'NYT': Tupi pode mudar política na AL

Jornal vê Brasil capaz de fazer contraponto à Venezuela

Com o barril do petróleo quase em US$ 100, a descoberta do campo de Tupi tem o potencial de transformar o Brasil em uma força global de energia e redefinir as políticas em um continente faminto por energia, afirmou o “New York Times” em reportagem publicada ontem. A reserva, estimada entre cinco bilhões e oito bilhões de barris, é a maior descoberta desde uma no Cazaquistão, em 2000.

“Nos próximos cinco anos, pode-se imaginar as reservas totais do Brasil ultrapassando México e Canadá, perdendo apenas, nas Américas, para Venezuela e Estados Unidos”, afirmou o jornal. Para Peter Hakim, presidente do centro de estudos Inter-American Dialogue, especializado em América Latina, o Brasil está se tornando uma potência energética.

O “Times” fez um contraponto entre o Brasil e seus vizinhos Bolívia e Venezuela. Nesta, “para desgosto dos Estados Unidos”, Hugo Chávez tem usado os recursos do petróleo para implantar uma agenda de esquerda, em seu país e em outros. “O campo de Tupi tem agora potencial para dar mais peso à abordagem de esquerda do Brasil, que é mais moderada”, afirmou o “Times”. O jornal observou que isso já provocou reações, com Chávez chamando o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva de “magnata do petróleo”.

Segundo o “Times”, a descoberta também é uma boa notícia para Argentina e Chile, que enfrentaram problemas de energia no inverno nos dois últimos anos.

O jornal citou até duas charges de Chico Caruso em O GLOBO: uma no dia seguinte ao anúncio da descoberta, com Lula tomando banho de sol em cima de um jorro de petróleo, e depois jogando óleo no presidente boliviano, Evo Morales, com a legenda: “Lula lá, cheio de gás: cuidado Morales!”.

Mas, ressalta o “Times”, o campo de Tupi, por estar em águas profundas, representa um desafio tecnológico. “Esse petróleo é para o futuro”, disse ao jornal Larry Goldstein, diretor da Fundação de Pesquisa de Política Energética, em Washington. “Se eu fosse Chávez, não perderia o sono — não agora.”

Shifting Presidential Politics, Already

Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, right,
took his presidential campaign to voters’ doors in Des Moines last month

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: November 4, 2007
The New York Times

DES MOINES, Nov. 3 — With a year to go until Election Day, the Republican and Democratic Parties are going through internal battles over their very identity, even as the races for their presidential nominations intensify. In many ways, the battles over how the parties will define themselves in the post-Bush era are nearly as significant a political fight as the presidential contest itself.

The continued strength of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who supports abortion rights and gay rights, is testing the question of whether social issues still drive Republican primary voters. Mr. Giuliani is talking about terrorism, cutting taxes, his record in managing New York City government — but he has made no serious effort to shade his positions to appeal to the social conservatives who helped reshape the party over the past three decades and helped President Bush win the White House twice.

Should Mr. Giuliani win the nomination, he would give the party a very different definition and face than the Southerners and evangelicals who have been ascendant until now.

The challenge to orthodoxy is slightly less marked on the Democratic side, where the party has tilted from the left to the center over the past 20 years. Tough talk about Iran by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has put her at odds with much of her party, and her nomination would suggest the party is willing to embrace a relatively hawkish foreign policy even as it promises to end the war in Iraq.

It typically falls to the nominee to provide the ideological framework for his or her party. That appears to be especially so this time, reflecting how both parties are somewhat adrift after eight years under Mr. Bush.

“The Republican Party is waiting for a nominee to voice a post-Bush vision for the party,” said Richard N. Bond, a former Republican National Committee chairman.

Of the two, the Republican Party seems to be at more of a turning point. Even if Mr. Giuliani fails to win the nomination, the fact that so many Republicans were willing to consider a candidate who was openly for abortion rights and gay rights — something that would have been unthinkable four years ago — suggests just how much the definition of what it means to be a Republican is changing.

