Even before the two hundred bullet-pierced corpses had time to stiffen, a whole crowd of "experts" showed up in all major newspapers and TV channels of three continents to tell a gullible audience that the recent murders in São Paulo and Santos, Brazil, were caused by poverty. Yes, extreme poverty bought thousands of Uzis and AK-47s and tons of ammunition, bribed hundreds of police officers and politicians, paid for the services of terrorist trainers from Spain, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.

Brazil: The Usual and Not-So-Usual Suspects

By Olavo de Carvalho
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 22, 2006

Even before the two hundred bullet-pierced corpses had time to stiffen, a whole crowd of “experts” showed up in all major newspapers and TV channels of three continents to tell a gullible audience that the recent murders in São Paulo and Santos, Brazil, were caused by poverty. Yes, extreme poverty bought thousands of Uzis and AK-47s and tons of ammunition, bribed hundreds of police officers and politicians, paid for the services of terrorist trainers from Spain, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.

The very leader of the rebellion, Marcos “Marcola” Camacho, admitted that the operation was prepared in close association to the MST, the “landless” movement whose friends include the British and Dutch Crowns, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Soros Foundation, besides the Brazilian governing party, the federal government itself and, not surprisingly, the Colombian narcoguerrillas, the Farc, that sell 200 tons of cocaine annually in the Brazilian drug market.

Mr. Marcola himself is a poor little fellow whose current protegée and lover, a woman named Cinthia, spends the monthly trifle of $8,000 to 10,000 in the fashion garment stores in São Paulo. For his defense in a recent trial Marcola hired Marcio Thomaz Bastos, a pop-star of Brazilian courts that now happens to be the government’s Minister of Justice. As soon as he was inaugurated in his new federal capacity, Mr. Bastos managed to change Brazilian law, erasing kidnappings from the list of “heinous crimes” and thus reducing the penalty imposed on people like Marcola himself.

So vitally important is the alleged function of poverty in the production of criminality in Brazil, that the Brazilian president himself, Mr. Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, seeing the murderous chaos spreading in the state of São Paulo, philosophically pondered that such things would never come to happen if during the 80’s and 90’s, instead of abandoning the poor children to the streets, we had invested in their education. The fact that these two decades were precisely those ones during which Mr. Lula’s predecessors in the government managed to put into schools 98 percent of Brazilian children has absolutely no bearing upon his opinion.

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But poverty, I admit, was not the only culprit to be unanimously indicted by the chic media as guilty for last week’s bloodshed in Brazil. The other was the governor of São Paulo, Mr. Claudio Lembo, an ideologically flavorless politician who made his career in the pro-capitalist party, the PFL (Party of the Liberal Front), which now supports the opposition presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin.

I have no reason to like Mr. Lembo. The day I was introduced to him—a meeting I went to in the vain hope of gaining his support for cultural projects that perhaps could have steered Brazil slightly away from the course of a foretold tragedy—he took the occasion to play to a gallery of petty leftists, labeling me as a right-wing extremist and recommending that I read the Bible to appease my evil political instincts.

I cannot, however, agree to the general efforts to blame his incompetence, however real, for the calamity occurred in São Paulo and Santos. It is more than a matter of injustice. It is a diversionary operation, calculated to conceal from public opinion the real agents who caused the episode. To understand who they are, one only has to put the facts together:

(1) The rebellious criminals confessed to having received aid and training from MST (Landless Workers' Movement), an organization strictly associated with the dominant Workers' Party which in turn received help and training from another organization friendly to the government, the Colombian narcoguerrilla.

(2) The President of the Republic is personally responsible for the presence of the twelve thousand delinquents in the streets who spread terror and death among the population of São Paulo. By releasing these criminals, aware that they kept telephone contact with their leaders in jail and that they were prepared for large scale terrorist acts, the Workers' Party Presidency of the Republic not only set fire to a State of the Federation but also made use of the flames to burn down the reputation of a tiny local adversary.

(3) It is absolutely inconceivable for a war operation of colossal proportions, involving three subversive organizations of the magnitude of the PCC (First Command of the Capital), the MST, and the FARC, to have been prepared without any news about it ever reaching the strategic coordination of the Left in the continent, the São Paulo Forum, whose founder and chronic president—on temporary leave—is better known nowadays as the President of Brazil but who has never ceased to work for that organization.

In a civilized country, even a remote link between a President of the Republic and the authors of that barbarity would lead to his immediate removal from office and his criminal indictment. But Brazil has already been tamed and trained to answer with adulatory smiles to every insult and aggression that comes from an ideologically approved source. The country will bow down in dumb servility to yet another cynical imposition from the enlightened elites that lead it, inevitably, towards the abyss.

As to Mr. Lembo, he is being made a scapegoat because he has the required dullness for that role. He does not understand what is going on, nor does he know whom he serves with the grotesque spectacle of his impotence. He is not guilty, except for being a fool.

Olavo de Carvalho is author of a dozen books. He presently lives in Virginia, and works as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers.

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