Читать книгу Lula of Brazil - Richard Bourne - Страница 10
Оглавление3 THE PT, THE WORKERS' PARTY
In all the hubbub at the end of the 1970s, with an amnesty, major strikes, and a sense that the military dictatorship was in its final throes, a different note was sounded. Lula and a group of other more progressive union leaders were calling for a distinctive workers' party—the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT. This was a contentious idea and, for many in opposition circles, divisive.
It was divisive because it overtly introduced class-based politics to Brazil. This put off many in the middle class and many traditional politicians and liberal professionals who had been struggling against the military through the tolerated opposition party—the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, the MDB. For them it was essential to maintain a broad front if the dictatorship was to be banished and a full democracy—something Brazil had never had—was to be achieved. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then a young sociology professor returning from exile, was among many who took that view.
It was also divisive on the left. The old PCB had split, with the Maoist PCdoB winning credit for tying up tens of thousands of troops in its Araguaia guerrilla campaign, though the PCB retained support in the unions. Trotskyites were also active. Some Marxists were critical of the idea of a PT because it seemed unideological and too concerned with bread-and-butter issues. As one PCB supporter said, there was already one party that struggled for Brazil's working class, and it had been founded as long ago as 1922.1 The PCB, which had pursued a strategy of infiltration of legal parties since before 1964, was also working for a negotiated transition out of the military regime. The smaller Trotskyite groups were more sympathetic to a PT.
Lula had first brought up the PT question publicly at the conference of oil workers in Bahia in the middle of 1978,2 but there had been informal discussion in unions in the main industrial centers earlier that year. What was the motivation? Undoubtedly there was a feeling that none of the existing politicians were truly representative of the workers. They had not spotted or campaigned against the erosion of the salàrio mínimo. Workers who had been standing up for their rights did not want to be mere vote banks for bourgeois and opportunist congressmen. Furthermore, the claims of the Marxist groups were bogus; they did not have much support among industrial workers, and atheism was anathema to those from a Catholic tradition.
When Lula went to Brasilia to try to get support from MDB congressmen for the strikes and union demands, he found little sympathy. In September 1978 he had gone with a delegation of union leaders to persuade them to vote against a measure of the Geisel government designed to prohibit strikes in essential services including transportation, banking, and petrochemicals. But only two MDB deputies, each of whom had other underground allegiances, gave them a hearing.3 Lula concluded that the existing Congress was totally aligned with the interests of employers.
At the same time, the union movement was gaining confidence. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of workers in the more advanced industries had almost quadrupled, from 2.9 million to 10.6 million.4 The strike wave had shown that they were prepared to use their muscle and take risks.
In 1979 the momentum for a new party increased, stimulated by the knowledge that the military regime was preparing new legislation for the formation of parties. The regime was concerned that MDB was overtaking ARENA, the conservative party that supported the regime. The object of the legislation was to create a multiplication of parties, to muddy the waters, and to make it harder for a more democratic system to undo its economic and institutional changes or lead to revenge.
The proposal for a PT was officially launched at a congress of the São Paulo metalworkers in Lins in January 1979. Lula was not the only union figure involved; among others were those who had been working together to coordinate the strikes—people such as Jacó Bittar of the oil workers and Paulo Skromov Matos of the leather workers. Nonetheless, the key movers took care to keep the party political planning separate from the organization of the strikes.5
But progress that year was erratic, partly because an informal committee consisting of these enthusiasts circulated a charter of principles at May Day rallies throughout Brazil, which others thought was going too far too fast. Some felt that the metalworkers, or the workers from São Paulo more generally, were hustling the rest of the country. Even Lula, after talking with workers elsewhere, sometimes urged caution.
There were discussions among unionists, intellectuals, and MDB politicians, and provisional PT committees were being set up in some states. These might be based on networks of friends, existing leftist or Catholic groups, or more structured union connections. But by 28 June, Lula was promising to distribute a draft program, suggesting that it would then be for the workers to decide whether to go ahead. Significantly, he widened the concept of “worker” beyond those who were unionized to include all wage earners and those involved in social movements such as the neighborhood associations.
