In one of her last official appearances of 2011, on December 22, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, arrived in a sweltering gymnasium in downtown Sao Paulo to give a speech to a few hundred working-class social activists.
In her speech, she mentioned “Lula” more than 10 times.
At one point the audience briefly broke into chants of “Lula, Lula, Lula!”
Lula wasn’t even present.
“Lula” is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the wildly popular and charismatic former president of this country.
This is the man who in 2009 told a ballroom of CEOs at a regional World Economic Forum meeting in Rio de Janeiro he was going to scrap the speech his advisors had prepared and instead gave a blistering and empassioned critique of how the rich, developed nations were resonsible for the global economic mess and it was poor all over the world paying the price.
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