Lula In Brazil

From the 1880s to the 1930s, it was a period of nation and state building in Brazil. Unlike Mexico, Brazil did not experience a revolution. A prince from Portugal named Pedro de Alcântara was sent by his father to rule the Kingdom of Brazil. He later joined the Brazilians and revolted against the Portuguese Kingdom in 1822. About a month later he was declared the first Emperor of Brazil. Unfortunately, because the country was so big, and decentralized, it was complicated to have any type of organization among the regions. For example in Chile and Argentina, there was an organized middle class that was able to mobilized. In Brazil, power was severely concentrated in the hands of the elite. This is a dynamic that exists to this day, which has

Before Lula, the military was still a strong player in politics and past presidents had center and right ideologies so a shift to a leftist party, was a start to a new era of politics in Brazil. Lula was a representative of “the most ideologically coherent and disciplined party in a field dotted with parties whose politicians possess few principled commitments and have been known to switch allegiances in order to get ahead” (Hunter 152). The Worker’s Party was known to be a programmatic, non-clientelist party. When Lula was in power, there was changed in the party’s ideology, he prioritized economic stability. This approach resulted in a lack of attention to other economic and social development problems, such as poverty, inequality, and education. When Lula realizes that the poverty in Brazil remained at an alarming rate, he established an innovative approach to poverty called “Bolsa Familia”. This social policy was a family allowance, or conditional cash transfers made to low-income families. The money was ideally given to the mothers under some conditions: the child must be enrolled in school, had to regularly see a doctor, and receive vaccinations. This policy decreased the levels of poverty, “…by over 55 percent, from 35.8 percent of the population to 15.9 percent in 2012. Extreme poverty [was] reduced by 65 percent, from 15.2 percent to 5.3 percent over the same time period.” (Weisbrot, Johnson, and Lefebvre