Читать книгу Lula of Brazil - Richard Bourne - Страница 8
Оглавление1 A TOUGH START IN LIFE
Lula was born on 27 October 1945 in the neighborhood of Garanhuns, a small town about 150 miles inland from Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco.1 It was a Saturday. His father had left a month before to find work in São Paulo, and his mother, Dona Lindu, was already bringing up six children. Lula, Luiz Inácio da Silva, was the seventh.2 They were living in a small house, and she was scraping together a living by growing maize and manioc, potatoes, beans, and fruit.
The house where Lula was born no longer exists. But its site, up a dirt track some way off the main road from Garanhuns to Caetés, was pointed out to me in September 2005 by two boys on motorcycles, one a distant cousin of Lula's. Technically, the land is semiarid, but there are pools of water nearby and the soil is fertile.
A few of the farmhouses now have satellite TV dishes. But there is still much unemployment, and there are armed holdups on some of the rural roads at night. Garanhuns, “the city of flowers,” was founded in 1879; its railway station, long closed, has become a cultural center. It is a region of minifundios (smallholdings), not natural territory for the Partido dos Trabalhadores (the PT, the Workers' Party), and it was not until twentyfive years after the party's foundation that it managed to elect its first town councilor (vereador).3
It is an area that has seen a steady flow of out-migration for more than a half century. In 2005, as president, Lula opened a law school at the state university of Pernambuco in the town, in part a contribution to keeping young people in the area. At the dedication there was a crowd of ten thousand, and fifty of his relations were photographed alongside him.
If Garanhuns today looks tidy, with some new buildings, the smaller town of Caetés is closer to the history of forgotten places in Brazil's impoverished northeast.4 There are still donkey carts to be seen, and the occasional pau-de-arara (literally, “parrot's perch”), which is a truck converted to a people-transport with hard wooden benches.5 It is hard to know what anyone does for a living in Caetés, aside from subsistence agriculture. But the da Silva family of the president is acknowledged. Opposite the home of Lula's cousin Gilberto Ferreira is a new public health clinic named for Dona Lindu.
It does not take a lot of imagination to realize that when Lula was born this was a harsh region. There was no electricity in the countryside. People heated their homes and cooked with charcoal and firewood. They got water from wells and washed their clothes in streams. Whole families squeezed into self-built two-room houses. Lula's had been built by his father and uncle, with a wooden roof, a cement floor under the main room, and beaten earth elsewhere. Cobras would sit on the roof. There was no radio.
Surplus produce barely stretched to buy essentials, such as clothing or salt, and game was hunted to add to the diet. Brazil may have been among the victors in World War II, its expeditionary force coming home from Italy to a country that was sick of its semifascist Estado Novo regime, but in the northeast, regularly stricken by droughts, there was often hunger.
When she felt her labor pains beginning, Lula's mother, Euridice Ferreira de Melo, asked her brother-in-law José to fetch a midwife from Caetés. He was thin, she was large, and they fell off the horse more than once on the way back; by the time they arrived, Lula was in the process of being born. His mother was thirty. Her eldest son, José Inácio, known as Zé Cuia, was nine; Jaime was eight; Marinete was seven; Genival, known as Vavá, was six; another José—later known as Frei Chico because his baldness made him look like a monk—was three; and Maria was two. Two other babies had died before Lula's birth; Lindu also lost twins later, after Lula's birth. Large families and child mortality were sadly common in an era prior to birth control and in a region lacking health services.
What Dona Lindu did not know, when she cried as she waved her dry-eyed husband, Aristides Inácio da Silva, off on foot to pick up a paude-arara in Garanhuns to find his fortune in the southeast—he had sold two horses to raise the fare—was that he was not leaving alone. He was traveling with a young female cousin of Lindu's, Mocinha,6 already pregnant, with whom he would raise a second family. Nordestino migrants to the richer central south often started second families. In the case of the da Silvas, this led to trouble.
Although Aristides sent money back for Lindu, which was crucial for two years when her smallholding was wracked by drought, he did not return to the northeast even to visit until 1949. He had won funds for a trip from jogo de bicho, the illegal but popular gambling game, and he brought his second wife and their two sons back to Pernambuco to see their homeland. Although he kept Mocinha apart from Lindu, Lindu felt humiliated, and Vavá made a point of throwing his well-dressed halfbrothers into the nettles. They did not come again.
Nonetheless, Lindu accepted Aristides. He made her pregnant once more, with Sebastiana, or Tiana, who was baptized as Ruth. Lula therefore met his father for the first time when he was four. He was not to get to know him until he was seven, and he was only to live with him for three rather unhappy years altogether.
A certain amount is known of Lula's antecedents. His paternal grandfather had land in Pernambuco and, according to Lula himself, was very mean and died poor. His was a common Portuguese surname. On his mother's side, Lula had a grandmother who was a dressmaker of Italian origin, who drank too much. It is generally supposed that, as with other northeastern families, there had been intermarriage with the local natives (usually called Indians) in the past. Aristides looked like a caboclo, a rural man descended from a mixture of Indians and Portuguese. Lula's parents were poor and illiterate, and, though his father had some admiration for Getúlio Vargas (the former dictator who came back to be elected as president in 1950), they showed little interest in politics.