On the Democratic side, the thirst to retake the White House is easing some of the party’s traditional internal divisions. “Ideological battles tend not to happen when parties believe they are going to win,” said Joe Andrews, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Still, if Mrs. Clinton should win the nomination, her campaign so far suggests that she would follow in her husband’s footsteps by trying to bridge the divide between the party’s liberals and centrists. A victory by former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, whose campaign is being run and highly influenced by many of the same advisers who managed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004, would suggest the party is leaning more to the left.

For Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, it may be more a matter of tone than ideology. Mr. Obama has said he wanted to transcend partisanship even as he appeals for support from a party whose base has been hungry for partisan battle. Mr. Bond and others have suggested that a victory by Mr. Obama could produce the most striking change in the identity of the Democratic Party.

“Obama is in a position to reposition his party not only in terms of issues, but in terms of offering a more general embracing appeal,” Mr. Bond said.

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The Bush Effect:
The President as Asset, but Only to Democrats

Consider this tally: 47 to 2.

That’s the number of times Democrats invoked President Bush’s name during their most recent debate to the number of times Republicans mentioned him at theirs (and one of the two Republican mentions was criticism from Representative Ron Paul of Texas, an antiwar candidate). Such are the consequences of being one of the least popular presidents since the invention of modern polling.

Aside from Mr. Paul, the Republicans almost never directly criticize the president. They hardly talk about him at all. And when they do, it never seems to have much of a four-more-years ring to it. “Change Begins With Us,” is one of Mitt Romney’s slogans.

The Republicans are in a bind. The president’s approval rating was at 30 percent in a CBS News poll in mid-October, so to embrace him is to risk alienating voters in the general election. But the same poll found that more than two-thirds of Republican voters still approved of Mr. Bush’s job performance, so if the candidates are too critical of him they risk offending primary voters.

The candidates walk a tightrope, refraining from criticizing Mr. Bush while sometimes telegraphing their independence from him. Rudolph W. Giuliani praises Mr. Bush as keeping the nation safe even as he presents himself as a competent manager, perhaps to draw a contrast with the president. Senator John McCain says little about Mr. Bush, but is outspoken in his criticism of some members of the administration. Fred D. Thompson presents a basically optimistic view of the nation, but criticizes some Bush programs, like the No Child Left Behind law.

Mr. Bush faces a challenge of his own: How to stay relevant as coverage of the race to succeed him eclipses coverage of his presidency. While it is unclear how potent a fund-raiser he will prove, whether Republicans will ask him to campaign for them, or what role he will play at the convention, Mr. Bush may have shown a glimpse of his strategy in recent days as he stepped up his criticism of the Democratic Congress.
MICHAEL COOPER

The Money Race:
Democrats Find Favor With G.O.P. Mainstays

As if Republicans need more evidence that they are in for a tough 2008, even traditionally Republican industries are shifting more of their giving to Democrats this year, and especially to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who leads the Democrats in polls.

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which categorized contributions by industry, individuals working in the finance, insurance and real estate businesses have given $32.5 million, or 54 percent, of their contributions this year to Democratic presidential candidates. Mrs. Clinton alone received $12.1 million of that money.

A total of $28.2 million went to Republicans. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who leads the Republicans in national polls, received about $10.5 million.

The trends are even clearer when compared with 2004 (when there was only one Republican, President Bush, seeking contributions).

People working for energy and natural resources companies gave 80 percent of their presidential contributions to Mr. Bush in 2004. This year, 59 percent of their money has gone to Republicans. Mr. Giuliani has been the biggest recipient, with $818,000. Mrs. Clinton is second with $569,000.

The health care industry, which had a rocky history with the last Democratic administration, President Bill Clinton’s, has given $6.3 million to Democrats, including $2.6 million to Mrs. Clinton, more than any other candidate. It has given $4.8 million to Republicans.

