Terror war's southern front. (Insider Report).

"Richard Nixon famously remarked, 'As goes Brazil, so goes Latin America,"' recalled Brazilian political activist Gerald Brant in the May issue of Brazzil. Under the reign of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva -- commonly called "Lula" -- Brazil is fulfilling "Fidel Castro's wildest revolutionary ambitions ... right under the nose of the Bush administration," Brant warns.

According to Brant, "anti-American sentiment has grown so high in Brazil that President Bush received a lower approval rating among Brazilians than Saddam Hussein...." While there are many sound reasons for opposing the war in Iraq, Brazilian public opinion appears to be following "the Brazilian Workers' Party (known as the PT) regime's attitudes toward the U.S.," opines Brant. Marco Aurelio Garcia, the hard-core Marxist who serves as Lula's chief foreign policy advisor, describes the PT as "radical, of the left, socialist." The vision of Lula's administration "is clear," Garcia declares: "If this new horizon which we search for is still called communism, it is time to re-constitute it."

Garcia is founder and executive secretary of the Sao Paulo Forum, "an organization of leftist parties and revolutionary movements dedicated to 'offsetting our losses in Eastern Europe with our victories in Latin America,"' continues Brant. Last December the Sao Paulo Forum held a four-day conference in Havana. Present at that revolutionary summit were delegates from such terrorist groups as Colombia's FARC, Peru's Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and Chile's MIR. Zuhair Daif, head of the Latin American Division of Iraq's Ba' athist Party, also attended, as did an unnamed Libyan representative.

Even as Lula's foreign minister networks with terrorist and revolutionary groups abroad, Lula follows a subtler strategy at home. "Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci's articles are particularly influential in PT circles given his recipes for achieving revolutionary goals while placating business interests and the middle class," comments Brant. As noted earlier in these pages (see the Insider Report item "Marxist Axis in Latin America" in our November 18, 2002 issue), Lula's ascent has been applauded by the globalist Council on Foreign Relations. And in the Bush administration, "Clinton administration holdovers such as [State Department official] John Maisto seem to be calling many of the shots on Brazil policy," notes Brant.

While Washington's attention has been on the Middle East and North Korea, "Brazil's government [has gone] back and forth on abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and building nuclear weapons; back and forth on offering exile to Saddam Hussein; refused the Colombian government's request to consider the FARC [as] terrorists; shored up [Marxist] President Hugo Chavez with oil shipments during the height of [the] Venezuelan opposition's strike; declared a 'strategic partnership' with Communist China; abandoned scientific cooperation agreements with the U.S.; ... [and] abstained from condemning Castro's crackdown on dissidents at the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva," reports Brant.