During his formative early years, Lula was brought up by his mother, brothers, and sisters, particularly his older sister Marinete. He adored his hardworking mother, a woman who never had enemies and who was loving without being demonstrative with her children. She was blueeyed and physically strong, but a tough life and modest diet prematurely aged her.
It may not be right to describe Lula as her favorite child, though he may have had some advantages as her youngest son. But she seems to have spotted something about him—a kind of energy, if not exactly a gift for leadership—quite early on, and she strongly encouraged his education when she could. The family was poor, surrounded by other poor families, and therefore not always aware of its poverty. Lula does not remember having had much fun in his early childhood.
His life changed when he was seven. In 1952, his mother brought the whole family down to Santos, where his father was working at the port as a longshoreman. He was loading sacks of coffee (then and for much longer Brazil's principal export) onto the ships. This was hard manual labor. Aristides became too fond of alcohol and tried to conceal his illiteracy by buying newspapers, which he sometimes pretended to read while holding them upside down.
Aristides probably never wanted his first family to come south, and implied that the only member he would have liked to see was a favorite dog, who had had to be left behind. On a second visit to the northeast he collected his son Jaime, who then wrote to Lindu without his father's knowledge to say that Aristides wanted them all to join him. Lindu, telling the children that it would be better to die of hunger in São Paulo than in the northeast, sold everything and bought a ride on a pau-dearara. Vavá, hiding in a tree, did not want to leave home.
The journey south was a classic migrant story of the era, lasting thirteen days and nights from 10 to 23 December 1952. Altogether eleven members of the family were on a crowded truck covered by a canvas top—Lindu and seven children, plus an uncle, his wife, and their son. Lula wore the same shirt throughout the trip.
This was Lula's first expedition away from home, and on it he caught his first sight of a bicycle, a car, and a truck. They started from Tonzinho's, a bar and corner shop, where they had to stay overnight because the paude-arara was behind schedule. On the journey they slept in the truck, in the open, or at gas stations; Lindu had packed chicken and biscuits, and they also lived off farinha (manioc flour), bananas, and jerked meat; they were chased by cattle; Lula and Frei Chico were nearly left behind when they stopped to relieve themselves, and had to run behind the truck at night for a half mile before they were spotted; they washed every three or four days. It was a huge adventure: sixty people packed together in two levels on an uncomfortable truck, driving on dirt roads, looking forward to a new life.
When the da Silvas reached their destination, the Brás bus station in São Paulo, all eleven of them piled into a new Chevrolet taxi and drove down to the Santos docks in search of Aristides. He was not particularly pleased to see them—he was living with Mocinha and their children—but rented a place for them to stay. This opened a new chapter in the life of the dysfunctional family. It offered the prospect of greater freedom for Lula, and this was the point at which he ceased to be a rather ignorant country child and began to grow up as a streetwise kid, close to Brazil's industrial heartland.
Lula never liked his father. He saw him as tyrannical, stupid, alcoholic, and favoring his second family over his first. When drunk—and he was overly fond of cachaça, a type of rough sugarcane liquor—he would beat his family, though his second wife and their son Rubens suffered more than Lindu's children. The only good things Lula had to say about Aristides were that he was a hard worker, that he tried to support both families, and that in certain ways he recognized the primacy of the first. Lula's other siblings were frightened of their father, but Frei Chico, who went hunting with him on the weekend, had a rather better opinion.
Lula's memories of his father in Santos, recounted to his biographer, Denise Paraná,7 were largely negative. He gave two illustrations. One was when Aristides had asked Frei Chico and Lula to check on a small boat he had on the River Caraú, the far side of a Brazilian air force base from where they lived. It began to rain heavily when they were going there, they were afraid, and they turned back without seeing the boat. When Aristides came home, Lindu told him that the boat was safe. The next day, however, a fellow worker told Aristides that he had seen someone rowing off in the boat—that it had been stolen. Aristides was furious. When he got home, he beat Frei Chico so hard with a hosepipe that he urinated in his school trousers, and he would have beaten Lula also had Lindu not stood between them. He struck Lindu instead; Lula thought this was the start of her determination to separate from him.
The other example was Aristides' meanness about food. Food was always in short supply, but in 1952, when Tiana was only three, he gave pieces of bread to his dogs even though she was begging for some. Lula also did not forgive Aristides for giving ice cream once to his two sons by Mocinha, but not to Lula, saying that he would not know how to lick it! Their father did not let them have much fun, would not let the older boys smoke, and was suspicious of education.
How did Aristides manage to keep the two households going? He alternated between them, spending two nights here and two there. But in fact he was a privileged worker, earning relatively good money as a stevedore. It was physically demanding to carry three sacks of coffee beans at a time. But longshoremen who loaded coffee beans onto the ships were able to dress well and were treated as aristocrats of labor.
Furthermore, every member of the family, except the youngest, had to work and bring in money. Vavá sold water from a barrel and worked in a bar, Jaime helped construct fishing boats in a shipyard, Zé Cuia worked in a coal yard, and Marinete and Maria both worked as domestics. When Lula was seven or eight, he started selling peanuts in the port with Frei Chico. They also sold oranges and Lindu's homemade tapioca. Lula was not very good at this to begin with; Frei Chico later recalled that he was too shy to shout his wares.