The construction industry still favors Republicans but less than before. It put about 70 percent of its presidential money into Mr. Bush’s campaign in 2004 but has given just 59 percent of it to Republicans this year; Mr. Giuliani received $1.4 million, and Mrs. Clinton received $1.3 million.

Likewise, agribusiness, which gave to Republicans by a 3-to-1 ratio in 2004, has only slightly favored Republicans this year, with $3.2 million for presidential candidates. Mitt Romney received the most, $565,000, but Mrs. Clinton was close behind, with $524,000.
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Economic Balancing Act for Argentina’s Next Leader

Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner with her husband, Néstor, on Tuesday.

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

The New York Times

BUENOS AIRES, Oct. 31 — The landslide victory of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the wife of Néstor Kirchner, Argentina’s current president, seemed to signal that the Peronist party was back and stronger than ever. But the way she won the presidency and the economic challenges she faces will prove a stiff test of her abilities to keep the couple in power.

Mrs. Kirchner, 54, won on Sunday with 45 percent of the vote, becoming Argentina’s first woman to be elected president and cementing the Kirchners as a political dynasty.

Her closest challenger, the center-left Congresswoman Elisa Carrió, garnered 23 percent. But an analysis of the vote shows that the president-elect won in only two major urban centers — Mendoza and San Miguel de Tucumán — drawing most of her support from the provinces where the lower classes voted with nationalistic fervor to continue Mr. Kirchner’s economic policies, which managed to pull Argentina out of its 2001 economic crisis, considered by many economists to be the country’s worst ever.

The aging Peronist party that carried her to victory has gone through so much change in the past decade that it is in “bad need of some vitamins,” said Graciela Römer, a political analyst here.

Mrs. Kirchner inherits double-digit inflation and a lurking energy crisis, two issues that will be difficult to address without alienating the poor classes that are the most vulnerable to economic shocks.

But her ultimate success in building her party’s base and shoring up the Peronists’ grip on power could depend on her ability to respond to the demands of the middle class, which has been critical of the authoritarian tendencies of the Kirchner government. Mrs. Kirchner failed to win in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Rosario — three cities with substantial middle-class populations.

“She will have to continue with the economic policies of Kirchner but put a stop to the concentration of power,” Ms. Römer said, “and look to build more dialogue and consensus.”

Peronism, a populist and nationalistic movement that sprang out of the rule of Gen. Juan Domingo Perón, the former president, has in recent years become three parties in one, with Mr. Kirchner leading the center-left strain with more pragmatic tendencies. But his mandate was tenuous in 2003, when he mustered only 22 percent of the vote on the first ballot. Former President Carlos Menem, another Peronist who espoused a neoliberal model, dropped out of contention, making a runoff unnecessary.

Even with Mrs. Kirchner’s large margin of victory, the government’s ability to maneuver could be more limited than before, analysts said this week. The new president is likely to inherit her husband’s falling approval rating, as voters make little distinction between her and Mr. Kirchner, Daniel Kerner, an analyst with Eurasia Group, said this week.

And the government will have its hands full taming rising consumer prices. Mrs. Kirchner has insisted that official government figures showing inflation between 8 percent and 10 percent have not been manipulated, but economists both here and abroad have said otherwise for months, pegging the inflation rate at closer to 20 percent.

The government intends to lower inflation through a “social pact” between the private sector and unions that would keep a lid on prices and wage-increase demands, and through a gradual fiscal adjustment. But measures that could slow growth or constrain consumption will be politically unfeasible, Mr. Kerner said, as they will undermine the government’s base of support.

An advantage Mrs. Kirchner has, however, is the fractured state of Argentina’s opposition. Julio Burdman, a political analyst here, called the opposition’s organization the weakest in Argentine history. Opposition parties briefly rallied to protest missing ballots on election night, a charge that Mrs. Kirchner said should be investigated.

