Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

If there was one last thing I could do in my life, it would be to help Dilma turn this country around, with the decency that the Brazilian public deserves.

They were two and a half decades in which Brazil had no capacity to invest in infrastructure. Just to give you an idea, in 1989, we had in Brazil about 50,000 project-engineering businesses. When I took office, there were just 8,000. Universities were no longer turning out engineers.

A war can perhaps be won single-handedly. But peace - lasting peace - cannot be secured without the support of all.

We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action.

The thing is that we live in a presidential system with a parliamentary constitution. Congress has a lot of weight in Brazil, and the president cannot always do when he wants; he does what he can.

The financial system has to be regulated, we have to end with the tax havens, and it's necessary that the central banks in the world should control a little bit the banks' financing because they cannot bypass a certain range of leverage.

Venezuela needs to develop; economic growth is essential for the country after so many years of lagging behind.

I know what unemployment means because I was unemployed for one-and-a-half years, and I know the drama that the worker and unemployed worker faces. I know the world of the labor union better than I think anyone else does.