Letter from Amazonia: "It'll take a tsunami to stop Lula winning a second term as president," says Manuel Sena Dutra, a professor at the Federal University of Pará here in Belém.
The four-year term of Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva - peasant boy from the state of Pernambuco in Brazil's starving northeast and former factory worker and union leader in the heaving industrial megalopolis of São Paulo - is up at the end of this year.
On Saturday he finally announced his decision to seek four more years.
In the immediate run-up to this weekend's decision, the man who created the PT, or Workers' Party, came under sustained fire from those who detest him and his politics.
Senator José Jorge, the main opposition candidate for the vice-presidency, fired both barrels. The head of state, said Jorge, "doesn't work - he just travels around and he's drinking a lot".
Lula will not worry too much about that attack. The senator has a national profile even lower than that of his boss, the unexciting opposition presidential candidate, Geraldo Alckmin.
Alckmin, a former governor of the state of São Paulo, is little known outside his own state, rich and powerful though that is. Though they are even less reliable than in many other countries, national public opinion polls show a tremendous swing to Lula.
They say he has gained 16 points since the beginning of this year and the government now commands a 60 per cent approval rating. In the same period the disapproval rating has fallen from 52 per cent to 34 per cent. Alckmin has a mere 18 per cent of the preferences.
The former governor is the sort of person that people here in the state of Pará and the rest of Amazonia don't like. He's rich, comes from the south and represents the fat cats who, in the view of Amazonians, forget this part of the world most of the time and, when they do occasionally remember it, just come in to buy it up and exploit it.
In his perceptive and entertaining book, Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks, Stephen Nugent recalls how he went to the Brazilian Cultural Centre in New York in search of newspapers from Belém.
"The staff there laughed: 'You mean they have newspapers in the Amazon?'. It was as though I'd pulled into a gas station expecting to get feed for my mule."
Jungle-covered Amazonia, drained by the world's greatest river, which is 12 times bigger than the Mississippi, embraces something approaching two-thirds of the area of Brazil yet contains only 21 million people, a mere 12 per cent of the population. Here there are only four people for every square kilometre, compared to more than 43 people for the same area in the rest of the country.
History, too, distinguishes it from the rest of Brazil. For more than a century, when Portugal ruled Brazil, Amazonia was separated administratively and ruled directly from Lisbon.
What is more, it was easier for the people of Belém to get to the Portuguese capital than to sail round the big northeastern bulge of the country to Rio de Janeiro, which was inaccessible by road.
In 1835, a decade after Brazil became an empire independent of Portugal, there was a vast uprising of the poor, blacks and Indians in the cities of the region, the Cabanagem, which was put down with much blood and difficulty after five years. The emperor sent the navy, troops and death squads up from Rio.
Its workers resorted to collecting wild rubber in disgusting labour conditions which were revealed to the world only by Roger Casement, then in the British Foreign Office, who was dispatched to report a century ago.
A still-bruised Amazonia does not warm to the rich industrial south, and relations are not improved by the fact that São Paulo has itself got into the business of rubber-growing. Amazonians are slightly less distrustful of the people of the northeast, but still are wary.
It is not surprising therefore that they took their time to accept Lula, born 60 years ago in the northeast and raised in São Paulo.
Now they are coming round to him. "This time in his political career he'll win with votes of poor people in the countryside," says Prof Dutra.
"His family allowance scheme has been a great success."
Lula won the presidency proposing the Zero Fome ("Zero Hunger") scheme, which promised that half of the 190 million Brazilians who live in poverty would have access to enough food.
Zero Hunger spawned an allowance for families with a monthly income of less than $43 (€34) a month per head, but it was made conditional on children between six and 15 being sent to school regularly and having their vaccination records kept up to date. So far nine million families, some 30 million people, have benefited. There are also kitchens where a poor person can get a meal for one real, the equivalent of 36 cent.
"They certainly like to be able to eat. They are enthusiastic about getting their children to school," says Dutra.
There are those who say that in his second term Lula will return to the agenda of thorough-going reform, such as a much-needed land reform, that he once espoused and appeared to soft-pedal after he became president. This frightens many establishment figures.
Brazil, increasingly prosperous, paying off its foreign debts and self-sufficient in oil, is beginning to make a mark in the world - even if it does not win the World Cup and its national airline does collapse.
Lula can start laughing at the navel-gazers in the United Nations International Monetary Fund in Washington. They recently complimented Brazil on its economic progress but warned Lula against spending too much on social programmes for the poor.
And that will do him no harm in this city. After all, affordable social spending will get him his second term. Unless, of course, there's a tsunami.