From Mexico City
the Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, concludes a new “morning”, the press conference that he offers every day for two hours since the beginning of his government. He says goodbye to the journalists: “I am leaving, because my friend is waiting for me Lula for breakfast”.
At that very moment, Lula walks through the gates of the imposing National Palace, convinced of the political importance of a meeting that takes place when the Mexican president reaches historic levels of popularity and he is drifting further and further away from his opponents in all the electoral polls.
The meeting is scheduled to last one hour. It lasts four.
unprecedented opportunity
The hug and the smile of both under the masterful murals of Diego Rivera (Photo) they are the best synthesis of the fact that a historical event has just taken place. Latin America is preparing for an unprecedented opportunity: recover its battered regional integration, with the two Latin American giants willing to rebuild it.
Lula follows a lunch with the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, which develops a broad and increasingly active regional agenda. Lula refers to AMLO and Ebrard as her great friends. And he promises that one of the first things he will do, if he wins the October election, will be return to Mexico to launch an agenda of work and cooperation unprecedented between both countries.
BRUNETTE
In the afternoon, Lula is received by more than 600 legislators from all over the country. They belong to MORENA, AMLO’s political organization, and its allied forces. The meeting seems like the reception of an iconic musical star. Deputies and deputies, senators and senators from all over Mexico receive Lula shouting: “president, president.” He is accompanied by his friend, the charismatic president of MORENA, Mario Slimwho has transformed, in just seven years, a small political organization into a mass movement.
The emotion conquers the immense space of the event when Lula makes a vibrant speech against the arrogance of the powerful, against the lawfare and for the unrestricted defense of the democratic rule of law, on the struggles for justice and equality, on the need to rebuild the ties that the oligarchies have tried to destroy between our countries, when he expresses his admiration for the heritage and the cultural diversity of Mexico. At the end, each of the more than 600 representatives of the Mexican people and all their support teamsThey seem unwilling to leave until Lula takes a photo with them.
Head of State honors
The next day, the former Brazilian president is received with honors as head of state in the Congress of Deputies and in the National Senate. There, Lula is moved to tears recounting her political career, the conquests of her governments and recounting the decadence and democratic challenges of today’s Brazil.
Chemistry, empathy, affectivity, emotion, mysticism. That’s what politics is about. Lula’s tears seal bonds of brotherhood towards a country that has stopped looking only at the giant that harasses it from the North.
At the end of the long day, Lula meets with representatives of the Brazilian community in Mexico. Janja, his partner, is with him, as in all the activities of the tour. Lula tells them that this meeting is as significant for him as all the others she has had. That she admires and moves him to think that people like them, so young, militate and fight for the democratic future of their country, even being so far away. He tells them that one only lives because one has causes to fight for.. And that is the most important thing: to always defend the causes in which one believes and for which one lives.
Half a century of militancy
In half a century of political militancy, Lula participates in these acts as when, since the 1970s, he would travel thousands and thousands of kilometers to hold a meeting with 20 workers or peasants in the confines of a continental and unjust Brazil, immensely unequal. He listens to them, harangues them, explains them, asks for explanations, hugs them, thanks them. He talks to them about the values of the left and progressivism, he talks to them about peace and equality. There isn’t a Lula from before and a Lula from now, at least in his relationship with the militancy. Because Lula knows that that maxim that once sentenced Edward Galeano rules policy: “The only thing that is built from the top down are wells”.
Lula says that politics is an act of love. And that he appreciates the opportunity to be madly in love with his partner Janja, the woman who received 580 love letters during the 580 days he was imprisoned.
In Mexico, Lula finds out that the Supreme Court of Justice of his country has just annulled the last criminal case against him. The legal farce has been dismantled. Others continue. Neither about this news nor about the trip to Mexico have the hegemonic media in Brazil published a single line.
finish one historical tourone of Lula’s last trips abroad, before beginning a frenetic campaign that will change the present and the future of Brazil.
*Coordinator of the School of Latin American and Global Studies, ELAG.