Brazil's presidential election Another Silva, A celebrated environmentalist pitches for the presidency

Apr 22nd 2010 | SÃO PAULO | From The Economist print edition

A born and bred green

OCCASIONALLY, a politician comes along who seems too principled to be thrown into an electoral dogfight in a giant democracy. Marina Silva, the candidate of the small Green Party in Brazil’s presidential election in October, is such a candidate. What she lacks in party machinery she is trying to make up with ethical force. Her immediate aim is to make it to the run-off ballot. This will not be easy: a recent poll gave her only 10% of the vote. But that is not bad given that many Brazilians, like voters elsewhere, do not count saving the planet as one of their priorities.

Ms Silva was born in Acre, in Amazonia. Her father, a migrant from the poor north-east, found work there as a rubber tapper. It was a hazardous place to grow up: of Ms Silva’s 11 brothers and sisters, only eight survived beyond infancy. Malaria, hepatitis and other forest diseases bequeathed health problems to the adult Ms Silva, including a collection of allergies to things from seafood to air-conditioning.

She worked as a maid to put herself through university in Acre (later she earned a postgraduate degree too). She campaigned with Chico Mendes, an environmental organiser from Acre who was murdered by a landowner in 1988. She was a founding member of the Workers’ Party, along with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a trade unionist of similarly modest origins. When he became president in 2003 he made Ms Silva, who had entered politics as a state deputy and federal senator, his environment minister.

In government she lost arguments, some better-founded than others, over the introduction of genetically modified soya, the paving of the BR-163 road through the Amazon and nuclear power. She was accused of filling her ministry with greens (to which she pleads guilty) and fellow evangelical Protestants (a charge she rejects). In 2008 she resigned shortly after another minister was handed responsibility for reforming the law on land tenure in the Amazon. She refused to criticise Lula publicly.

Ms Silva’s main campaign theme is that Brazil has a moral responsibility to become a high-tech, low-carbon economy as an example to other developing countries. In a tacit critique of Lula’s fondness for a big state and for Fidel Castro, she also says that Brazil must lower its tax burden and not cuddle up to tyrants. Guilherme Leal, who owns Natura, a big cosmetics firm, and is one of Brazil’s richest men, is considering a request to be her running mate. She still has a lot of ground to make up. “My grandfather told me that the animal with the shortest legs has to run the farthest,” she says, before rushing off to her next campaign appointment.