On the Death of Dr. Eneas Carneiro: Brazil Loses a Patriot, the LaRouche Movement a Friend

Dr. Eneas Carneiro

May 8 (EIRNS)--Dr. Eneas Carneiro, Brazilian cardiologist and Congressman, died on May 6 at the age of 68, from leukemia. Eneas, as he was known since he broke into national prominence in his first run for President of Brazil in 1989, was a fierce patriot and opponent of globalization, and an outspoken friend of the LaRouche movement. In 1998, when interviewed on national television during his third Presidential campaign, he cited the call of "the brilliant economist" LaRouche for a New Bretton Woods, and held up an EIR whose cover attacked George Soros.

In August 1998, he invited Helga Zepp-LaRouche to join him in speaking in Sao Paulo, and in June 2002, he organized an invitation for Lyndon LaRouche himself to receive honorary citizenship from the Sao Paulo City Council.

Dr. Eneas Carneiro
and Lyndon LaRouche

Five months later, Eneas was elected to Congress by the greatest number of votes received by any single candidate, before or since (over 1.57 million) in a campaign on which he spent, at most, $22,000. In his first address in the Chamber of Deputies, in February 2003, Eneas called on President Lula da Silva to break with the IMF system, "this nauseating and infected model that sucks out the innards of the nation," and spoke of the work of "the renowned American economist and thinker Mr. LaRouche," who "studies, dissects, and explains the crisis of the International Financial System as heading towards an abyss which, if not stopped, will without doubt take Humanity into a New Dark Age."

Eneas was a voluntarist. Born on Nov. 5, 1938, and working from age nine to help support his family after his father's death, Eneas became a mathematician, a physicist, and one of Brazil's preeminent cardiologists, teaching thousands of doctors and authoring a textbook on the electrocardiogram. He became a folk hero, a leader who "would not back down."

In February 2004, Eneas gave an interview to EIR in which he reiterated the urgency of changing the global financial system, as LaRouche proposes, and fully endorsed the idea of building a revolutionary youth movement. "I am an enthusiast for this [idea of building a youth movement-ed], an enthusiast! ...I want to believe that leaders will emerge from that collection of youth... Further ahead, I have to participate in a process similar to that ...I am not yet able to do that; I lack the resources. But further ahead, I will do so."