By TARSUS GENUS*
Lula and Gabriel Boric, together, can unify America in a single concert voice
On the first day of January 1959, at night, in Cuba – the political banditry and the torturers of the political police of Sergeant Generalissimo Fulgencio Batista – were informed that Fidel Castro had entered Havana, celebrated by the people inflamed with rum and with the joy of those humiliated by the dictatorship of the “general”. Accompanied by Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara, Fidel fires the imagination of the dispossessed, perhaps showing that it is better to die fighting than to live under oppression.
About Latin America, always invaded by mariners by Americans and mercenaries, who guaranteed killers like Alfredo Stroessner and Anastacio Somoza in power and murdered rebels like Eliecer Gaitan, Farabundo Marti and Augusto Cezar Sandino, breathed a fresh breath of hope. Regardless of the frustration of the utopias that followed the continent's national liberation struggles. It was the most intense obstruction made against the apocalypse of American national dignity in the past century.
More fights, more moral violence, more hunger, more misery and unpunished murders and our America goes to a more political-electoral level of popular and democratic struggles, in the search to conform sovereignty, policies of minimum social cohesion – more heroes who immolate themselves and few who are left to breathe in the “liberal” jungle – when an ABC worker appears who says “everyone can win”. And he becomes president, without any subversive pretensions against capitalism, which he fights in its concrete form and attacks hunger and generates jobs, using his political capacity to aggregate and conciliate, in non-revolutionary times or even “strong” reformists, saying that everyone should eat, that the “weakest” need the State and that Brazil is a generous and rich country, which cannot accept children without school, nor dead without burial.
Luís Inácio Lula da Silva was the possible rebellion of the dystopian times that were beginning, with the serpent of fascism preparing to put its nails out against the worthy president who succeeded him. Lula's time has not yet passed, but Gabriel Boric's time has already begun. I was recently in Chile and I had the opportunity to listen and speak to President Boric, who has become president of one of the most important countries in South America. This 36-year-old young man arrives at La Moneda Palace with an enormous desire to get it right, to bring to the Government the disordered and pure voice of the streets, which reflected both hatred of all types of oppression, as well as sympathy and respect for traditions. of its people, present in the luminous memory of Salvador Allende: a betrayed, dignified, socialist and libertarian democrat.
And the two will certainly meet in their respective governments: one, with the breath of their rebellious youth; the other – with the experience of the struggles of its people and the conciliation of classes – to try to remove Latin America from the quagmire that the majority of its ruling classes reserved for their nations: to a new level of struggles, disputes and conciliations, since there is no revolution on the horizon, nor defined utopias that make the dead eyes of those devoured by misery or sacrificed by infamous denialism glow.
Two parallel experiences of government begin, in a world in permanent war, sometimes concentrated, sometimes diffused, but which – as always – accumulates profits and distributes suffering. Russia's war against Ukraine is the fateful meeting of two power apparatuses perverted by right-wing nationalism, for which only the myth of the conservative nation is valid, not the material and immaterial reality of the life of its people.
In this corner of the world, two great men, together with their democratic colleagues, will probably meet to think about our destiny and the future of Latin American land. To also block the hydra of fascism, which silently travels through the most fragile and painful sectors of society and its most privileged sectors and happy with the misfortune of others, to show its saliva of hatred and death. May Lula and Boric not be – and will not be – Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, but listening to the whispers of the indignant people and the light of the dead that always surround us with their rebellious examples, unite America in a single concert voice, so that our countries have more common friends than explicit enemies.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