Mrs. Kirchner is expected to have a strong ally to help plug the holes in the Peronist party apparatus — her husband. Mr. Kirchner said in interviews last week that he would dedicate himself after the election to “constructing social organizations,” a signal some analysts took to mean that he plans to shore up the party.

If he is successful, that might be just enough time for him to make a run at replacing his wife as president, rather than her risking lame-duck status. Some analysts believe Mr. Kirchner had just such a plan in mind when he decided in July not to run for re-election, despite his popularity at the time, and instead pushed his wife’s candidacy in a sort of merry-go-round presidency.

The Kirchners have been coy about their political strategy. Mr. Kirchner said publicly on Tuesday that he would “take off for a literary cafe.” In an interview with CNN in Spanish on Tuesday, Mrs. Kirchner seemed to scoff at the idea of an alternating succession.

“Kirchner 2011 is like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ ” she said. “It is a fictional movie.”

A Violent Police Unit, on Film and in Rio’s Streets

Belemcom, via Reuters

Actors filmed a scene from “Tropa de Elite,” the movie based on BOPE that opened Friday throughout Brazil.

• By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
• The New York Times

RIO de JANEIRO, Oct. 13 — For Antônia Dalva de Souza, a new movie depicting the violent war between Rio’s drug gangs and an elite police military squad hit too close to home.

Douglas Engle for The New York Times

A badge bears BOPE’s symbol, a skull and crossed pistols.

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Douglas Engle for The New York Times

A member of the State Police Special Operations Battalion, known as BOPE, stood guard in the Parada de Lucas slum in Rio de Janeiro during an occupation in 2005 after eight kidnappings in which drug dealers were suspected.

Her hillside house, with its flimsy hollow brick walls, was riddled by police bullets this year. A round scar on her upper arm came from a bullet fired in a recent police crackdown, she said. Another stray bullet killed her 5-year-old daughter, Joyce, in 1995, as she lay beside her in bed. She suspects the police fired the shot.

“They come in firing,” Ms. de Souza, 32, said. “My kids crawl under the bed when the shooting begins.”

Residents of the Vila Cruzeiro slum here, one of the more violent in Rio, say they have been under siege for the past month from the black-clad, beret-wearing State Police Special Operations Battalion, better known as BOPE by Brazilians. Battalion members ride in on heavy armored vehicles bearing the force’s symbol, a skull and crossed pistols, or on foot, moving with frightening, catlike speed and efficiency.

Like seemingly every other Rio resident, Ms. de Souza has seen “Tropa de Elite,” or “Elite Squad,” a new Brazilian drama based on life inside BOPE, which is tasked with combating the city’s drug traffickers.

The movie, which opened nationwide on Friday but last week in Rio and São Paulo, has offered a rare look into the battalion, which is depicted as killing and torturing, seemingly at will. It is causing many Brazilians to reflect on what level of violence is acceptable from the police, especially in Rio, a city with a homicide rate more than six times higher than New York City’s.

In particular, torture is presented in the film as a near constant aspect of urban violence in Brazil, with police officers and traffickers competing to outdo each other on the brutality scale.

Even before it hit theaters, “Elite Squad” was already on its way to becoming one of Brazil’s biggest movies. A pirated DVD version was seen by nearly 11.5 million people, the polling organization Ibope said.

Efforts by the Rio police to keep the movie out of theaters failed. And on Thursday a police colonel in an internal affairs unit demanded that José Padilha, the director, appear for questioning on Monday. Mr. Padilha said Friday that it was part of a police effort to root out the officers who helped him make “Elite Squad.” Gov. Sérgio Cabral of Rio advised him to ignore the request. “The police are trying to persecute everybody that worked on this film,” Mr. Padilha said.

No film has caused such a stir here since “City of God,” an acclaimed 2002 look at Rio’s favelas, or slums, from the perspective of drug dealers. “Elite Squad” has made almost everyone who has seen it squirm, prompting, for example, a debate about whether hedonistic drug use by Rio’s rich and middle class is to blame for the city’s war.

