Читать книгу Lula of Brazil - Richard Bourne - Страница 9

2 STRIKE LEADER

Both Lula and his mother cried when the newlyweds departed for their honeymoon. Lula and Lourdes seem to have been very happy together. Lula had been her first boyfriend. With a loan from the Villares firm's social fund, they were able to get their own two-room house in Vila das Mercês, close to Dona Lindu. Lourdes, who was working at a firm in Ipiranga, kept their home spotless. Lula's sister Maria and her husband, who was then out of work, stayed with them. But tragedy was about to strike the young couple.

Lourdes became pregnant. In her seventh month, in 1971, she started vomiting seriously. Initially the doctors said this was normal. She was then taken to the Hospital Model, in São Paulo, where she was diagnosed with hepatitis. The doctor in charge was an inexperienced trainee. Lula visited her and found her crying out in pain, with no nurse or doctor to attend to her.

On a Monday, he received a call to take clothing for mother and baby, as a cesarean birth had been scheduled. But when he arrived at the hospital, he was told that both mother and baby—a little boy—had died.¹ Naturally, he was distraught. He would not permit a postmortem autopsy. Perhaps surprisingly, his father, Aristides, came up from Santos for the funeral; his mother stayed away.

The loss of his wife and baby, when he was only twenty-five, had a huge impact on Lula. It was a life-changing event. He was bitter about the hospital and its lack of care. This made him realize the importance of social assistance work for the union, his first portfolio as a full-time official. He felt that health services for the millions of Brazil's poor were utterly inadequate and second-rate.

Personally, he was depressed. For at least six months he would not go out. He did not want to meet people. Every Sunday he would place flowers on the grave. Many years later, the deaths of his first wife and baby still brought tears to his eyes. Dona Lindu, worried about him, asked another child to move out so that Lula could live with her for a while and she could keep an eye on him. In fact, he lived with her for three years.

When he did come out of the worst of his depression, he reacted. He took out a different girl every weekend. It was a phase that lasted three years. But he also became more serious with one, Miriam Cordeiro, who was working as a nurse in a clinic. Lula had gotten to know her from regularly taking twin girls, the children of the brother-in-law of his sister Maria, to the clinic for treatment.² He took her out, the relationship became sexual, and when she was three months pregnant, she told Maria and Lula that she was expecting a baby. Lula was delighted.

The baby girl was born healthy and named Lurian—a combination of the names of her parents—but Lula soon broke up with her mother because he had met someone else. Miriam tried to cut off all contact between her child and Lula. In a dirty political trick in 1989, when Lula was running for the presidency the first time against Fernando Collor, Miriam was paid to go on television to say that Lula had wanted her to have an abortion. Lula's family says that this was rubbish.³

It was while he was still with Miriam that he first heard about the woman who was to become his second wife, Marisa Leticia Casa. Coming back late, up to midnight, after seeing Miriam, he would often take a taxi home. He got to know an elderly cab driver who told him how his son had been killed in a fight in the square. His daughter-in-law was pretty and was bringing up their little boy with his help.

Then, by chance, Lula met Marisa at his union office, where she had come in to get a form witnessed. Lula liked to talk to people when he was doing his social assistance duties—it was one of his skills as a union organizer—and he had given instructions to colleagues that he would personally attend to any good-looking widows who came in. As he drew her out in conversation, he realized that she was the daughter-in-law of the taxi driver.⁴

Very quickly, he fell in love with Marisa, who was working as a school secretary in São Bernardo. Lula's determination was shown when he persuaded Marisa to send away a former boyfriend—a Volkswagen worker—who then stalked them for a while. Lula insisted on staying put at her house early one evening, when the former boyfriend was due to visit her, until she told the man it was all over between them. She warned Lula that she would not live with him until they married. So, after knowing each other for only five months in a whirlwind romance, Lula and Marisa had a civil wedding. Lula became the adoptive father of her three-year-old boy, Marcos.

