Ricardo Berzoini, who resigned last month as Brazil's Labor Minister.
Seven other factions have put forward candidates for the PT chairmanship, reflecting growing divisions in the party, which former union leader Lula founded in 1980 while battling the country's military regime.
Almost all of the PT's minorities are groups strongly opposed to the fiscally conservative economic policies President Lula has followed since taking office January 2003.
This article appeared originally in Mercopress - www.mercopress.com.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.