At a large meeting in São Paulo on 18 August organized by politicians on the left of the MDB, Lula argued strongly for an independent workers' party because the union structure, however modernized, could not deliver everything that workers needed. Such a party should welcome politicians from the MDB. The party should not be constructed by unions as institutions, as this could compromise their own work. Union leaders might or might not belong to the PT. Hence the PT was launched on a different trajectory from that of the British Labour Party—founded at the start of the twentieth century as an offshoot of trade unions—and comparable parties such as the German Social Democratic Party.
The final pieces in the jigsaw were put together later in the year. At a meeting in a São Bernardo restaurant on 14 October, around a hundred people, including Lula, decided on a structure for the new party. Five days later, the government sent to Congress its party reform law, which abolished the two parties, ARENA and MDB, set up the year after the military takeover. The formal foundation of the PT took place in São Paulo in February 1980, at a meeting of three hundred people in an auditorium of the journalists' union named after the murdered Vladimir Herzog. The party adopted a red five-pointed star as its symbol, and Lula's wife, Marisa, sewed an example, using some Italian cloth she had kept by.
The new rules gave parties a year to get organized and required them to hold conventions in at least one-fifth of the municipalities in at least nine states. They also gave advantages to parties that had at least 10 percent of the membership of the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, and that had an inherited structure; state funding was also to be made available, 90 percent on the basis of the number of congressional representatives a party had succeeded in electing.
All this gave considerable assistance to the conservative PDS (Partido Democrático Social), the heir to ARENA, and to the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro), a continuation of the MDB. The PT, which acquired a small number of leftist deputies from the São Paulo state assembly, never had significant support from the existing Congress, which had not been freely elected. The other new “opposition” party was the PDT (Partido Democrático Trabalhista), formed by Leonel Brizola, who had returned after the amnesty for exiles, but who had failed to recapture the valuable PTB name, which instead was gained by Getúlio's great-niece Yvete Vargas for the party she headed. Over the next couple of years, PT organizers had to fight off constant criticism from those who thought that the PMDB, PT, and PDT ought to work closely together, if not merge outright.
Achieving the required number of party branches and following the new procedures to get registration required a heroic effort by the PT. Money for travel around the country was scarce, and organizers placed a high premium on genuine grassroots participation. Sectarianism was a constant risk, though Lula, perhaps naïvely, hoped that workers would elect their representatives based on merit rather than label. On 22 October, the party requested provisional registration from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, showing that it had regional commissions in eighteen states and municipal commissions in 647 municipalities in thirteen states.6 The PT was the last of the parties to get registration, yet by June 1981 it was claiming some two hundred thousand members.
The PT was the creation of a group of people who had been radicalized by their experiences fighting for union rights in the late 1970s. It was not a creation of Lula alone, though he was a symbolic, charismatic figure. It was part of a much wider context of the struggle for democracy and socioeconomic progress in the dying days of the military regime.
The end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s were a turbulent time in Brazil. The attempt by the military regime to secure itself a soft exit was under constant threat from its own right-wingers, who wanted no backsliding from a linha dura; from a wide range of opponents in civil society, who were hoping to build, for the first time, a truly democratic state; and from events that were often outside the government's control. An aggressive strike movement led to violent police repression, especially in 1980. And Brazil's systemic internal inflation and increased dependence on external loans meant that the economy could suffer unpredictable shocks.
A major campaign was under way to grant amnesty to the politicians, artists, and intellectuals who had lost their civic and political rights. Many had been forced into exile. In August 1979, in President Figueiredo's first year in office, and quite rapidly, Congress granted the amnesty. On one level, it was a response to the campaign and part of the government's strategy for relaxation (distensão). On another, it was designed to sow confusion among opponents, as returnees such as Leonel Brizola, Miguel Arraes,7 and Luis Carlos Prestes sought to resume political careers cut short in 1964.