The film traces the true story of Operation Holiness, the 1997 BOPE effort to exterminate a drug gang working in a favela near the home of Rio’s archbishop. BOPE was tasked with making the area safe for a brief visit by Pope John Paul II.

During the four-month operation, BOPE killed about 30 people and arrested 30, including the two drug kingpins, said Rodrigo Pimentel, a former BOPE officer who led the operation and co-wrote the book that inspired the movie. At least two bystanders were among the dead.

Back then, BOPE had about 120 members and was considered a haven for honest officers in Rio. The force has grown to more than 400 today, and its reputation for being incorruptible is fading.

But its reputation for brutality is almost indisputable. In a city fed up with violent crime, the movie’s fictional protagonist, Capt. Roberto Nascimento, has been lionized by many here for his ruthless, deadly style in taking on criminals.

It is not unlike the way Americans have grown to admire the fictional Agent Jack Bauer of the television series “24,” whose no-holds-barred style strikes a chord in a society on edge over terrorist threats. Both men are deeply troubled. Captain Nascimento, played by the actor Wagner Moura, suffers from wrenching panic attacks and struggles to separate his violent night world from his family life.

The captain and his men incessantly slap drug suspects and cover their heads with plastic bags until they spit blood. “Put it on the pope’s tab,” the captain says when a fellow squad member asks him whether to finish off a torture victim. It was a line BOPE members often said during the real operation, Mr. Pimentel said.

Reactions to the Nascimento character seem to have broken down along class lines. “He brings security to us rich and middle-class people,” said Aletea de Souza, a fitness trainer, after a showing on Sunday in Leblon, one of Rio’s wealthiest neighborhoods. “I wouldn’t say he’s a hero, but he’s a barrier, between the good and the bad.”

In Vila Cruzeiro that kind of attitude is breeding concern that the film glorifies BOPE. “This is a dangerous movie,” said Nanko G. van Buuren, who directs the Brazilian Institute of Innovations in Social Health, a nongovernmental organization in the favela. “The BOPE are torturing, and they are killing, and that is not O.K.” Children in the favela wear black and playact torture sessions, placing plastic bags over the heads of friends, he said.

Mr. Padilha said the eye-for-an-eye reaction of many Brazilians surprised him. He said he set out to make a film denouncing violence and torture. Mr. Moura, the actor, said he thought it was “impossible that people in Finland or Sweden would see these police as heroes, police that torture and kill,” while many Brazilians clearly respect Captain Nascimento.

Mr. Pimentel, who resigned from BOPE in 1998 after six years, says the movie is arriving at a time of outrage among residents over violence in Rio. A particularly shocking case was the death in February of João Helio Fernandes, 6, who was dragged more than four miles by a seat belt after two teenagers stole his family’s car at gunpoint.

Mr. Pimentel said he became disillusioned with BOPE after Operation Holiness. “The police have forgotten their main mission,” he said. “We were not there to serve and protect. We were just fighting a private war against the drug traffickers.”

Mery Galanternick and Joshua Schneyer contributed reporting.

Scientists Are Making Brazil’s Savannah Bloom

Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

Pioneers In the labs and fields of Brazil, Embrapa has become a research leader in tropical agriculture.
In Belem, an instructor taught students how to collect seeds.

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: October 2, 2007 - The New York Times

PLANALTINA, Brazil — Anyone curious to know how Brazil has become what the former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, calls an “agricultural superpower” — poised to overtake the United States as the world’s leading exporter of foodstuffs — would do well to start here in this busy network of government laboratories.

The New York Times

The sprawling labs and experimental fields are operated by Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural and livestock research agency, and have become an obligatory stop for any third world leader visiting Brazil.

Although little known in North America, Embrapa has in three decades become a world research leader in tropical agriculture and is moving aggressively into areas like biotechnology and bio-energy.

