Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva

Joedson Alves / AFP-Getty Images Globe-Trotter: Brazil's Lula is raising his country's profile by making the rounds with foreign leaders Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is on a roll. In recent weeks he's shared a dais with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, and drew effusive praise ("My man!") from Barack Obama at the G20 summit in London. He even had a photo op with Queen Elizabeth II. The former machine-tool worker, who spent decades picketing "savage capitalism," is now the toast of bankers and boardrooms. "Don't you think it's chic that we are now lending the IMF money?" he joked at a ... Read Full Story

Politics in Brazil Lula's last lap From The Economist print edition A freakishly popular president has only a year left before electioneering curtails his mandate. He will spend it reacting rather than reforming REPEATS are often disappointing. It is rare indeed to find a president in his second term with an approval rating of 80%, as Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva now enjoys. No American president since the second world war has managed it. In Latin America, only Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe at the height of his success last year against the FARC guerrillas has touched a similar level of adoration. So Lula, a ... Read Full Story

by Matthew Andrews For ten days in March I participated on a delegation to observe the presidential elections in El Salvador with CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. As a witness I participated in the struggle against election fraud and played a modest role to ensure that the Salvadoran people could write their own history. In anticipation of my trip, I picked up an old used book I had bought years ago, Revolution in El Salvador. This quote by the author, Tommie Sue Montgomery, alerted me as to how a personal experience can change someone. "I arrived in El ... Read Full Story

FINANCIAL TIMES  - Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president. The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency. Mr Lula da Silva, who is visiting Beijing this week, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, first discussed the idea of replacing the dollar with the renminbi and the real as trade currencies when they met at the G20 summit in London last month. An official ... Read Full Story

As the emphasis of the run up to the forthcoming G20 summit focuses on the economic disaster which has plagued the international community recently, we can assume that issues of social justice and principles of economic, environmental, social and legal equality will be made mere cursory footnotes. It does not have to be this way. As the old adage goes, there is no point crying over spilt milk. What has come to pass is now yesterday’s news and we have before us the opportunity to embrace a myriad of new and rejuvenated regimes and to emerge from the havoc which the financial crisis has ... Read Full Story