Abstract - Labor Market and Labor Relations under the PT Governments

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Labor Market and Labor Relations under the PT Governments

by Ana Paula Fregnani Colombi, José Dari Krein

There is some consensus on the foreign policy of Dilma Rousseff’s government that Brazil lost prestige and international influence because of her lesser personal dedication. Against this consensus, the paper presents two alternative hypotheses for explaining its unsatisfactory outcomes: that there was no change in policy objectives but an adaptation to a more hostile context and that its limitations were structurally related to dependency on global corporations and to the increasing rejection of South-South politics by domestic business. If this analysis is correct, the structural limitations described require that the struggle to achieve an independent foreign policy involve deeper political and ideological battles and a more radical questioning of neoliberal capitalism.

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Abstract, Sailing Against the Wind: The Rise and Crisis of a Low-Conflict Progressivism

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Sailing Against the Wind: The Rise and Crisis of a Low-Conflict Progressivism

by Gustavo Codas Friedmann, Claudio A. Castelo Branco Puty

The governments of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) in Brazil (2003– 2016) were part of a cycle of progressive governments in Latin America whose differences are more specific to the conditions of political struggle in each country—the conditions of arrival in government, the structure of the political system—than fundamentally programmatic. They can be characterized as a low-conflict progressivism in that, although there was no promotion of a neoliberal agenda on the model of European social liberalism, there was accommodation within the framework of the established order that was ultimately fundamental to the success of the 2016 parliamentary-judicial coup.

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Political Report # 1158 El Gigante Del Sur Tendrá Que Combatir

Por Manuel E. Yepe

"Ahora los pobres, los excluidos, los sintierra y los sintecho, que tenían la esperanza de llegar a ser felices, tendrán que buscar otras asociaciones partidarias o forjar nuevas herramientas de hacer política, fundadas en la ética, la supresión de las causas de las desigualdades sociales y en la búsqueda de otro Brasil posible". Tal es el pronóstico que formula, ante la grave crisis por la que atraviesa tras el golpe de estado parlamentario y mediático contra el orden constitucional en su país, el periodista, escritor, religioso de la orden de los dominicos y militante de la Teología de la Revolución, Frei Betto, quien fuera asesor del Presidente de la República de Brasil cuando Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva ocupaba este cargo. Los tres primeros gobiernos del Partido de los Trabajadores (PT) - dos de Dilma Rousseff y uno de Lula- representan lo mejor que ha habido en la historia republicana del gigante suramericano. "Salieron de la miseria 45 millones de brasileños; los programas sociales -desde el Bolsa Familia al Más Médicos- le extendieron una red de protección social a la parcela más pobre de la nación; el acceso a la universidad se popularizó; el Fondo Monetario Internacional dejó de meterse en nuestras cuentas y América Latina ganó más unidad. Y Cuba fue sacada del limbo", escribe el prestigioso religioso revolucionario Frei Betto.