Right-wing terrorism aimed to destabilize the relaxation strategy and was a challenge both to public security and to the authority of the military regime. Those behind it were torturers and blind anticommunist ideologues, loose cannons lurking in the shadows of the security apparatus. In 1976, ten bomb attacks, for which an “Anticommunist Alliance of Brazil” claimed responsibility, shocked the country; in the same year, the bishop of Nova Iguaçu, in the state of Rio, was kidnapped. Every year from then on until 1981 there were bomb attacks. In 1979, for example, a bomb exploded in a vehicle belonging to one of Lula's colleagues, Joao Pires de Vasconcelos, the president of the Metalworkers of Joao Monlevade, in Minas Gerais. It was difficult to guarantee Lula's personal safety.8
The culmination took place on the night of 30 April 1981, when two bombs went off at the Riocentro convention center in Rio de Janeiro. There, twenty thousand young people had gone to a concert to listen to musicians linked to the opposition. The explosions had a direct connection to the security apparatus of DOI-Codi, as indicated by the fact that one of the bombs went off prematurely in a car, killing a sergeant and army captain.
This led to a crisis within the regime. General Golbery do Couto e Silva, a Machiavellian figure who had been trying to steer distensão through two presidencies, resigned in protest against the loss of control over the security apparatus. President Figueiredo, who himself had commanded the SNI, the national intelligence service, brokered a deal within the system; those responsible for the attacks would not be tried, but the linha dura would have to accept that the government was committed to freer elections. In November, therefore, the government produced a package that would govern elections in 1982.
Opposition to the military comprised a broad and often disparate front. There were the liberal professionals, such as lawyers and journalists, whose work had been directly hampered by the dictatorship at its apogee. In September 1980, for example, a letter bomb addressed to the president of the Brazilian lawyers' association (OAB) killed his secretary. University lecturers, such as the future president Fernando Henrique Cardoso—who had had to flee to Europe via Chile—were opposed to the regime. Students, depoliticized in the 1970s at a time of university expansion, were recovering their voice of protest. Artists and writers had been overwhelmingly against the regime from the beginning, and famous musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Chico Buarque had been in exile.
The Catholic Church was, by the end of the 1970s, also largely against the dictatorship. This was not only on ideological grounds, related to human rights abuses and the soaring inequalities between rich and poor. It was also the product of the church's daily work with Catholic base communities, with workers involved in strikes, and with land conflicts in rural areas. In São Bernardo, an extreme case, priests were working hand in glove with the strike committees.
Several bishops were outspoken in their criticisms—Archbishop Dom Helder Camara in Recife, Dom Cláudio Hummes in São Bernardo, and Dom Adriano Hypolito in Nova Iguaçu. Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, the archbishop of São Paulo, provided leadership in the country's fast-growing industrial and commercial capital. He decried the worsening poverty in São Paulo's periphery of slums.
There was also a significant campaign in the political class for democracy and civic freedom, reflected in the media. Lula, who defined the main division in Brazilian society as being between exploiters and the workers they exploited, had personally supported Cardoso as an MDB candidate in an election in São Paulo in 1978. In 1979, an “opposition” candidate, running against Figueiredo in the electoral college of senators and deputies, which chose the new president, had collected 266 votes to Figueiredo's 335.9 But MDB politicians were far from united, some being more willing than others to play along with the regime and its rules. Ulysses Guimaraes, for example, argued that their duty was to regain the rule of law for Brazil, not to put up candidates for the presidency who were bound not to win.10
The resurgence of inflation at the end of the 1970s and the second oil price shock of 1979 added to the unpopularity of the regime and the uncertainties surrounding its departure. The annual inflation rate rose from 40 percent in 1978 to 55 percent in 1979, 90 percent in 1980, and around 100 percent in the two following years. Higher world interest rates and the damage caused by frost and drought to Brazil's agricultural production also hurt the economy.
Hence, although the electoral package had required a two-thirds majority in Congress to change the Constitution under which the military had been operating, President Figueiredo was still taking a risk in permitting general elections in November 1982. State governors and deputy governors would be directly elected for the first time since elections were suspended by the military in 1966.
This was the first test for the PT. Lula, whose initial intention had been to stay out of the election to promote the party nationwide, was running for governor of his adopted state, São Paulo. The previous year he had taken the precaution of changing his name legally to incorporate Lula, the nickname by which he was best known, so that it could be more easily recognized on a ballot.11
Many of the PT candidates were young and new to politics. The election rules, designed to baffle the less sophisticated and barely literate, required a voter to vote six times—from the presidency down to a seat on the town council—or the vote was treated as null and void.
