Second, since the development of inclusive economic and
political institutions is key, using the existing flows of
foreign aid at least in part to facilitate such development
would be useful. As we saw, conditionality is not the answer
here, as it requires existing rulers to make concessions.
Instead, perhaps structuring foreign aid so that its use and
administration bring groups and leaders otherwise
excluded from power into the decision-making process and
empowering a broad segment of population might be a
better prospect.
E MPOWERMENT
May 12, 1978, seemed as if it were going to be a normal
day at the Scânia truck factory in the city of São Bernardo
in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. But the workers were
restless. Strikes had been banned in Brazil since 1964,
when the military overthrew the democratic government of
President João Goulart. But news had just broken that the
government had been fixing the national inflation figures so
that the rise in the cost of living had been underestimated.
As the 7:00 a.m. shift began, workers put down their tools.
At 8:00 a.m., Gilson Menezes, a union organizer working at
the plant, called the union. The president of the São
Bernardo Metalworkers was a thirty-three-year-old activist
called Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”). By noon Lula was
at the factory. When the company asked him to persuade
the employees to go back to work, he refused.
The Scânia strike was the first in a wave of strikes that
swept across Brazil. On the face of it these were about
wages, but as Lula later noted,
I think we can’t separate economic and
political factors.… The … struggle was over
wages, but in struggling for wages, the
working class won a political victory.
The resurgence of the Brazilian labor movement was just
part of a much broader social reaction to a decade and a
half of military rule. The left-wing intellectual Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, like Lula destined to become president
of Brazil after the re-creation of democracy, argued in 1973