Today elections will take place in Brazil and one of the specters being raised by the possibility of a victory by left-wing candidate Lula Da Silva is that somehow there will be a new alliance between Hugo Chavez and Lula which will destabilize the region. I do not belive in this. Lula Da Silva and Hugo Chavez are very different. Chavez is a self-centered, egotitistic and militaristic incompetent who does not believe in democracy and thinks that he is the only one that has the truth. Lula, on the other hand, is not a newcomer to politics and knows that you have to negotiate in a democracy. In fact perhaps the differences between the two are best described by Lula himself in an interview:
“Chavez has a little more than 40 years. His background is military. He is not a politician in the essence of the word. Venezuela does not have progressive parties, nor unions nor a progressice church like the Brazilian one. It is a state with fragile institutions, where the oil company can overthrow the President. When I was with Chavez I had the opportunity of giving him advice: You have to talk to everyone….You need a channel of communication with society and reestablish calm to be able to execute the policies that you want. You have no alternative, you have to negotiate with society, with the private sector and even with those that are the harshest with you, with the owners of TV stations, with the owners of newspappers, in order to govern the country. Nobody can live with everyday tension…That is not my style, I am a negotiator. I have done that all my life : reaching agreements, negotaiting. The same will not happen here because even when someone does not want to talk with me , I will do the utmost to talk.”
The Devil's Excrement 
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