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SOCIALISȚ ACTION JANUARY 1990 13 change.2 The second problem involves the policy of alliances carried out by the PT leadership in line with the position adopted by the party's national convention.3 This policy blunted the PT's ability to differentiate itself from [bourgeois candidates] Mario Covas and Leonel Brizola. In fact, the leadership even characterized them as our allies, thereby allowing them to present themselves to the masses as working-class candidates, which they are not. In the states of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and in the South, they obtained far more votes than the PT in the first round.

The final problem is that the party's rank and file became involved in the campaign only late in the game. Lula sought to portray himself as a statesman, above all social classes and detached from his party. It was only in September, after Lula had dropped in the polls, that the ranks were appealed to and involved in the campaign.

A program to advance the struggle We can win in the second round of these elections, but for this it is necessary to make some radical changes in our program and campaign.

We must at all times strive to maintain our independent, working-class profile. We must be intransigent: In our government there will be no room for any bourgeois figures or parties. We must speak clearly about the need for socialism and the self-organization of the working class and its allies.

If a Lula government is to satisfy the demands of the oppressed, it must rest on the force of the working class, organized in its own councils—in the workplaces and communities-independent of the state.

The Popular Democratic Program put forward by the Brazil Popular Front [the electoral coalition led by the PT] is incapable of satisfying the demands of the population. Lula government will have to: 1) Cancel payments on the foreign debt. The debt is illegitimate; its payment demands unacceptable sacrifices by the toiling masses. A PT government must spearhead the fight for the cancellation of the debt, forming an international front of governments and working-class organizations to cancel the debt.4 2) Implement an agrarian reform under the control of the workers. 3) Nationalize the financial system and foreign commerce. 4) Nationalize the multinational corporations and the large capitalist holdings. 5) End the tutelage of the military. 6) Save the Amazon region. 7) Implement an urban reform. 8) Pursue a proletarian-internationalist foreign policy. 9) Put an end to the discrimination against women and Blacks.

Fighting for these objectives, and basing itself on the mass mobilizations and aiding them to constitute their own councils, a Lula government could begin the transition to socialism, imposing itself as a Workers' Government.

Lula For President!

For a Workers' Government that breaks with the Foreign Debt and satisfies the demands of all the oppressed!

Footnotes:

1. Two "left-liberal" bourgeois candidates challenged the PT in the first round of the elections last November: Mario Covas of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and Leonel Brizola of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT).

2. The PT mayors in dozens of cities refused to cancel that portion of the foreign debt allocated by the federal government to the municipalities, and ended up administering the government's austerity program. This default was duly rewarded in the voting booths: In the city of Sao Paulo, for example, where Luiza Erundina was the PT mayor, Lula finished fourth in the first round of the 3. At its Sixth National Convention in June 1989, the PT endorsed the leadership's popular-frontist electoral alliance with small petty-bourgeois and splinter bourgeois parties: the Brazil Popular Front. This front included the Green Party, the Brazilian Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and the bourgeois PSB.

4. Since the founding of the Workers Party (PT) in the early 1980s, Lula and his party had championed the call for the total cancellation of the foreign debt. At the Sixth National Convention of the PT last June, however, the party reversed its position on the debt, calling instead for a suspension of payments on the debt pending renegotiations with the international banks.

This new position, which was challenged by a significant percentage of the convention delegates, was the one Lula advocated during his presidential campaign. A top adviser to Lula, economist Paul Singer, explained the PT's economic program in an interview reprinted in the Nov. 21 Los Angeles Times.

"The Workers Party plans to suspend payments on Brazil's $112 billion foreign debt while the country decides what part of the debt is illegitimate. Our forecast is that 40 percent of the debt is illegitimate, because it

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rest during the recent offensive against Christiani government El Salvador. FMLN fighter takes the 2333 Donna DeCesare/Impact Visuals Americans working with poor refugees."

Casolo was blindfolded and threatened in jail. Her release was due entirely to the pressure of human-rights advocates and church people who understood the repression. But 70,000 Salvadorans killed in the last decade have not been so fortunate-nor were Casolo's two Salvadoran friends arrested with her who are still being held, or her lawyer, whose home was raided.

As Casolo says: "The Salvadoran people deserve a country where their children can eat and go to school and don't have to worry about being dragged out in the middle of the night.... I ask that those who went to bat for me continue to fight that justice is served, not just for us, but in El Salvador."

Diplomatic victory for Cristiani The international outcry against the horrors perpetrated by the Salvadoran government, the bombing of its own civilian population, and the murders of the Jesuits, have added to ARENA's isolation. Seeing one of its bloody dictatorships in trouble, the United States rushed to exert its influence on the diplomatic front as it already had on the military front.

The agreement of the five Central American presidents in early December serves U.S. interests by trying to isolate the FMLN and by equating it with the Nicaraguan contras. The five presidents, including Sandinista Commander Daniel Ortega, "expressed their decisive support of Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani and his Government" and termed it "the product of democratic,