Luis Inacio Lula da Silva — In 2002, Lula da Silva (known as Lula) took some lessons in image makeover from Hillary Clinton, Yasir Arafat and Vladimir Putin. It was his fourth run for president of Brazil; this time he would moderate his Communist Workers’ Party’s image. It worked; he is now the chief executive of Latin America’s most populous country and its biggest economy. Congratulations for his election win poured in, from Fidel Castro, the Socialist International, Communist parties — and the Council on Foreign Relations. Kenneth Maxwell, director of the CFR’s Latin American Studies program, wrote an op-ed for the September 27, 2002 Financial Times scolding Lula’s critics for mentioning Lula’s long Red record. After all, Maxwell said, echoing the CFR line, "the Cold War is long over." Maybe he should explain that to Comrade Lula, who insists on wearing his Communist red star lapel pin from the Cold War era and still participates in the Sao Paulo Forum (SPF), the international terrorist conference he helped found with Fidel Castro. To help celebrate his electoral victory, Lula invited Castro and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela’s Marxist president) as his first official state guests. Marco Aurelio Garcia, who founded the SPF with Lula and still serves as Lula’s top adviser, is a hard-line Marxist-Leninist, who participated in Salvador Allende’s Cuban-directed attempt to communize Chile. "We have to first give the impression that we are democrats," Garcia explained to Brazil’s Communist faithful. "Initially, we have to accept certain things. But that won’t last."

But these words, even coupled with ominous, visible reality, didn’t perturb the Pratt House globalists. On December 5, 2002, CFR "expert" Kenneth Maxwell was defending Lula again, this time in the New York Review of Books. Maxwell, who had recently returned from a Brazil trip, said "Lula’s triumph seemed like the realization of an American dream," and he was miffed that anti-communists might spoil that dream. He dismissed Lula’s Castro, Chavez, and SPF connections as inconsequential. Interestingly, two days later, on December 7, the online edition of the People’s Weekly World (PWW), official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, also ran an article on Lula. In it, PWW interviewed Luis Fernandes, a leader of the Communist Party of Brazil, who helped run the Lula campaign. Comrade Fernandes enthusiastically explained that when Lula won, all his fellow Communists "came out into the streets dressed in red" to celebrate.

PWW went on to report: "During the election campaign, Lula charged that FTAA would clear the way for ‘annexation’ of Latin America by the United States while Mercosur is a buttress against U.S. control." Mercosur is a regional trade bloc that includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay as full members, and Chile and Bolivia as associate members. Lula’s line is that the Mercosur countries must accelerate their integration as a sub-region to avoid being swallowed up by the much larger FTAA. The truth is that the socialist, sovereignty-destroying program Lula is pushing for Mercosur would demolish almost all currently existing national barriers of member countries against absorption by the FTAA. In fact, CFR one-worlders (like Maxwell) have been pushing for Mercosur integration for decades. They know that Mercosur, like FTAA, is part of the global WTO regime. Mr. Lula knows this too, of course; he and his top administration officials hobnob regularly with the CFR crowd at globalist conclaves. In fact, Lula himself was the main speaker at a special "Meeting With President Lula" sponsored by the CFR in New York on September 25, 2003.

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