Child labor and children selling on the street were common then and are not unknown in Brazil now. An excellent film by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Rio, 40 Graus, follows the fortunes of a group of child peanut sellers in Rio de Janeiro at about the time Lula and Frei Chico were selling peanuts in Santos. It depicts the intimidation of young street sellers by older boys and the police in a risky and potentially violent environment. Lula was not an orphan and had a large family and loving mother behind him, but his experiences on the quays of Santos only strengthened his knowledge of human nature, his street smarts, and his will to survive.
Lula and his siblings worked by day and studied by night. He and three others went to the same school, the Grupo Escolar Marcílio Dias. He remembers a teacher, Dona Terezinha, who was fond of him, and he recalls that Frei Chico won a translation of Gulliver's Travels as a prize.
But life in Santos, with a sometimes drunk father and a mother who was far from happy that she was sharing her husband with another, was no idyll. It involved much drudgery, which included hauling water and firewood. Within three years Lindu had had enough and decided to break away from Aristides. Although he tried to win her back with feasts and relatives' attempts at persuasion, and by hanging around her new home at night, she was finished with him. One day she and her family left the joint home early, leaving behind only a daughter to hand him the keys.
Lindu never married again, though she had an offer, and she bore Aristides little ill will after the separation, even bringing up one of his other children. For Lula and her other children, however, this separation was like a cry of liberty. They could begin to live a normal childhood and adolescence, go to the movies, play soccer, and have boyfriends and girlfriends.
But they were still toiling hard, and Lindu was sorting coffee beans and then washing clothes to make money. She got behind with her rent. Her fortunes changed in 1955, however, when Vavá found a package wrapped up in a newspaper on the ground at the market where he was working. It contained 5,855 cruzeiros—more than thirty-four times the legal minimum monthly salary.
After waiting a week to see whether anyone would claim the money and giving 500 cruzeiros to the man he had asked for advice, Vavá handed over the money to his mother. She promptly paid off the rent she owed and moved with four of her children to Vila Carioca, an industrial suburb of the city of São Paulo. Two of her daughters, working as domestics, stayed behind in Santos; Frei Chico and Lula lived with Aristides and Mocinha for an uncomfortable year—during which Aristides was stabbed in a drunken brawl and lost a kidney—before rejoining their mother in 1956.
What sort of a Brazil was it that Lula was growing up in, as he arrived in Brazil's industrial capital? It was an exciting time. In 1955, Juscelino Kubitschek had been elected president, backed by two parties, the Partido Social Democrático and the Partido Trabalhista Brasileira, both of which traced their origins to Getúlio Vargas. He promised fifty years of progress in five, a program of thirty metas (goals), rapid industrialization based on import substitution, and a deepening of Brazil's rather fragile democracy. This was a democracy that was only a decade old, where an elected president had committed suicide in 1954, blaming malign pressures, where illiterates such as Aristides could not vote, where there had been constant rumors of military intervention, and where Kubitschek could be elected with only 35.63 percent of the vote.
Historically, Brazil had been an exception in Latin America. It was Portuguese-speaking, largely surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries. It had been created by the diplomacy of Portugal and the ruthless westward advance of mixed-race bandeirantes, of Portuguese and American Indian heritage, in the era of Portuguese discovery and the following century. Two years after Columbus “discovered” the New World, Portugal persuaded the pope to arbitrate between the two Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal, in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Under the terms of the treaty, Portugal would get land 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Six years later, Pedro Cabral “discovered” Brazil, and a rather lackluster mother country oversaw a steadily expanding occupation by her more energetic offspring.
In the succeeding four centuries there was a gradual colonization of the vast space of modern Brazil. Rivals such as the Dutch, who briefly occupied the northeast in the seventeenth century, were defeated. Negro slaves were brought from Africa, after the local Indians proved resistant to coercion and manual labor. There were periodic booms in sugar, gold, and cotton, but Portugal, initially more interested in a route to India and the spice trade, took a while to find much economic advantage in its South American possession.
While the coastal strip saw a semifeudal world consolidate, with plantation houses and slavery, a more dynamic and lawless society was growing up in São Paulo and in the west, the south, and up the Amazon tributaries. Intermarriage and sexual promiscuity among Europeans, Africans, and Indians were commonplace. Brazil joined the European world of the early nineteenth century extremely suddenly following Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807. Guarded by the British Navy, the royal court and ten thousand hangers-on arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where they were to stay from 1808 to 1821.8
A new opera house, botanical gardens, and a surge of modernity followed. But the experience also marked out differences between Brazil and its Spanish-speaking neighbors. The ideas of the enlightenment and the American and French revolutions led to violent rebellion against the Spanish crown. In Brazil, by contrast, the king's younger son, Pedro, with his grito do Ipiranga—his cry of “Independence or death”—led the colony into independence from Portugal in 1822. This launched the long anomalous period of the Brazilian Empire, finally concluded by an army mutiny in 1889. One year earlier, Brazil had belatedly abolished slavery, an indication of the social conservatism of the empire.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the era in which Lula's parents were growing up, Brazil's politics were dominated by coffee and milk—the states of São Paulo, with its powerful coffee growers, and Minas Gerais, with its dairy farmers. The northeast was in thrall to the coroneis— reactionary local landowners who may or may not have once been colonels in the militia. In the south, along the border with Uruguay and Argentina, European immigration and a cowboy tradition had led to a certain impatience with the sloth and corruption of the federal government in Rio de Janeiro. Politics was elitist, subtle, and personal, and habits of accommodation and the exchange of favors persisted from the imperial era.
