Brazil’s radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened Tuesday’s U.N. General Assembly declaring, “Brazil is back” – an echo of fellow leftist President Joe Biden’s declarations after his took over from predecessor Donald Trump.
Lula’s speech was his first as president to the General Assembly since defeating popular conservative former President Jair Bolsonaro in last year’s presidential election, a highly contested race whose results – giving the office of the chief executive to a convicted felon – prompted a riot in Brasilia in January. Lula served two other terms as president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011.
Lula arrived in New York to angry jeers from Brazilians calling him a “thief” and a “communist” outside of his luxury hotel on Monday.
Throughout his speech on Tuesday, Lula stated that inequality should “inspire outrage” from global leaders, demanding that countries must prioritize the fight to end social inequality while making demands for investments in environmental preservation and the fight against climate change from developed countries.
“Twenty years ago, I took this platform for the first time. I return today to say that I maintain my unwavering confidence in humanity, reaffirming what I said in 2003,” Lula said at the opening of his speech. “At that time, the world had not yet realized the seriousness of the climate crisis. Today, it is knocking on our doors, destroying our homes, our cities, our countries, killing and imposing losses and suffering on our brothers and sisters, especially the poorest.”
“Hunger, the central theme of my speech at this World Parliament 20 years ago, today affects 735 million human beings, who will go to bed tonight not knowing if they will have anything to eat tomorrow,” he continued.
Lula also proclaimed that the United Nations 2030 Agenda, a set of vague promises to end poverty, “could turn into its biggest failure,” as its goals are still far from being achieved.
“Reducing inequalities within and between countries” should become the United Nations 2030 Agenda’s summary objective, he insisted. To achieve such a proposed end, Lula suggested that national budgets must reduce inequality by making the rich pay taxes proportional to their wealth.
“In Brazil, we are committed to implementing all 17 sustainable development goals, in an integrated and indivisible manner,” Lula said. “We want to achieve racial equality in Brazilian society through an eighteenth objective that we will voluntarily adopt.”
The “Sustainable Development Goals” are 17 objectives presented by the United Nations to state powers that include ending all hunger on earth, ending the “climate crisis,” and achieving “gender equality.”
Lula continued his speech by stating that acting against climate change involves “thinking about tomorrow and facing historical inequalities,” adding that the populations of the “Global South” are the most affected by climate change.
“The richest ten percent of the world’s population are responsible for almost half of all carbon released into the atmosphere,” Lula said. “We, developing countries, do not want to repeat this model.”
The Brazilian president asserted that sovereign equality between nations, a principle of multilateralism, has been “eroded.”
“In the main instances of global governance, negotiations in which all countries have a voice and vote have lost steam,” Lula stated. “When institutions reproduce inequalities, they are part of the problem, not the solution.”
“Last year, the IMF made $160 billion in special drawing rights available to European countries, and just $34 billion to African countries,” he continued. “The unequal and distorted representation in the management of the IMF and the World Bank is unacceptable.”
“We have not corrected the excesses of market deregulation and the support of the minimum State,” Lula proclaimed, explaining that the China-led BRICS economic and security bloc — of which Brazil is a member — emerged “in the wake of this immobility … to promote cooperation between emerging countries.”
Lula explained that BRICS’ recent expansion serves to accommodate the “economic, geographic and political plurality of the 21st century.”
“We are a force that works towards fairer global trade in a context of a serious crisis in multilateralism,” Lula asserted.
The Brazilian president also stated that governments need to break with the increasing dissonance between what he described are the “voice of the markets” and the “voice of the streets.”
“Neoliberalism has worsened the economic and political inequality that plagues democracies today,” Lula said. “Its legacy is a mass of disinherited and excluded people.”
“Amidst its rubble, far-right adventurers emerge who deny politics and sell solutions that are as easy as they are wrong,” he continued. “Many have succumbed to the temptation of replacing a failed neoliberalism with a primitive, conservative and authoritarian nationalism.”
Lula continued his speech by rejecting an alleged agenda that “uses immigrants as scapegoats, that corrodes the welfare state and that attacks workers’ rights,” without giving further explanation.
Lula also criticized “unilateral sanctions,” asserting that sanctions cause “great harm” to the population of affected countries while hindering mediation processes and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Lula, a longtime ally of the communist Castro regime, made calls for an end to the “embargo” imposed by the United States on Cuba and its inclusion on the United States’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The Brazilian president concluded his speech by making calls to reform the United Nations Security Council, proclaiming that the Council has progressively lost its credibility due to the “actions of its permanent members, who wage unauthorized wars in search of territorial expansion or regime change.” As Lula has long maintained friendly relations with Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine last year, the remark likely was an attempt to condemn America’s military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The United Nations needs to fulfill its role as builder of a more just, supportive and fraternal world — but it will only do so if its members have the courage to proclaim their outrage at inequality and work tirelessly to overcome it,” Lula concluded his speech.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.