Brasilia – Brazilian leftists who view the conservative-tending pragmatism of the country’s socialist leader as betrayal have named a woman as their presidential candidate in elections set for October.
Three parties proclaimed Sen. Heloísa Helena Lima de Moraes Carvalho their standard-bearer on Sunday, making her the first woman to join the race.
Heloísa Helena, as she is known here, called on supporters to combat what she called the “betrayal” of the true left by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party, an organization that kicked her out three years ago for her constant crticism of Lula’s pragmatism.
Following her expulsion, the Marxist senator founded the Socialism and Freedom Party, which named the 43-year-old its candidate with the backing of the United Workers Socialist Party and the Brazilian Communist Party.
Her running mate will be economist Carlos Benjamin, a former guerrilla and political prisoner and one of the original 100 founders of the Workers Party. He also left that group over differences with Lula.
“We’re boiling like volcanic lava,” Heloisa Helena told her supporters in accepting the candidacy.
She recalled her humble roots, her progress through nursing school and her ascension to the Senate, where, she said, “I stepped into the realm of the bourgeoisie without selling out.”
“There is no democracy in a country where a half-dozen people take for themselves half of all the wealth, while a poor girl sells her body for a dollar and a boy of six becomes the tool of drug-runners,” said Lima de Moraes Carvalho.
She acknowledged that her campaign will be an uphill struggle, but exhorted her supporters: “A David must be born within each of us to bring down the Goliaths of the neo-liberal fraud, the stealing of public money and the other perverse and accursed things wrought” by entrenched politicians.
