Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

...Dilma was radicalized in the late 1960s in Minas Gerais, a large state roughly the size of Texas about an hour’s flight north of Rio. Most of her ideological positions were influenced in her late teens and early 20s by the anti-capitalist political movements of Europe—Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.She trained in the left’s counter-military insurgency and intelligence, she has said on record, but never shot at any officials or military personnel during her time with the National Liberation Command, or Colina.

...Dilma will take over a country vastly changed over the past eight years under Lula. The elites have benefited, but so has nearly everybody else. Judging by Lula’s outgoing popularity polls, the majority would agree with the changes the country has gone through. It’s a new world and a new country.

...Remember the Washington Consensus and its prescriptions for Latin America? That narrative of privatization and open markets has been relegated to the trash can and deleted from the ether. The International Monetary Fund can no longer push Brazil around. In fact, Brazil is a creditor nation and now helps fund the IMF. Its loans from the fund were paid back in full in 2004 under Lula, who did as he always promised: kick the IMF out of Brazil, which has become one of the most important of the rising economic and diplomatic powers, along with China and India.


http://www.thenation.com/article/155799 ... first-lady

Brazil has its independent and opinionated anti-Dilma and anti-Lula pundits, but it lacks the US-style echo chamber that would get everyday Brazilians spinning like a top.