Brazil was still overwhelmingly agricultural, but in the big cities of the central south there was the start of modern capitalism and an industrial working class. Francisco Matarazzo, an entrepreneur, opened his first textile factory in São Paulo in 1904, and thirty years later the combined revenues of his businesses represented 87.5 percent of the income of the state. The Brazilian Communist Party was founded in 1922, and the federation of São Paulo industrialists six years later.
What changed Brazil more profoundly than the end of the empire in 1889 was the revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930. Vargas had been the state president of Rio Grande do Sul and had run in a federal presidential election that year as the candidate of the Liberal Alliance. His father and maternal uncle had been commanders on opposite sides in a brutal statewide civil war, and he inherited a ruthless streak. He had backing from Minas Gerais and the northeastern state of Paraíba in the 1930 election. But there was no secret vote, and elections were fixed through a carving up of spoils among state political machines. After the 1930 election, the outgoing president, Washington Luís, claimed that his candidate, Julio Prestes—the state president of São Paulo, so a Paulista like himself—had won by a two-to-one majority.
The country was ripe for a revolution. Stocks had crashed in 1929, and in the same year there had been a crisis of overproduction of coffee, the key export earner—output had almost doubled in five years, outstripping demand. Foreign capital fled Brazil. The government's gold reserves, healthy at the end of World War I, had dropped to zero by the end of 1930. And over the previous decade there had been bubbling dissent and minirevolts among young army officers, the phenomenon of tenentismo.
Launched in Rio Grande do Sul on 3 October after careful planning, the insurrection was successful relatively quickly. Vargas was in the Catete, the presidential palace in Rio, by 31 October. He was greeted by tumultuous crowds. A canny, introverted man with a fatherly smile, he was to be the key figure in Brazilian politics until his suicide in 1954. He defeated a rebellion in São Paulo in 1932 and an attempted communist coup in 1935, and he was imprisoned for a few hours in a nearly successful putsch by the Integralistas, the Brazilian fascists, in 1938. Having introduced a personal dictatorship with his fascist-style Estado Novo in 1937, he brought Brazil into World War II on the side of the Allies in 1942.9
Two key elements of the Vargas era, which resurfaced when Vargas was democratically elected president in 1951, were the incorporation of the growing working class and significant gestures of economic nationalism within a context of industrialization. Fascist ideology, which in Europe had done little for organized workers except to destroy their autonomous unions, was reinterpreted by the Estado Novo in Brazil to give unionized workers a stake in society. The approach was paternalist and clientelistic, with much power vested in the Ministry of Labor and not much freedom for workers' elections. Strikes were outlawed under the 1937 Constitution. But with a minimum wage in some industries, and attempts to provide pensions and social protection, it seemed like progress for poor people who were moving from the countryside into a free-for-all industrial society.
The biggest symbols of economic nationalism were in steel and oil. Late in 1940, when the United States was still trying to keep the Americas out of World War II, it authorized its Export-Import Bank to loan twenty million dollars for the construction of a steel plant in Volta Redonda; it was already known that Brazil had substantial reserves of iron ore. In December 1951, after he returned as president, Vargas sent the Brazilian Congress a bill to set up a national oil corporation, Petrobrás, which would have a monopoly on extraction and new refineries. The Petrobrás question became a major unifying force among Vargas supporters over the next two years—the popular slogan was “The oil is ours”—before the bill became law. At the same time, it discouraged foreign investment in other sectors, as well as in petroleum.10
From 1930 to 1945, Getúlio Vargas had been a dictator. But in the early months of 1945, the illogicality of Brazil's political situation caused the Estado Novo to crack, and calls for democracy, freedom, and elections became unanswerable. The military had become politicized and was now opposed to Vargas. In October, when there was doubt as to whether Vargas would permit elections, and the appointment of Vargas's brother Benjamim as police chief enraged his now wide range of opponents, the generals overthrew Vargas. Eurico Dutra, who had been Getúlio's defense minister, was elected president. Vargas, who was elected senator by the Partido Social Democrático (PSD), one of the two parties he founded—he showed more affection for the Partido Trabalhista Brasileira (PTB), set up by his supporters in the Labor Ministry and controlled unions—retired to his home in São Borja, in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. In October 1950, however, he was elected president by nearly a majority, backed by the PTB and PSD.
Getúlio's final government was not a success, and it stimulated more military plotting. Although the Korean War had resulted in a boom in primary products, the government kept chopping and changing its economic policy, inflation grew, and there was serious corruption, some of it linked to thugs in the presidential bodyguard. The murder of an air force major, Rubem Vaz, killed in an attempt on the life of a noisy anti Vargas journalist, Carlos Lacerda, led to a military ultimatum. On 24 August 1954, Getúlio committed suicide rather than be forced out of office for a second time. There was a nationwide outpouring of emotion at the death of a man rebranded as “the father of the poor.”
Plots and counterplots punctuated the next couple of years. There were two temporary presidents, Café Filho and Carlos Luz. Only a “prolegality coup” by Henrique Lott, a minister of war who refused to be sacked, enabled Juscelino Kubitschek and his running mate from the PTB, Joao Goulart, to assume the offices to which they had been elected.
