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Passion Fruit
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- Last month, the nonagenarian Brazilian socialite Lily Marinho hosted an extraordinary event at her Rio de Janeiro mansion—a political endorsement for the ruling Workers' Party presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff. Over champagne, salmon remoulade and passion fruit crepes, Marinho introduced Rousseff as "Lady Democracy" to the 40 powerful women assembled at her grand colonial home. When a reporter asked her if she would be hosting luncheons for the eight other candidates, the bejewelled Marinho shot back from her wheelchair, "No, just for her!"While Rousseff, the 62-year-old frontrunner in Brazil's October vote, basked in the adulation, Brazil's president and Rousseff's former boss, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, 64, must have been savouring the turn of events. After all, when he first took office in 2003, members of Marinho's rareified circle worried that he would take Latin America's biggest economy down the road to ruin, turning the country into a Marxist banana republic.In fact, before his death in 2003, media baron Roberto Marinho—Lily's husband—worked actively against Lula. During Lula's first presidential bid in 1989, Marinho ensured that his Globo TV empire supported Lula's principal opponent, Fernando Collor de Mello, the right-wing governor of Alagoas state, whose short-lived rule of Brazil proved a major disaster. His economic reforms went nowhere and he resigned amid accusations of influence-peddling and corruption in 1992. "Stop for a minute and look back to 2002," Rousseff told the Rio socialites at the luncheon. "Understand just how different this country has become. Twenty-four million Brazilians have left poverty and 31 million others have entered the middle class. The country grew and companies grew."Indeed, Lula has poured billions into social programs to alleviate hunger and improve education. The efforts seem to be paying off. Brazil's income gap—one of the world's biggest—is shrinking while the bottom 10 per cent of the population saw their income rise by nearly 60 per cent between 2001 and 2006.In March, he launched the second phase of an investment scheme that will pump more than US$800 billion into everything from roads to housing to renewable energy. Even Lula's former rival, Collor, now a senator, recently described Lula as "the best president Brazil ever had."
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