Marisa was popular with Lula's family. She was the eleventh child in a family of twelve, of Italian ancestry. She had been working since the age of nine as a nanny and a packer in a candy factory, before getting her position in a school.⁵

Although the couple were happy, Marisa's former in-laws were not. They felt they had lost both a grandson and a daughter. It was not until more than a year later that the couples were reconciled, when Lula and Marisa invited them to be padrinhos, or godparents, of their first son together, Fábio. It was an example, in family terms, of a talent for accommodation that Lula would demonstrate in wider fields.

His marriage to Marisa in 1974 provided real stability in his personal life, and they went on to have three children together. It also coincided with significant advances in his status and reputation in his union.

Lula had managed to recruit three hundred workers at Villares into the metalworkers' union, but he had needed some persuading to let his name go onto the slate of the controlling faction for the union elections in 1972. The man who did the persuading was Paulo Vidal, who effectively ran the union. He asked Lula to stand for election as a first secretary in the so-called Green Slate. It won with more than 70 percent of the vote, and Lula became a full-time union official, responsible for a new social security department. He took various courses and he remained shy of public speaking; his favorite paper remained the sporting Gazeta Esportiva.6

Vidal was a controversial figure. He was egocentric and a good orator. He was conservative in his political attitudes, and accused perhaps unfairly of fingering some communists to the dictatorship's police. When ten Ford workers came to see Lula in late 1973, suggesting they go on strike, Vidal discouraged them, warning that they could be caught by the dictatorship's National Security Law, and even tortured. But in union circles he was regarded as more progressive, organizing the first national metalworkers' congress in 1974 and seeking to modernize the union.

Shortly after that, the factory in which Vidal had worked moved, making him ineligible to preside over a union based in the municipality of São Bernardo. Vidal therefore put forward Lula as candidate for president in the 1975 elections, with himself as secretary. This controlling faction was challenged by a leftist slate, supported by the illegal and persecuted Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).

Lula had various indirect contacts with the communists, but only one formal meeting with one of its leaders, Emilio Maria de Bonfante, whom he talked to on a bench in the square in front of the mother church of São Bernardo. He strongly disliked the atmosphere of subterfuge and paranoia in which the communists worked, telling his brother Frei Chico frankly that he would not be a party to secret meetings. He wanted to act in the open.

He also learned that what he liked about the union was the sense of solidarity with workers, not its bureaucratic technicalities. Shortly before the 1975 elections, Vidal had called a massive rally, threatening a loss of medical benefits to those who failed to turn up; many assumed that they were going to be called out on strike, but Vidal made what Lula called a “Vaseline” speech and handed over the chair to one of the union's lawyers. It was another example of Vidal's lack of courage, consistency, and empathy. Nonetheless, the slate including Lula as president and Vidal as secretary was elected with 92 percent of the vote. Lula suspected that Vidal was hoping to continue to pull the strings in the union.⁷

Lula took up his post on Saturday, 19 April 1975, at a big ceremony. There were ten thousand people present—workers; Paulo Egydio Martins, the governor of São Paulo; Dona Lindu; and Marisa, who was pregnant with their first baby, Fábio. Lula was very nervous when he spoke, using a text written for him with terms he would not normally employ. But his balanced approach, reflecting Catholic social teaching, gave a clear insight into the thinking of a man who was still not thirty years old and had been given sudden responsibility.

He argued that the moment through which Brazilians were living was “one of the blackest for the individual and collective destinies of the human being.” On one side, in the Soviet bloc, the people were crushed by the state, enslaved by Marxist ideology, and restricted in their freedom to think and demonstrate. But on the other, in the West, the people were enslaved by the economic power of capitalism, exploited by other men, deprived of the dignity of labor, affected by greed, and joined to mad production rhythms. Implicitly he rejected both the capitalist model being pursued by the military regime and any communist alternative to which the regime's divided revolutionary opponents adhered.