All of this may have seemed rather remote to a street boy like Lula, still only ten years of age when Kubitschek became president at the end of January 1956. But the next five years, with the optimism and showmanship of the new president, marked the consciousness of all Brazilians and were certainly influential for a young teenager. Dubbed “the country of tomorrow” in the 1940s by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who ended his days in Brazil, the strategy of “goals” and the breakneck building of a new capital, Brasília, did suggest that the country could escape its stagnation, poverty, and backwardness. Kubitschek and those around him were advocates of the doctrine of development, desenvolvimento, even if this led to high rates of inflation and a row with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
But for Lula's family, now in Vila Carioca in São Paulo, life was still tough. They lived in a room behind a bar belonging to an uncle. There was no chair for the doctor who came to see Frei Chico, then known as Ziza, when he had pneumonia. The road outside was unpaved, often a sea of mud. People around were very poor. Though Lindu was washing clothes and Lula was shining shoes, the family could not afford meat. Lula borrowed a jacket to enter a cinema, then a requirement, and when his friend Cláudio asked for it back, Lula was not allowed in.
The family moved several times, gradually acquiring more furniture. Lula worked for a dry cleaner and life looked up. He worked six months in an office, and then in a factory that made screws—the Fábrica de Parafusos Marte. It was here that he worked as part of his course in SENAI, when he trained as a lathe operator.
SENAI, Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial, was a national industrial training program originally launched under Vargas. It became increasingly important in the São Paulo area with the arrival of automakers and other new industries in the spurt of industrialization promoted by Kubitschek. The program was quite hard for a teenager to get into, and Lula took the entrance exam twice. The first time, the only vacancy was for a welder, which did not attract him. Because his educational attainment became an issue more than thirty years later, when he first started campaigning for the presidency, it is worth stating that the entrance requirement was equivalent to that of a good high school.
Interviewed by Denise Paraná in the 1990s, Lula said that his SENAI time was the happiest period of his boyhood.11 His mother was exceedingly proud of him; they had come a long way together, from Vila Carioca to Ipiranga, when he went to take the test. His two-year SENAI training was what is sometimes described as a sandwich course, involving linked classes and practical experience, and also some physical education.
He spent five months in classes, six months in the factory, and had a month's holiday. All this time he was being paid, at a rate of half the minimum salary. He was the first member of his family to have a trade or profession that required training, and he was able to contribute money regularly to the household. “I feel that my mother's pride was the same that I feel when a son of mine goes to university,” he remarked later.12 This was the culmination of his formal education.
Lula was properly fed, and he was able to play soccer in lunch breaks at the factory and afford entertainment. One of his means of relaxation at the time was to go swimming in lakes around Vila Carioca. Other northeasterners were working at the factory, and as a youngster he was treated with affection. He was taken under the wing of an older man, a black lathe operator named Barbosa, who shared his refreshments with him, taught him on the job, and was a kindly father figure. Altogether he stayed at the screw factory for three and a half years, moving on in 1964, a baleful year in Brazilian history.
Although life had been getting more pleasant for Lula, the optimism of the Kubitschek years in Brazil as a whole had turned sour. Whether Kubitschek had achieved his intended fifty years of progress by the time he left office after the inauguration of Brasilia in 1960 is a matter for debate. But there certainly had been remarkable growth, with a combination of import substitution for the internal market, foreign capital, and national planning. Special executive groups were set up to stimulate the auto industry, shipbuilding, road building, production of agricultural, railway, and heavy industrial machinery and equipment, iron ore exports, and warehousing. Between 1957 and 1961, gross national product grew by 8.2 percent a year, and real income per capita by 5.1 percent.13
Growth was particularly striking in road building, where more than 10,000 miles were built; in the electricity supply, where 1.65 million kilowatts came online, much of it through hydropower; and in the auto industry, where production rose to 170,000 car and truck units a year, and international companies such as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz opened factories.
But there were substantial costs, both economic and political. Inflation soared in the last eighteen months of Kubitschek's term, when talks with the IMF had broken down; 1960 saw a record payments deficit; and by early 1961, three times the amount of cruzeiro money was in circulation as at the end of 1955. The dash to build the new capital of Brasilia, inaugurated in 1960 after work had started only four years earlier, was inflationary and involved substantial corruption. Construction firms made fortunes. That the city, with its sensational modern architecture, was a symbol of a new more developed Brazil did not disarm conservative critics.
Kubitschek passed on the presidency to a maverick from São Paulo, Jânio Quadros, who suddenly resigned in August 1961.14 He had been supported by the conservative, anti-Vargista party, the Uniao Democrático Nacional, and had won 48 percent of the vote. But his departure opened a worrying prospect for conservative groups, and especially those in the military who had been plotting on and off against Vargas and his legacy since 1945, because the vice president was Joao Goulart of the PTB, known as Jango to his supporters. Although he was a landowner in Rio Grande do Sul, he had always run on a populist platform of economic nationalism and benefits for organized labor.
Initially, Goulart was not allowed full powers, but an experiment in parliamentarism was swept away in January 1963, when in a referendum the people voted five to one to return to an executive presidency. Goulart by now was calling for basic reforms—tax reforms to hit the rich, land reform, and the nationalization of foreign-owned utilities such as the Canadian-owned Rio Light in Rio de Janeiro. While inflation rose, ineffective price controls were introduced. Social malaise was growing, with pro and anti-Goulart demonstrations, and the president seemed to dither.
