A Pall Over Brazil

Terrorists have once again threatened to kill perennial Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inacio da Silva, popularly known as Lula. This has happened often throughout his long, controversial political career. This time he and the government should take the threat seriously--as should all who care about the region’s tenuous grip on democracy.

A group that calls itself the Brazilian Revolutionary Front has already killed two members of Lula’s Workers’ Party and threatened to kill 15 others. Last September, gunmen shot to death the mayor of a city in Sao Paulo state. A month later, a bomb injured a Workers’ Party mayor from a nearby city. Then last week, eight gunmen kidnapped Celso Daniel, the popular leftist mayor of a Sao Paulo suburb. Two days later, police found his bullet-riddled body.

Brazilian officials, including President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, dispute suggestions that Daniel’s death is linked to his politics. They suggest that common criminals abducted and killed him, although no ransom note was ever sent. Have they forgotten Brazil’s recent history? Death squads, formed by a military dictatorship in the 1960s and ‘70s, not only carried out hundreds of political assassinations but created a legacy of violence and intimidation that still resurfaces periodically in Brazilian society.

The American public hears about such mayhem only rarely, as in 1988 when anti-environmental ranchers ordered the murder of rubber-farmer-turned-Workers’-Party-activist Francisco “Chico” Mendes or, three years later, when human rights groups made credible accusations that death squads were behind the mass killings of homeless children in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. It’s time to pay attention again.

Instead of brushing off the latest kidnapping and murder, Brazil’s president should order a thorough investigation. Then he should demand law enforcement scrutiny of the other attacks on political figures and the spate of threats, which are causing a sickening pall of political paranoia to fall on a nation that should be emerging as a shining example of South American democracy.