By the end of the year, however, Lula himself was faced with one of his blackest moments. In October, as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers, he had gone to a world Toyota congress in Tokyo. It was his first international outing, and he did not enjoy it. He had little money, knew no one, and disliked Japanese food. While in Japan, he was telephoned by a lawyer for the metalworkers' federation, who told him that his brother Frei Chico had been imprisoned on 4 October. Frei Chico, who was by then a member of the PCB, had been elected vice president of the metalworkers of Santo André only the week before. He had been eating lunch at a bar near his home with one of Lula's predecessors as president of the São Bernardo union when he was picked up by members of the feared DOI-Codi, a military intelligence outfit in São Paulo.⁸

This arrest was part of a much bigger anticommunist sweep throughout Brazil but carried out with particular viciousness in São Paulo, which was a center for the most ruthless security thugs who were only partly under the control of the military presidents. A major scandal erupted over the murder there of a well-known journalist, Vladimir Herzog.

The sweep aimed to destabilize the regime's more respectable opponents in the tolerated Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, MDB) by showing that some of its parliamentarians had links with the underground communists. The MDB had done well in elections in 1974, particularly in the big cities. It was also a strike against President Ernesto Geisel, who had launched a strategy of distensão—or relaxation—aiming to take some of the sting out of the dictatorship.⁹

The lawyer who telephoned Lula in Tokyo warned him to stay away, as he risked being arrested if he returned to Brazil. Subsequently, the security services tortured Frei Chico to get him to state that Lula had been passing a letter to Luis Carlos Prestes, the veteran leader of the PCB, now in exile. It was nonsense. Lula had made clear that although he was biologically related to Frei Chico, he had nothing to do with the Communist Party.

Lula dismissed the lawyer's caution and decided to fly home at once. He was greeted at the São Paulo airport by union colleagues and advisers. No attempt was made to arrest him. The following day he went to the prison to try and find out what had happened to Frei Chico and also to Osvaldo Rodrigues Cavinato, another party member who had been working at the São Bernardo union, and who had been tricked into going with security men who had told him they were taking his father to the hospital. At that time it was risky to inquire about political prisoners, and Lula was insulted when he tried.

Frei Chico, who had been picked up with an incriminating document from a European communist party, was beaten, tied up, and tortured on the “dragon's chair.” The soldiers who tortured him were very young and were paid extra for their work. The interrogators faked a confession, but Frei Chico totally denied the story that Lula had been a messenger for the party. After seventy-eight days in prison, Frei Chico and sixtyfour others were released, and only nine were sentenced; confessions obtained by torture were rejected by the court.

A number who had been arrested in the sweep died, and Lula and the family were worried about Frei Chico's fate. But more significant was the radicalizing effect on Lula himself. He asked himself: What was the logic of arresting a worker simply because he was against social injustice? Frei Chico, the father of a family, had been working since he was ten years old. What possible order or ideology could justify the arrest and torture of men like him? Lula was simply revolted. At the same time, he lost most sense of personal fear.

But Lula also concluded that the approach of the PCB was all wrong, as was the nonconfrontational approach of his union. Although the communists might want social justice, they were crippled by their conspiratorial methods and their obsessive secrecy. Furthermore, his own union was letting down its members by opting out of any serious effort to improve wages and working conditions, and settling for a quiet life. Although the national security laws sought to outlaw strikes, other more militant groups were finding the courage to push against wage restrictions.

While the political scene was restrictive, the economic picture was more helpful to workers in the advanced industries around São Paulo. Foreign money had been pouring in to Brazil, offsetting deficits on the current account, buoyed up by talk—promoted by the military—of an “economic miracle.” In fact, with tight controls on wages and the political system, annual growth in the gross national product from 1969 to 1974 had been running at 11 percent, with the lowest levels of inflation since the 1950s. Although occasionally hitting 9 percent, the average growth from 1973 to 1981 was only 5.6 percent a year.¹⁰

But there was a particular spurt in investment in Brazil after the oil shock of 1973, when petrodollars were sloshing around international markets. In conjunction with conservative economic management by the military, Brazil was able to take on new foreign bank loans. The fact that the country was building dangerous and ultimately unsustainable levels of debt was sometimes brushed aside.