Finally the crisis came to a head in March and April 1964. At a Rio rally on 13 March, organized by the trade unions that were part of the PTB machine, Goulart expropriated private oil refineries and decreed that underused landed estates close to roads, railways, or federal irrigation projects could be taken over by the state. He said that he was planning to introduce rent controls, to give the vote to illiterates and servicemen, and to change the Constitution. After a hostile demonstration, and a naval mutiny, which Goulart tried to resolve by sacking his navy minister, the army launched a coup, backed by governors in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and the city-state of Guanabara, formerly Rio de Janeiro.
The coup was all over in three days, by 2 April, with little bloodshed although, in a warning of what was to come, there were allegations that opponents had been tortured in the northeast.15 It had received discreet help from the U.S. government, which, like Brazilian conservatives, was concerned about the possible spread of the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America. Many congressmen, union leaders, artists, and journalists were deprived of their political rights by the regime; a process of “cleansing” (called Operaçao Limpeza), with military police inquiries, was launched by the hard-line defense minister, General Costa e Silva.
The military was to rule Brazil for the next two decades and, as we shall see, Lula played a major part in getting them back to their barracks. The military dictatorship was the context in which Lula was to develop as a trade unionist and become a national figure.
Meanwhile, Lula himself, still a teenager in 1964, was trying to get on in the world as a lathe operator. He left the Fábrica de Parafusos Marte because it refused to raise his wages to the level of older men, even though he had worked there as long. In 1965, therefore, when the economic squeeze was biting, Lula found himself out of work for eight months. His brothers were also unemployed, and Dona Lindu's household was under strain. Lula would leave the house at 6 A.M., trudging around to the factories to see if any of them were taking on workers. Sometimes the staff would say there were no jobs. Sometimes they would take away Lula's professional card, hang on to it for a while, and then say that there was nothing available. His dreams of being well paid and working for one of the big automaking firms seemed far from reality.
The family moved around frequently, and several of the poor-quality houses they lived in flooded. There was not much to eat—just rice and potatoes cooked in oil, but no chicken or meat. Lula found the experience of unemployment profoundly depressing; he had no workplace friends or money for modest pleasures.
After what seemed a long time, he found a job in another factory, Fábrica Independencia, where he was employed as a lathe turner on the night shift. He could sleep a little on the job, waking up before the boss arrived. He earned enough to buy a secondhand bicycle. It was here that he lost the little finger of his left hand in an accident. A screw broke on a machine, and a heavy press fell, smashing the finger.16 It was painful, and he had to wait some hours before the factory manager arrived at 6 A.M. and took him to a doctor. The loss of the little finger gave him a psychological complex for months but won him compensation of 350,000 cruzeiros, a fair sum at the time; he used it to buy furniture for his mother and to help her buy a little piece of land.
Safety arrangements in the new factories springing up in the Sâo Paulo area left much to be desired, and many mechanics and lathe operators suffered industrial injuries. Other members of Lula's family were also victims of the largely unregulated rapid industrialization. One Volkswagen manager told the correspondent of a German newspaper that he preferred employing the uneducated northeasterners of Brazil, and that the car output in São Paulo was higher than with German workers in Wolfsburg.17
At Independencia, where the firm offered a flagon of wine with the thirteenth month's salary, Lula had his first experience of getting completely drunk. He and his fellow workers drained the flagon in a nearby bar and chased it with a number of beers. Fortunately, Lula had a short walk home. After eleven more months at this factory he went to another, Fris-Moldu-Car, where he was sacked after a minor act of rebellion. The boss there wanted him to work on a Saturday. But he wanted to go on a picnic to Santos with his brothers. So Lula refused to work that Saturday, went on the picnic, and lost his job.
At both Independencia and Fris-Moldu-Car, Lula had the experience of participating in metalworkers' strikes. The military regime of Humberto Castelo Branco was following the tight anti-inflationary policy of its finance minister, Roberto Campos.18 This squeezed the income of workers and, although there was a crackdown on communists, leftists, and other opponents of the military takeover, unions had to respond to the desire of ordinary members to maintain their earnings.
But in the late 1960s, while the military regime was tightening its grip on power with Institutional Act number 5—after its friends proved incapable of winning elections in 1967—Lula's situation improved. Following his brother Frei Chico, who was already working there, he got a job in Aços Villares, a large engineering firm. The firm had a policy of not employing relatives, but because the personnel department had not figured out that José Ferreira da Silva and Luiz Inácio da Silva were brothers, he got the job.
Lula was embarrassed on his first day because, short of money before he got his first paycheck, he could not afford to buy lunch. He had to walk for an hour and a half or two hours to get to work because he had no money for the bus. He also had to work the night shift.
At this time Lula seemed to be a typical young working man—fanatical about soccer, not greatly interested in politics or trade unions, beginning to date girls. His first serious girlfriend was a pretty girl of Japanese origin—there was a large Japanese community around São Paulo—but she lost out to his interest in soccer. Although close to much of his family, he was completely out of touch with his father.
Even an apolitical worker, however, was neither immune to the labor unrest of the late 1960s nor totally unaware of the heightened tension in the country in 1968-69. As an ordinary worker, Lula had observed a number of strikes. Some were violent. When he was fifteen, he was advised not to go to work one day because the factory was being picketed. His sister Maria was one of two thousand strikers locked into a jute factory by management but rescued by fellow workers. Lula himself went on strike at the Metalúrgica Independencia.
