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This article appears in the October 18, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
DOCUMENTATION: DR. ENÉAS CARNEIRO

A Citizen Who Chooses
To Make History

by Gretchen Small

Who is this man who won the largest number of votes of any Congressional candidate in Brazil's history, in a campaign on which he spent, at most, $22,000?

Dr. Enéas Ferreira Carneiro, known simply as "Enéas" throughout Brazil, is one of those rare individuals who step forward to shape history when their country needs them. Born on Nov. 5, 1938, Dr. Enéas is a mathematician, a physicist, and one of Brazil's most pre-eminent cardiologists, who has taught thousands of doctors. His textbook on the electrocardiogram has been published in various editions, in Brazil and abroad.

In 1989, he founded the Party for Rebuilding of National Order (PRONA), recruiting to its ranks many of the physicians whom he had inspired with his love of science—and of Brazil. The founding manifesto declared PRONA open to Brazilians from all races, creeds, and classes who wish to stop the looming dissolution of the nation due to pressure from its international creditors, and the state of near anarchy created by the government's failure to exercise authority.

Under PRONA's banner, Enéas ran for the Presidency three times, campaigning against the International Monetary Fund's looting of Brazil—all the while maintaining his medical career. In a March 1999 speech to a packed EIR seminar in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he explained, "Being a professor of medicine and, until the age of 50, never having participated in any political process, at a certain moment in my life, in 1989, did I suddenly, precipitously, without any prior preparation, without any link to the establishment, suddenly decide to enter politics?" He spoke of hospitals filled with malnourished and neglected children, of corruption which siphons off funds from the health budget, and the lines of poor people who can get no medical attention. "I was outraged," he said. The educational system was no better.

Without any links to any existing structure, "I gathered former colleagues of mine, former companions, former students, of whom I have had more than 30,000, and I created a political structure, a party, and I launched my candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic, saying these things, telling the truth," he explained.

From his first election bid in 1989, his trademark became "My name is Enéas," the concluding words of the 17 seconds in free national television time allotted him as a minor Presidential candidate.

He earned the attention of the international oligarchy as a potentially serious threat in the 1994 elections, when he came in third, winning nearly 5 million votes, for 7.4% of the total. In that election, he had the right to "a whole minute on television—an eternity," which he used to call on the state to adopt the dirigist credit policies of the United States' first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

It was after that ad, that Dr. Enéas came in direct contact with Lyndon LaRouche's associates in Brazil. Soon, he was instructing PRONA members to read EIR, "the only magazine in the world which still defends the existence of the sovereign nation-state."

In January 1998, on the eve of his third run for the Presidency, Dr. Enéas discussed, in an interview on national television, the analyses of the "brilliant economist" LaRouche, who had forecast the crisis, and called for a New Bretton Woods. In March 1998, in a prime-time TV interview, he went after globalization, as typified by mega-speculator George Soros' buying up Brazil's state companies. Holding up the issue of EIR famous for its cover featuring Soros surrounded by marijuana leaves, Dr. Enéas charged that Soros' money is drug money.

His war-cry in the campaign was that Brazil must "break with the international financial system," and stop paying a debt which was, even then, unpayable. He told the Brazilian daily Tribuna da Imprensa that one of the biggest problems in the country, was that the citizens had been brainwashed to believe the state is useless and should be weakened. The citizens fail to understand that the state is the only institution strong enough to defend the common man, he argued.

As the Presidential campaign went into high gear, he invited LaRouche's wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, to address a São Paulo City Council ceremony in August 1998.

It was in that election that the media adopted the policy being employed today: to smear Dr. Enéas as a right-wing fanatic, a proponent of "nationalist extremism" like France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, and not to report anything except that he purportedly wants Brazil to build an atomic bomb. In September 1998, Germany's Der Spiegel called him "the uncontested star of the election campaign. . . . He wants to build atomic weapons, triple the manpower of the armed forces, and liberate Brazil from the claws of the international mafia of speculators"—the latter the only hint provided of Enéas's actual campaign.

Despite the massive slanders, Enéas won over a million votes in that election, coming in fourth with 2.3% of the vote.

Victory in 2002

The media are lying in the wake of his stunning 2002 Congressional victory that, as Associated Press claimed, Dr. Enéas is a "fringe candidate" for whom citizens voted without knowing what they voted for. This is ludicrous. Even before the hot phase of the 2002 Presidential campaign, without his being a candidate, pollsters were reporting in May that he was receiving 3-5% of voter preference nationwide. Folha de São Paulo, one of the papers most insistent today that no voter supports his "nationalist ideas," had itself reported on May 2, that the audience present for a May 1 TV interview gave Dr. Enéas an ovation, when he told the reporters that he, as President, would not keep on Central Bank President Arminio Fraga and other members of the Cardoso economic team, because they are "enemies of the Fatherland."

On June 19, Enéas announced that for the first time, he would not run for President, but rather for Congress, as the most effective way to shape national policy, given the tight controls on the Presidential elections.

Brazilian leaders treat citizens "as if we were retarded imbeciles," Dr. Enéas had told his Buenos Aires audience in March 1999. Yet, the history of the world is full of examples that "no empire lasts forever. . . . If we understand history, we know that things are absolutely unpredictable. I studied mathematics, the exact sciences, and I know that this process isn't linear. . . . The historic process tells us that we are heading toward an encounter with the unforeseeable, toward change."

Those sticking with globalization "are involved in a process that carries within it the worm of their own destruction. There is no way for the financial bubble to maintain itself, because it lives parasitically off the organism that it inhabits. And so, my message at any point in the process has been, that we have to have hope. We have to be ready at all times. We have to be prepared. We have to be aware that our fight is between the light and the shadows, between life and death. It is a fight between good and evil, between Christian truth and Satanic lies. And it is with this thought, that I say to you that we must stand firm, with the certainty that truth will triumph."

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