“Embrapa is a model, not just for the so-called developing world, but for all countries,” said Mark Cackler, manager and acting director of the Agricultural and Rural Development Department of the World Bank. “A key reason that Brazil has done so well with its agricultural economy is that it has invested heavily and intelligently in front-end agricultural research, and Embrapa has been at the forefront of that effort.”

Embrapa owes much of its reputation to its pioneering work here in the cerrado, the vast savannah that stretches for more than 1,000 miles across central Brazil. Written off as useless for centuries, the region has been transformed in less than a generation into Brazil’s grain belt, thanks to the discovery that soils could be made fertile by dousing them with phosphorus and lime, whose optimum mixture was established by Embrapa scientists.

When the annual World Food Prize was awarded last year to two Brazilians affiliated with Embrapa, the citation called the emergence of the cerrado “one of the greatest achievements of agricultural science in the 20th century.”

Embrapa also championed the main crop for the region by developing more than 40 tropical varieties of soybeans, which had been thought of as only a temperate zone crop.

“When I was working in India and Pakistan and the Near East countries in the 1960s and 1970s, nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive,” Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for work that earned him the title “father of the Green Revolution,” said in a telephone interview from Iowa. “But Embrapa was able to put all the pieces together.”

As a result, Brazil is today the world’s top exporter of soybeans and beef and a fast-rising exporter of cotton, three-quarters of which it produces here in the cerrado. Encouraged by that success, Embrapa scientists have turned their attention to wheat. Brazil now imports most of its wheat from nearby countries with temperate climates.

“We think the potential is enormous,” said Roberto Teixeira Alves, general director of the cerrado research center at Embrapa. “We launched two new varieties of wheat with good yields just last year, and believe there is also a strong possibility of adapting barley to the region.”

Embrapa’s laboratory in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, has also been studying ways to make carbon sequestration more efficient. Scientists have been examining what are known as “Amazonian dark earth soils,” small, fertile islands that were built up by pre-Columbian Indian tribes and that have especially high concentrations of phosphorous.

“We don’t know why that should be, but we are trying to understand and reproduce that phenomenon so that we can benefit from it now,” said Wenceslau Teixeira, a soil scientist who is in charge of the effort. “These islands have especially stable levels of carbon, which helps retain nutrients and is thus both quite useful and hard to find in tropical soils.”

And although Brazil’s sugar-based ethanol program is largely focused elsewhere, Embrapa has an agro-energy division that is concentrating on ways to grow diesel fuel. Embrapa scientists have identified some 30 plants that could be used in such programs and are focusing on palm oil.

“Palm oil’s composition is one of the best for production of bio-fuels,” said Maria do Rosario Lobato Rodrigues, the director of the Manaus laboratory, where the research is based. “It has a high capacity to fix carbon, doesn’t require the use of chemical products to produce, and no part of the plant is ever wasted.”

Under Embrapa’s newly broadened definition of agriculture, nothing seems off limits, from a tropical hog that is lower in fat and cholesterol than its American counterpart and has a higher yield of loin and ham, to the extraction of bio-polymers from spiders. At the Embrapa executive dining room in Brasilia, there are even place mats made with varieties of natural cotton fibers, which, because they grow in shades of green and tan, could cut costs of dye stocks for textile manufacturers.

Getting adequate financing is always a problem for any public research institution in Brazil. Two years ago, though, the Brazilian Congress passed a law that allows Embrapa to profit from its research and has widened the agency’s ability to form joint ventures.

Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

A nursery worker tended Cupuacu fruit.

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Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

In Manaus, a chemist analyzed vegetal tissues.

“Being entrepreneurs is new for us, but we need to transform our knowledge into riches,” Silvio Crestana, Embrapa’s director-general and a soil-physics specialist, said in an interview in Brasilia. Beyond royalties, he said, the agency wants to attract venture capital.