Lula's brother Frei Chico had become increasingly active in the metalworkers' union. Although Frei Chico did not join the Communist Party (the PCB) until the early 1970s, he was angry at the unbridled capitalism unleashed by the military regime, with metalworkers' wages dropping by a third, accompanied by longer shifts and more Saturday work. In 1968-69, he threw himself into the campaign for higher wages, spoke up at meetings, and began to serve in various union offices. Lula, who attended one or two of these meetings, thought that his brother was too much of an activist. Behind the scenes the PCB did what it could to stimulate unrest, although Catholic anticommunism in the context of the Cold War, police arrests, and government repression all obstructed the party.
In December 1968 the regime, which had already removed the mandates of congressional representatives who might oppose it, decreed the fifth Institutional Act (AI-5). Institutional Acts were the decree-laws of the regime that substituted for a democratic constitution. Castelo Branco had handed the presidency over to Artur Costa e Silva in February 1967, following the collapse of his policy for a more suave military regime, which had envisaged continuing elections. Costa e Silva represented the hard-line anticommunist elements who opted for a much more frank dictatorship.
The excuse for AI-5 was a provocative invasion of Brasilia University by the hard-liners, which was matched by an incendiary speech by an opposition deputy and journalist, Marcio Moreira Alves, who denounced the army as a bunch of torturers and executioners, and urged the girlfriends of young officers and cadets to boycott them. AI-5 unleashed more censorship, waves of arrests, and repression.19 Leaders of the student movement such as José Dirceu, later to be a key organizer for the PT, were thrown in jail.
While the student movement in the United States was protesting the Vietnam war and that in France was protesting the presidency of de Gaulle, in Brazil the military regime and more parochial student concerns had led to a clandestine mobilization. But after AI-5, many leftists and Marxists who had managed to escape arrest—such as the young sociologist and future president Fernando Henrique Cardoso—went into exile. At the same time, inspired by urban and rural guerrilla movements elsewhere in Latin America, small cells, mostly of young men and women, decided to take up arms against the dictatorship.
The year 1969 was important for Lula. He married. He took a post in his union, the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos. And apolitical though he was, a dramatic incident—the kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador—showed him and all Brazilians that the military regime was not impregnable.
Lula's marriage and union involvement began almost simultaneously. He had known Maria de Lourdes Ribeiro, a textile worker, for some years simply as a friend and neighbor. She was dark and pretty, and she had come from Ipatinga, a town in the interior of São Paulo state, near the Minas border. Lula and his family found themselves living next to Lourdes, her three brothers, and her parents when they moved to a house in Jardim Patente, in greater São Paulo. Lula became friendly with Maria's brothers, especially Jacinto, and they all went to dances together.
Lula realized that he was becoming attracted to Lourdes, but he was very shy. He asked Jacinto how he should approach her and whether he ought to talk to her parents first. Jacinto said he should talk directly to her. At a weekend dance, after he had drunk four brandies and several dances had gone by, he summoned the courage to say that he loved her.
While Lula was falling in love, he was also becoming an active trade unionist, almost against his will. In September 1968 he signed up as a member of the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos de São Bernardo. São Bernardo was an industrial suburb of São Paulo with several motor and engineering factories. It was part of the industrial and working-class belt that was known as the ABCD region—along with Santo André, São Caetano, and Diadema. This region, and São Bernardo in particular, were to be the center of Lula's activity over the next fifteen years and his springboard to national prominence.
On 24 April 1969 Lula assumed a position as an alternate or substitute member of his union's executive. Just over a month later, on 25 May, he married Lourdes in a happy occasion, surrounded by their extended families. They went away in a horse-drawn carriage and had a brief honeymoon at a beautiful spot, Poços de Caldas.
But the wedding nearly did not happen, because Lourdes was anxious about Lula's enhanced status in the union. She was employed by a small textile firm, and the managers put pressure on her when they learned that her fiancé was to be a union official; to them (a sign of the oppressive atmosphere of the time), active unionists were probably communists, and union prominence would bring trouble from the police. Lourdes was not political, or especially conservative, but it was common knowledge that leftists and active unionists were being persecuted.
In fact, Lula himself had needed much persuasion to join the winning slate in the union elections. His general feeling was that the union was a waste of time, union meetings were occupied with trivial disputes and power struggles, and the real capacity of the union was limited to modest social assistance. The person who persuaded him to allow his name to be included in the slate of candidates was his brother, Frei Chico, who also got the metalworkers' leadership to talk to him.
It was Frei Chico, not Lula, who had originally been invited to run for the directorate of the union. But Frei Chico had by then moved on from Villares, where he spent less than a year, and had joined a firm of two hundred employees called Carraço, which made vehicle bodies. There was already a union man, older than Frei Chico, from the small company; if Lula's brother was successful in the election, it would debar the current union official because the rule prohibited more than one member of the executive from the same business. Frei Chico did not want to exclude the older man so, even before Lula had joined the union, he suggested his name as a candidate in union elections. Frei Chico knew the union's leadership well—Afonso Monteiro da Cruz, the president, Mário Ladeia, the secretary-general, and Paulo Vidal, the second secretary, who would shortly become president. Frei Chico said he knew someone good at Villares, a big firm, who was his brother. The leadership asked what he was like. According to Denise Paraná, Frei Chico replied, “He's young, he doesn't like the union, and he doesn't know anything…but who knows? He might agree to take a part.”20
It says a lot for the status of Frei Chico, and possibly the weakness of the metalworkers' union, that this lukewarm recommendation should lead to a siege of Lula by the union hierarchy. Frei Chico, who understood Lula well, had noticed that whether Lula was playing soccer or at work, he had a natural gift for leadership. The principal figures in the union all tried to persuade him, encouraging him to attend courses and meetings. Lula held out for a long time, telling them that all he wanted to do was to get on with his life. Lourdes's worries did not make his choice any easier; like him, she dreamed first of a small house of their own, backed up by steady wages. But by the end of 1968 the die was cast. Lula talked it over with Lourdes and disarmed her concern.
