Sorry, please delete this. Wrong forum. I'll repost. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

Unasur will be Lula's show
At the meeting of South American leaders in Quito, the path forged
by Brazil's president, not Columbia's, will find most favour


Hugh O'Shaughnessy
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 August 2009 11.00 BST

It'll be Lula's day on Monday, high up in the Andes in Ecuador's poor but beautiful colonial capital of Quito.

He'll be the dominant figure when a majority of Latin American governments solemnly and forcefully declare their distaste for – indeed their rejection of – foreign governments' efforts to mess up their countries and turn them into a new battlefield where "the good guys" (whoever they may be), using real bullets, slug it out to the death with "the bad guys".

The occasion will be the meeting of Unasur, the Union of South American Nations, an energetic organisation of sixteen countries which wants to fix the continent's course towards a future of quiet self-respect and dedication to the effective reform of its vast social problems of inequality and racism. Under the Brazilian leader's aegis a raspberry will be quietly blown in Quito at those who posit the continuation of the phoney cold war of past decades.

This needless struggle pitted the supposed champions of western Christian civilisation, armed to the teeth and trained in the latest torture techniques, against Castroites, Sandinistas and Allendistas who might – by dint of outrageous exercises in political spin – be portrayed as latter-day followers of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and the sort of folk who were never happier than when breakfasting off freshly-grilled babies. Just as Lula himself had to suffer from the professional alarmists of Wall Street before he won the clean presidential elections that brought him to power, today it is Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia who are the particular victims of well-resourced campaigns of international vilification such as has never been mounted against, say, Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians or the regime in Egypt for its jerrymandered elections.

Now the leader of Latin America's largest country – with India, Russia and China one of the "Brics", the planet's most promising economies – and with Brasília likely to soon take a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, Lula can and does, laugh off the humiliations of yesteryear – which included being turned away from the doors of Labour party headquarters in Walworth Road for looking too scruffy. He has no hesitation in criticising the financial strategies which have brought US banks low, or in telling the US Navy to stop prowling round Brazil's massive new offshore oilfields or in saying that Washington's pussyfooting in Tegucigalpa must stop, the elected President Zelaya restored and the increasingly violent impostors bundled away.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/09/unasur-lula-brazil-ecuador