The election campaign showed up both the strengths and the weaknesses of the PT. It was relatively strong in the industrial belt in and around São Paulo; all told, it elected six out of a possible sixty federal deputies for the state, and nine out of a possible eighty-four deputies in the state legislature. Lula himself came in fourth in the contest for the governorship, with 1.144 million votes, behind both PDS and PTB candidates and Franco Montoro, the PMDB candidate, who won easily with 5.209 million votes.
For Lula it was a personal as well as a political setback. Five years later, in a speech to the PT's fifth national meeting, he reflected ironically on a campaign “in which the least dangerous of us had been condemned to ninety years in prison.” Many voters were frightened of candidates who could be stereotyped as jailbirds, and he personally had misunderstood the psychology of working-class voters.
He had promoted himself as “a Brazilian just like you”—a former dye worker and lathe operator and a trade unionist. But workers did not necessarily want someone like themselves as a governor, though they did as a union leader. They expected someone better off, and better educated, as a governor.
Across the whole of Brazil, the PT did poorly. To the great disappointment of its supporters, it did not meet the law's minimum requirement of 5 percent of votes nationally, and 3 percent in each of nine states; this would have entitled it to public funding. Its best efforts were in São Paulo, with 9.9 percent, and the small Amazon state of Acre, with 5.4 percent.
It did appear to be a Paulista party, and the fact that its best-known face was tied down in the São Paulo governorship election meant that Lula could do little to help struggling candidates elsewhere. The main winner was the PMDB, benefiting from an opposition to the military regime that had lasted for nearly two decades. The PDS, successor to the pro-regime ARENA party, did well in the conservative, economically backward, and clientelistic states of the northeast. In a result that indicated that pre-1964 figures still had support, Leonel Brizola won the governorship of Rio de Janeiro for the PDT.
The PT's campaign theme was “work, land, and liberty.” It wanted to end the dictatorship, to end hunger, to provide land and better wages for rural workers, to promote better health and less profit from illness, to define access to education and culture as a right, not a class privilege, to promote equality and an end to discrimination, to prevent the stealing of public money, to end the exploitation of public contracts by private companies, and, in a rhetorical flourish, to claim “power to the workers and the people—the workers' struggle is the same all over the world—only socialism will solve our problems once and for all.”12
Although the PT had been created from a coalition of factions, it ran its election in a centralized way. The same election materials were provided to all its candidates. Those who were elected were expected to turn over 40 percent of their salaries to the party.
There were several features of this first electoral test for the PT that the party took to heart afterward. It became involved in a furious dispute with the PMDB, which saw the PT as a splitter, dividing the antigovernment vote. PMDB leaders, especially in São Paulo, called for the voto útil, a useful vote; electors should not waste their votes on parties with little chance of winning.
Lula saw the PMDB as an enemy, describing it as hostile to the working class, as “flour out of the same sack” as the PDS, and as cozying up to the government. He denounced the way in which the media, which had built him up as a hero only three years earlier, were now attacking him. He dismissed as slander the idea that the military government would not let him or Brizola take office if they were elected.13
The PT realized that it was bad at public relations with the media and did not appreciate how its propaganda would be seen by others. Strict limits on political advertising meant that only photos and brief biographies appeared on TV; by showing that many PT candidates had been imprisoned by the regime, it inadvertently suggested that they were criminals. It also learned that its capacity to mobilize huge crowds—Lula spoke to as many as one hundred thousand at a rally in the state capital and almost one-third of the population of the small town of Nova Odessa—had little to do with its ability to win their votes. To begin with, it complained that polling organizations were undercounting the PT vote because polling estimates seemed so small compared with the turnout at PT meetings. But the pollsters were right. Lula himself was a celebrity and an exciting speaker, but this did not mean that audiences would vote for him or the new party, or that all the electors were coming to PT rallies.
