Menelaus

Lula – The Gramsci of Latin America. Latin America is a bit behind Europe, but it follows the same script. Lula is in fact their Gramsci, or their Dutschke. In Europe, the turn came in 1968. The revolution had failed in the streets, so the generation of '68 took Gramsci's advice and Dutschke's slogan: don't storm the palace – march through the institutions. Latin America had its own street revolution: Che's guerrillas. They failed too. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and the left lost both its model and its money. So in 1990, Lula, the leader of the Workers' Party, who had just lost the presidential election, called the left of the whole continent to a hotel in São Paulo. He and Fidel Castro had agreed that his party would host the meeting. The São Paulo Forum was born: communist parties, socialist parties and guerrilla movements, all at one table. This summer, Lula himself explained why he created it: he thought the left of Latin America could be educated through elections. The road to power was not the rifle but organizing people and winning votes. And that it would take 20-30 years. That is the long march: not the war of maneuver but the war of position. Gramsci, translated into Portuguese. And it worked. Within fifteen years, parties from the Forum governed Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador – and Brazil itself. In Cuba, of course, the communists never left power since 1959. Brazil even had the long march's schoolmaster. Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the book that turned teaching into raising revolutionary consciousness, ran São Paulo's schools for Lula's party from 1989. And the march reached the courts. The Supreme Court annulled Lula's corruption convictions on procedural grounds, then sentenced his main rival, Jair Bolsonaro, to 27 years in prison. In Europe, the long march was an idea. In Latin America, it has a founder, an address and a membership list. Dutschke gave Europe a slogan. Lula gave Latin America an organization. But Latin America started the march twenty years after Europe – and it may be the first to walk out of it. Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and Chile already have. Brazil, for now, stays in line.