Initially, most such agreements were with Brazilian companies. But Embrapa and BASF, the German chemical maker, recently announced a partnership to develop and market a genetically modified, herbicide-resistant soybean that is expected to be on the market by 2012 and will compete with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready brand.

With the support of multilateral lending and development bodies like the World Bank, Embrapa is also trying to raise its profile abroad. Although it has long had exchange programs that have brought scientists from Latin America, Africa and Asia to work at its laboratories, Embrapa only recently opened its first overseas office, in Ghana, headquarters of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.

“This is a good and potentially important move, because there are plenty of places in Africa, such as Zambia, that have savannahs with soil and rain conditions similar to Brazil’s cerrado,” Mr. Borlaug said. “I think that soybeans and corn, together with beef production and improved pasture grasses for grazing, are all things that will be fit to transfer from Brazil.”

Like the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, which has found a profitable niche selling commuter jets, Embrapa seems keen to focus on marketing the know-how it has developed in crops and products that are often ignored by research institutions in the industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere.

“Brazil has a comparative advantage through its own experience that is very relevant in a tropical context,” Mr. Cackler said. “To take one example, how many American universities are going to put much effort into cassava? It’s just not a priority for them. But tens of millions of people depend every day of their lives on cassava, so we at the World Bank are delighted that Brazil is willing to develop and transfer that technology.”

The New York Times entrevista o Presidente Lula

A Resilient Leader Trumpets Brazil’s Potential in Agriculture and Biofuels

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Published: September 23, 2007

BRASÍLIA, Sept. 21 — In recent months the political climate in Brazil has been a boiling caldron for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country’s president.

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Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

Now serving his second term, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said, “What I want is to govern my country well.”

The second deadly airplane crash in 10 months set off a crisis in Brazil’s aviation industry in July, with many critics saying government inaction was at the root of the problem.

Last month, the country’s Supreme Court ordered 40 members of the president’s political party to stand trial on corruption charges in a scandal that has netted some of his closest advisers, including his former chief of staff.

But as Mr. da Silva, now in his second term, sat down for a 75-minute interview here in the presidential palace, those worries hardly seemed to faze him. He was nothing but upbeat, and with good reason.

Despite the controversies, Mr. da Silva’s approval rating hovers above 60 percent. Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, has grown by 3.5 percent a year, slower than China and India but a marked improvement over the 1990s. Debt levels and unemployment are down. Reserves are up. Inflation is one-third what it was five years ago.

“We are experiencing an auspicious moment in Brazil right now,” Mr. da Silva, 61, said in his first extended discussion with an American journalist since 2004. “Brazil is experiencing its best economic period.”

That boom combined with his broad popularity among Brazil’s working class has provided Mr. da Silva, a former metal worker with a sixth-grade education who worked in an auto plant, with remarkable political resilience.

“He is the Teflon president,” said David Fleischer, a political analyst here and an emeritus professor at the University of Brasília. “Nothing sticks to Lula.”

That includes the scandals that by now could have debilitated another presidency. But Mr. da Silva continued to deny knowing anything about the most recent one, in which members of the governing party are accused of paying congressional deputies more than $10,000 a month to vote for favored legislation.

He refused to say if anyone in particular had betrayed him. “There are hundreds of employees around me that I don’t have any idea what they are doing,” Mr. da Silva said.

One of them, apparently, was his former chief of staff, José Dirceu, whom many consider the architect of Mr. da Silva’s rise to power, and who has been charged with being the mastermind of the vote-buying scheme.

“I don’t believe that there is any evidence that Mr. Dirceu committed the crime that he is being charged with,” the president said. “He will be judged.”

Fresh from a trip to Europe, where he stirred interest in Brazil’s sugar-based ethanol fuel and won billions of dollars in investment pledges, Mr. da Silva was instead focused on the economy.

Exports of Brazil’s raw commodities like soybeans and iron ore are booming as a result of high global prices and insatiable demand from Asia. In one sign of Brazil’s economic health, as the subprime credit crisis was roiling the United States a few weeks ago, Brazil’s bonds were raised to just below investment grade.