There were various positives, however. The first related to the performance of Lula himself. In this campaign, in what was to become a running criticism in his early presidential campaigns, he was attacked as too uneducated to be an appropriate governor of the most powerful state in Brazil; the accusation was that he might be all right as a strike leader, but greater sophistication was needed to govern São Paulo. But in fact, in televised discussions among the governorship candidates, Lula debated the issues on terms of equality. A poll taken after the first debate, broadcast on 14 August, showed that the majority of viewers thought that he had won the argument.
The second positive, which the party could not easily interpret, showed that it had an ability to win support outside the unionized workers. Its foothold in Acre, where the PT was winning elections into the twenty-first century, illustrated this wider reach.14 And, although the organized workers in greater São Paulo were critical to PT's support in the state, the deputies it elected were not all trade unionists and reflected different elements in the party's makeup. For example, Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy, a former professor and scion of the Matarazzo dynasty, had been fighting corruption from the MDB before joining the PT. Irma Passoni was a Catholic activist who had been an organizer of the popular movement against the rise in the cost of living. Beth Mendes was a film and TV star. José Genoino Neto was a Marxist who had been captured in the Araguaia guerrilla campaign.
Nonetheless, the PT's poor showing in the 1982 elections was a profound blow to activists. Many of them felt that they would do better to return to work in the unions and social movements that had inspired them in the 1970s. The handful of councilors and deputies who had won felt that they had little institutional support from the party.
It was also a personal blow to Lula, who suddenly had a great emptiness in his life. His union was no longer under state intervention and he had handed it over to Meneghelli. He had lost the election, which he had persuaded himself he had a chance of winning. He would wake up in the morning with nothing much to do. In fact, he returned to the Metalworkers' Union of São Bernardo, becoming a director on Meneghelli's executive committee. At the same time, he retained his position as president of the PT's national committee.
The following year, Lula promoted a solidarity strike in the ABC zone that led to another intervention in his union. In July 1983, his old friends the petroleum workers of Campinas launched a strike in protest against a military decree-law that reduced the rights of employees of state enterprises; they shut down the refinery at Paulínia, responsible for a third of the country's gasoline. Lula, who was not even a delegate to the Metalworkers' Congress at Piracicaba, made an off-the-cuff speech urging that the metalworkers should go on strike in solidarity. The congress was suspended, and Lula went off to Campinas in such a hurry to tell the Campinas workers the news that he left Marisa behind. Meneghelli had difficulty taking control of the strike, and once again the Ministry of Labor took over the union.
The conflict rapidly escalated. The government had already taken over the union of petroleum workers of Campinas and Paulínia, throwing out its president, Jacó Bittar, who was also secretary-general of the PT. Workers throughout the country decided to hold a national strike on 21 July, in protest against the government's economic policy and its willingness to negotiate spending cuts with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The strike was particularly effective in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro, but the government stopped some of the action by mobilizing military police in every state. The repression was violent, with police detaining and beating up workers. Workers in São Bernardo who had tried to take refuge in the cathedral were pulled out by armed police in spite of the protests of Bishop Hummes.
Lula was attacked by some for being irresponsible, and his union did not get its building back for a year. But he argued that, because solidarity strikes were still illegal, it was important that workers should show support for one another if they were to build a strong, autonomous movement. He was also in tune with most of organized labor in criticizing an IMF economic policy that led to cuts in public spending and worsened the recession. The events demonstrated that, even without a prominent role in the union, Lula himself could still sway opinion.
In the PT there was also an organizational development of significance. Lula was rarely interested in organizational matters, but the setting up of the “Articulaçao of 113”—a pressure group initially composed of 113 people—was designed to bring discipline to the party. It became the dominant faction in the PT into the 1990s, and a key player was José Dirceu, a former student leader who had gone to Cuba after the kidnap exchange and then returned to Brazil in disguise. He fully appreciated the importance of party structuring.
But Lula himself had found a new cause—the campaign for direct elections for the presidency. Some Marxists in the PT thought little of bourgeois democracy, but the Articulaçao and Lula saw this as a way of mobilizing support. The PT was the first major party to throw its weight behind the campaign and, at a meeting in the Rio governor's mansion on 25 June 1983—just prior to Lula's solidarity struggle alongside the petroleum workers—Lula, Leonel Brizola, and Franco Montoro agreed to work together for “Diretas Já,” direct elections now. Significantly, this brought the PMDB, the PDT, and the PT together. Huge demonstrations took place in the main cities in 1984—eight hundred thousand in Candelária, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, and 1.4 million in the valley of Anhangabaú, São Paulo.
