This Monday has been the most atypical for the president of Brazil. Instead of starting the week as usual, with meetings with ministers in Brasilia, on a trip that takes him to some corner of his country or with an international tour, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 78, spent the day in São Paulo, dedicated to what his team has defined as a private agenda. The president has visited the American intellectual Noam Chomsky, 95, at his home, who is recovering from a stroke in Brazil, the native country of his wife; He then met with one of his predecessors, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 93 years old, and before that with the writer Raduan Nassar, 88 years old. Lula was last Friday with another former president, José Sarney, 94, during a trip to Maranhão, in his electoral fiefdom.
No one has explicitly said that the visits were a round of farewells to veteran colleagues, but that was the flavor of the day. Already the day before, the Brazilian media announced that Lula intended to visit the most veteran of the great leftist intellectuals of the United States and former President Cardoso.
Lula has not made any public statement about his visit to Chomsky, but the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo ha posted some details leaked by the philosopher’s family. “You’re older than me, but you have a lot more hair,” the president joked, to which the American intellectual responded with a smile. The linguist suffered a massive stroke a year ago that left him with serious difficulties in speaking and moving. Since then he has been hospitalized. First, in the United States, then in Brazil.
Here, visit in São Paulo four people who have great affection: the former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the linguist Noam Chomsky, the journalist Mino Carta and the writer Raduan Nassar. In the last sixth fair, I had not visited Maranhão, or former president José… pic.twitter.com/Sl8KLOMfBI
— Lula (@LulaOficial) June 24, 2024
This was the first meeting between the two since Chomsky and his wife, the Brazilian linguist Valéria Wasserman, visited the founder of the Workers’ Party (PT) a few years ago when he was imprisoned in a Curitiba police station for a judicial sentence that had already been annulled.
“I have come to see my friend and return the visit that you and Valéria paid me when I was in prison,” the president told him, according to the Brazilian newspaper. “Not a week goes by without Celso Amorim [actual asesor internacional de Lula y uno de los más veteranos en su círculo] and let’s not talk about you.”
The meeting has had several witnesses. On the one hand, the Indian writer residing in Santiago de Chile Vijay Prashad, co-author of The retreat with Chomsky. “I have never seen anything like it, it has been an exciting meeting,” she said, according to Folha. And on the other, the intellectual’s wife, his sisters, his nonagenarian mother and the Brazilian who directs the team of nurses who cares for the patient.
Chomsky had his followers in suspense last Tuesday, when some media outlets published, erroneously, that he had died. His wife denied his death almost at the same time that her husband was discharged from the Portuguese Charity hospital, where he was admitted on an undisclosed date after arriving in Brazil from the US on a medical plane.
Details Folha also that the Brazilian president has told the American, known for his frontal criticism of his country’s foreign policy, that he is preparing a summit of Democratic presidents to discuss how to confront the extreme right.
President Lula, who has received the good news that the strike in the federal universities has ended, later visited his predecessor in office Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 93 years old, father of the Plano Real that ended hyperinflation and that these days he turns 30 years old. Cardoso has been retired from public life for a couple of years, but until then he was a regular in interviews, public events, etc. In the last elections he asked for the vote for the leader of the Brazilian left. The president has also visited Raduan Nassar, author of the book Archaic Labor.
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