He said that Latin America as a whole was at a critical moment, when it needed to seize the opportunity to shore up its economies, notorious for mismanagement and corruption.

At the same time, he shrugged off suggestions that he should seek to be a hemispheric force and a stronger counterweight to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who has aggressively seized the spotlight in the region with his energy deal-making and political maneuvering in favor of left-wing candidates.

“We in Latin America are not trying to look for a leader,” Mr. da Silva said. “We don’t need a leader. What we need to do is build political harmony because South America and Latin America need to learn the lesson of the 20th century. We had the opportunity to grow, we had the opportunity to develop ourselves, and we lost that opportunity. So we still continue to be poor countries.

“What I want is to govern my country well.”

As Mr. da Silva heads to New York on Sunday for a United Nations meeting, he is relentlessly pitching Brazil’s agricultural potential and energy experience, especially in ethanol, which Brazil makes from sugar cane, a source more efficient than corn.

With ample arable land that is the envy of the world, and a 20-year head start on developing a biofuels industry, Brazil is the only country exporting ethanol in any significant quantities.

Mr. da Silva predicted that within 15 years a global biofuels industry would be developed, with the commodity being shipped around the world on tankers for a global price.

“I believe that the world will yield to biofuels,” he said.

He found a receptive audience recently in Sweden, where he rode in an all-ethanol-powered bus in Stockholm, one of 600 buses, he said, that the Swedish government had retrofitted for use with biofuels. Sweden wants every new car on the road to run on renewable fuels by 2020. The European Union has recommended its countries add 5.7 percent ethanol to the gasoline supply by 2010.

“We will democratize energy access,” he said. “Instead of 10 countries producing oil, we could have 120 countries producing biofuels.”

So far, however, a biofuels accord Mr. da Silva signed with President Bush this year has yet to yield concrete results. The two countries agreed to share technology and experience to develop technical standards.

An import tariff in the United States, supported by the powerful farm lobby, has prevented Brazil from competing for a share of the American market with corn-based ethanol.

Relations are generally warm with the United States. But Brazil’s relations with Venezuela have been strained at times with Mr. Chávez as Brazil has appeared to shy away from some of Mr. Chávez’s proposals for greater regional integration.

In the interview, however, Mr. da Silva offered tacit support for the creation of a “Bank of the South,” which could provide more money for development.

He also said that more than 50 experts from Petrobras, Brazil’s state oil company, and officials from Petróleos de Venezuela were still discussing a $15 billion natural gas pipeline project that would stretch 5,000 miles from Venezuela to Argentina.

A crucial question is whether enough gas exists to make it viable, Mr. da Silva said. Mr. Chávez on Thursday again blamed Petrobras for delays in approving the project, Reuters reported.

The economic focus was consistent with Mr. da Silva’s move to the center since he took office in January 2003.

Since then he extended many of the economic policies of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, while putting in place programs like Family Allowance, a welfare program devised to help the poor. Last year, the program offered monthly subsidies of about $50 to some 11 million families, representing 40 million to 50 million voters.

Mr. da Silva’s personal story has inspired millions of Brazilians: he grew up dirt poor in a small town and later worked as a lathe operator at an auto plant. He found his calling as a labor leader and politician.

Despite his modest education and sometimes questionable grammar, his personal warmth and colorful references to Brazilian soccer have captivated many.

When he steps down in 2010, Mr. da Silva said, he plans to head back home to São Bernardo do Campo, the hardscrabble industrial town near São Paulo where he got his start in politics with the metal workers’ union.

“I am not going to go on a graduate study program at Harvard University,” he said, in a dig at his predecessor, Mr. Cardoso, who regularly teaches at Brown.

“When I leave the presidency,” he said, “the one thing I want in life is to be treated as a friend by all of those who were my friends before I took office.”