With the support of the leadership, therefore, Lula went on to be elected one of a union directorate of twenty-four. From 1968 to 1972, Lula still worked at Villares, and when fellow workers brought him questions he could not answer, he would stop by the union offices at night to speak to lawyers and others who might solve their problems. It was a humdrum, undramatic apprenticeship in union affairs, far removed from heroics on the national stage.
Yet Brazilian heroics burst into international consciousness on 4 September 1969, when a group of urban guerrillas succeeded in abducting the U.S. ambassador, Charles Burke Elbrick. The world's media suddenly became aware that Brazil's military government, a close ally of the United States, was not all-powerful. It faced armed opposition. In fact, following Costa e Silva's incapacitation by a stroke, Brazil was temporarily being ruled by that standby of other South American countries, a military junta.
What was more embarrassing was that the government, with all its soldiers, police spies, and capacity for torture, was unable to find and release Elbrick. It had to make a deal. It agreed to free an eclectic group of leftists—including José Dirceu, then a student leader, who had been arrested in São Paulo—in return for the ambassador's release. A famous photograph of thirteen handcuffed political prisoners was taken at Rio's Galeao airport, as they posed in front of the Hercules plane that would fly them to Mexico. When a policeman yelled, “Smile, you sons of bitches,” they all glowered at the camera. Many of those involved in the kidnapping and many among those released in consequence would play a part in the growth of the prodemocracy movement and the debates that led to the foundation of the PT.
It is worth pausing at this stage to consider what sort of a person Lula was at age twenty-four, married, and on the brink of his true career. Had one met him then, he would have seemed like thousands of other young men—soccer-mad, relatively unambitious, close to his extended family. In matters of personal belief, his Catholicism would have seemed more important than any other political or ideological allegiance, of which he had virtually none. He was physically strong and shared the pride in survival of many of those born in the northeast, who see themselves as the truest Brazilians.
But there was much more to his experience. His family support network was vital in helping him and the other da Silvas to keep going through periods of hunger and poverty. His mother had faith in him. The absence of a father he disliked was—if the psychology of other successful men is anything to go by—another spur. His brother Frei Chico, who did not hesitate to call him a “vagabond” during one of his spells of unemployment, liked and promoted him.
The insecurity of poverty, and the poverty of Brazil during the era in which he was growing up, were also a crucial context. It was part of that “biography” that was to enable him to empathize with other Brazilians, and for millions to empathize with him, when he came to run for the presidency. He had genuinely known hunger. He had been a shoeshine boy and had had to sell peanuts on the streets as a child. He had lived in small, poor shacks that were not rain-proof and were liable to flood. Money was hard to get and vulnerable to the constant devaluation caused by rampant inflation. Educational advancement, without the lucky SENAI break, would have been out of reach.
At the same time, for the da Silvas as for the country, there was an enormous desire for progress. The excitement of the Brasilia boom had come and gone. But when the da Silvas and other retirantes (internal migrants) had come down from the northeast to the central south, they had wanted to partake in a richer, more developed Brazil. Lula had longed for the “monkey-suit” of a well-paid engineer in an auto factory. The positivist national slogan, “Ordem e Progresso”—order and progress—influenced all parts of what was still a conservative society. It infected the anticommunist ideology of the military takeover of 1964, whose officers were also fed up with politicians' populism, bureaucratic muddle, and outdated systems from telephones to public finance.
And Brazil was doing things. The onward march to megalopolis of São Paulo, with its factories and skyscrapers, was symbolic. In 1970, amid national rejoicing, Brazil would win the World Cup in soccer. A better future seemed achievable.
Yet Lula had learned about the dark side of what military apologists would call the Brazilian economic miracle: poor safety in factories, depression of living standards, and an environment in which those who stood up for the rights of workers were spied on and arrested, and could lose their own rights. He himself had lost two jobs when trying to stand up for his own rights.
He had also been drawn into trade unionism in a way that was not exactly democratic, but which mirrored an enduring element in the country's politics and society. It reflected a widespread tradition of patronage and the significance of family connections. He had been invited to become a member of a union executive before he was even a union member, before any election, because he was Frei Chico's brother, and he was put on the winning ticket.
His own take on the military regime at this stage was much hazier and less confrontational than Frei Chico's. It was a world away from the leftist ideologies of the middle-class students and their professors, wrapped up in arcane Marxist disputes, moving toward different schools of armed revolution. To most Brazilians, a little fearful of the military regime and keen to keep their heads down and go about their business, the small guerrilla groups seemed eccentric if not threatening. In 1969, Lula's attitude and the anxieties of his new bride, Lourdes, were probably typical of a large chunk of Brazilian opinion. His own political education had hardly begun.
