PT does not stand for the Party of Trickery, Fraud or Skullduggery. It’s the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores), which over its 35 years of existence has shown itself to have many virtues and a few vices. Today it appears to a considerable portion of public opinion as a party “just like all the others”, or “flour from the same sack.”

The horror of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages and the recent cases of pedophilia don’t obscure the history of the Church bathed in the blood of martyrs and embraced by so many exemplary figures, such as St. Francis of Assis, Father Bartolomeu de las Casas and Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

The fact that some PT leaders have acted unethically and against the party’s principles does not mean all its leaders are implicated, much less its militant base, for the most part made up of the poor, unemployed, housewives, small farmers, students and liberal professionals.

Excesses, betrayals and corruptions occur, unfortunately, in all institutions. Even Jesus had his Judas.

The PT does not deserve to be reduced to the gutter by Congressman Roberto Jefferson. It needs to be preserved and cleansed, as President Lula well-noted in supporting the special congressional investigating committees, firing his chief of staff, José Dirceu and intervening in the party’s direction, easing out some of its members from position in his cabinet and replacing them with highly competent and trustworthy ministers, such as Tarso Genro (Education), Ricardo Berzoini (Labor) and Humberto Costa (Health).

I never joined the PT, but I participated in its history, I endorsed it together with the Ecclesial Base Communities. As a citizen, I can state it is viscerally committed to the country’s future. If the PT is shipwrecked along with its leaders who are under suspicion, what other horizon will the poor have to channel their hopes? The PT is much more than its directors who are accused of involvement in illegal campaign financing.

In a nation where the richest 10% of the population controls 45% of the wealth, and the poorest 10% shares only 1% of the nation’s wealth, the PT has been a beacon for change, for more social justice, despite the hindrance of the government’s current economic policy.
The hypothesis of tearing the PT apart, advocated by retrograde sectors of Brazilian politics, is a threat to the stability of democracy. Without the PT, the popular movements will lose their political representation. It’s true they can quit the party and migrate to other progressive parties, but none of these have sufficient grass-roots support and tradition in the country, nor do they enjoy the confident enthusiasm the PT enjoys throughout Brazil.

Without the PT on the Brazilian political scene, the popular movement will be orphaned, without any channel for expression, which could cause disenchantment with institutional politics and result in serious problems. Labor unions and landless peasant movements could yield to the temptation of becoming party alternatives, deviating from their specific objectives. Social movements could well become incapable of containing the revolt of their more militant members in search of non-institutional alternatives to achieve social changes. Nobody can be sure these alternatives will respect the limits of a lawful state.

Armed struggle today only interests two sectors: weapons makers and the extreme right, pining for the days when the law was subjugated to the rifle. But we cannot ask 53.9 million poor people to have infinite patience. Although the federal government has been implementing innovative social programs, such as Zero Hunger, family stipends for sending kids to school, microcredit, assistance to smallholders, demarcation of indigenous lands (such as Raposa Serra do Sol), help to cooperatives and expansion of formal employment, there is still much to be done to achieve the PT’s historic commitments, such as effective agrarian and labor reforms.

Nobody emerges unscathed from a crisis. In the current one afflicting the country, in the eye of the storm, the PT must serve for the party’s new direction – the provisional one that will be elected at the September party convention – to rethink its internal control mechanisms, its ethical principles, its campaign finance criteria, its process of membership, formation of political militancy and qualification of its leaders, its strategic vision of a less unequal and more developed Brazil.

The PT is a repository of immeasurable hope, today centralized in the Lula government. Worse than all the scandals is to see fear, faced with the injunctions of the financial market, defeat this hope. Corruption is not the PT’s greatest threat. It’s the risk that the party will not achieve its historic role as an agent for social transformation. As Lula said while speaking at the Bastille in Paris, those who think big are big. If the PT only thinks of the upcoming elections, blind to the horizon of changes that it unveiled, it will wither away like a dim star. And it also will wipe out the hope of millions. Only abject despair will remain, in whose womb will germinate malign political seeds: fascism, fundamentalism and terrorism.

We must save the PT, freeing it of those who are undeserving. It’s a matter of saving Brazilian democracy. And there’s a lesson we can all learn: when we can’t see clearly who our adversaries are, we run the risk of behaving just like them.