Brazil had not seen anything like it. Newspapers such as the Globo group, based in Rio, and Folha de São Paulo, both of which had attacked Lula in 1982, backed the movement. Lula, breathing the oxygen of publicity again, was a star speaker at rallies. Any speaker who seemed at all hesitant in backing direct elections for the presidency was booed.
The constitutional amendment, put forward by a young PMDB congressman from Mato Grosso, Dante de Oliveira, was due to be voted on 25 April 1984.15 Such was the tension in the country that President Figueiredo declared a state of emergency in Brasília and neighboring municipalities of Goiás six days in advance of the scheduled vote; TV stations were prohibited from covering the voting; and six thousand troops occupied the heart of the city on the day of the vote. The troops were led by General Newton Cruz, mounted on a white horse, who tried to stop motorists from honking their horns to show their support for Diretas Já.
The constitutional amendment needed a two-thirds majority, which it just failed to reach. Although 298 deputies voted in favor, with only 65 against and 3 abstentions, the amendment's passage was stymied by the absence of 112 parliamentarians. In effect, the absentees won. This meant that the regime's attempt to keep the transfer to a civilian president within a system of indirect election, which it had a better chance to control, had succeeded.
This was to overlook the wily skills of the Brazilian political class, however. Although Lula and the PT were strongly critical of this class—its elasticity of principle, its elite proclivities, and its self-enrichment—its sense of public opinion had survived the two decades of dictatorship. Elected politicians realized that it was time for a change. The PMDB put together a “Democratic Alliance” with a breakaway group of progovernment congressmen and launched a campaign to elect the PMDB governor of Minas Gerais, Tancredo Neves, as president. The formerly progovernment José Sarney, now in the PMDB, was his running mate. Once again there were huge public demonstrations.
While the PCdoB joined the pro-Tancredo demonstrations, the PT leadership was adamant: there had to be direct elections, there had to be a constitutional convention, and this was just a “conservative transition.” Lula was vitriolic. He said that the election of Tancredo would not mean the end of the dictatorship and the military regime. There would still be an authoritarian regime, which would try to persuade Brazilians to forget the crimes of the previous twenty years. PT members were consulted directly. They were asked to vote on three options—whether their deputies should support Tancredo against the “fascist” Paulo Maluf,16 whether they should back Tancredo after reaching an agreement on a program of interest to workers, or whether they should boycott the process.
Although only 7 percent of party members took part in the internal referendum, they voted overwhelmingly to boycott the process. In January 1985, however, Tancredo and Sarney were elected by Congress with 480 votes; three out of the eight PT deputies, including the film actress Beth Mendes, voted for them and had to leave the party. Tancredo, a subtle politician, appointed an old friend of Lula as his minister of labor. He was Almir Pazzianoto, a labor lawyer who had represented the São Bernardo Metalworkers. In a tragedy that moved the country, however, Tancredo was taken to the hospital on the eve of his inauguration, and he died on 21 April. He was succeeded as president by José Sarney.
In May, the Congress finally reestablished direct elections for the presidency, giving twenty million illiterates the right to vote—something they had not enjoyed prior to 1964—and legalizing all political parties. It also called for a constitutional assembly. Although this was not precisely the format called for by the PT, and Sarney's conduct of the presidency was probably more conservative than Tancredo's would have been had he lived, these measures together meant that the military era was over.
The political changes that led to the establishment of the “New Republic” in 1985 were paralleled by important changes in the economy and the organized labor movement. The early 1980s saw a downturn in the Brazilian economy. In mid-1981, more than nine hundred thousand people lost their jobs in the six major metropolitan areas of Brazil, and by August of that year unemployment in those cities was estimated at two million.17 The government was also greatly concerned by the growth of Brazil's indebtedness and was encouraging state enterprises to borrow internationally to offset the deficit in the balance of payments. There were constant liquidity crises in 1982 and 1983, and, just after the 1982 elections, the Figueiredo government was forced to start negotiating with the IMF.
