Leftist Lula Will Move to the Center on the Military
The new Brazilian president will try to keep Bolsonaro from co-opting his generals, and seek greater cooperation with the Pentagon on hemispheric security.
Rummy and the radical were all laughs in 2004.
Photographer: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images
In 2005, when I was a 3-star vice admiral and senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, I met in Brasilia with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, universally known as Lula. He was about a year into his first term as Brazil’s president. The immediate impression was of a tough, working-class leader who famously lost a finger in an accident while he was a metalworker and trade unionist decades earlier.
He and Rumsfeld had a very friendly exchange, despite their deep political and cultural differences — Lula is a global socialist, and Rummy was a rock-ribbed American Republican. I watched them essentially charm each other with their shared sense of hard work, grit and humor.