The military regimes were not homogenous. There were running battles inside them over political and economic policy, and zigzags almost month to month. Each military president followed a slightly different line, with different cabinets. General Garrastazu Médici (1969-74) had pursued a tough anticommunist strategy with nationalist flourishes such as the attempt to “occupy” Amazonia with a vast road network and incentives for poor northeastern colonists to migrate there. He was followed by General Ernesto Geisel (1974-79), a political general and a technocrat, whose brother Orlando had been Médici's defense minister.¹¹ He and General Golbery do Couto e Silva, the head of the Serviço Nacional de Informaçoes (SNI), the intelligence service,¹² were resolved to manage a gradual opening-up of the political system, but at their timing and under their control.

Broadly speaking, the frictions over political stance were between, on the one hand, the so-called linha dura, the hard-line anticommunists, who believed in ruthless suppression of supposed enemies, with censorship and torture, and were prepared to rule for a long time, and, on the other hand, military men who saw the takeover in 1964 as a temporary aberration from the gentler, accommodating, and constitutional political traditions of Brazil. The latter wanted a clean-up of the system—limpeza or saneamento were the words used in Portuguese. They supported the post-1964 device of “military police inquiries” (Inquéritos Policias Militares, IPMs), which led to the stripping of rights from politicians, civil servants, union leaders, intellectuals, and artists, but they looked forward to going back to the barracks when the clean-up was complete.

Although the military had been a factor in Brazilian politics since the overthrow of the empire in 1889, it had usually been in the background. The difficulties of governing Brazil could expose weaknesses in the high command and put at risk its status and privileges. In 1964, Castelo Branco had been one of those who had been in favor of a temporary takeover, but clear signs of opposition to the military whenever elections were permitted and small but embarrassing guerrilla activities had played into the hands of the linha dura.

Uniting both factions was an ideology—the doctrine of national security. This had been developed, with some encouragement by the U.S. military, in the officers' own “university” in Rio de Janeiro, the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG).¹³ The doctrine held that Brazil was threatened, both internally and externally, by totalitarian, revolutionary communism. This might be Soviet communism, the Cuban communism of Fidel Castro, Maoism, or the ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. What was more important was that a mortal threat was perceived to the religious and social traditions of Brazil. It justified the overthrow of Brazilian democracy, censorship, and restrictions on free association and labor movements. Parallel ideas were influencing the officer class in Argentina and Chile also.

There was also a more ambitious side to the teaching of the ESG. This was that Brazil must become a great power. It tapped into the positivist strain in the country's history, its pride in its size and extensive resources. This teaching led to some hyperbolic propaganda and use of the soccer successes in the World Cup to boost the nation's self-image.¹⁴ The concept of the national security state was, therefore, all-embracing.

São Paulo, where Brazil's Second Army was based, was a stronghold of the linha dura. Since July 1969, the Second Army had been orchestrating “Operaçao Bandeirantes,” attempting to deal with the divided but visible urban guerrillas, and setting up the vicious DOI-Codi as its instrument.¹⁵ There had been a series of small guerrilla actions, including the theft of weapons from the fourth infantry regiment by Captain Carlos Lamarca in January 1969, a raid on the safe of the corrupt former São Paulo governor Adhemar de Barros, and the “execution” of a businessman who had helped finance Operaçao Bandeirantes, Henning Boilesen.¹⁶

The dragnet that picked up Frei Chico led also to the murder of Vladimir Herzog, the head of journalism at TV Cultura, by agents of DOI-Codi; journalists and Catholic church groups, skeptical of the official claim that he had committed suicide, organized large demonstrations, and President Geisel flew to São Paulo, where the commander of the Second Army promised that there would be no more such suicides.

Herzog had died in October 1975. But in January 1976 there was another death at Codi in São Paulo, of Manuel Fiel Filho, a worker. Geisel saw this as a challenge to his authority over the army, as well as undermining his strategy of political relaxation by fueling more disgust throughout the country. He dismissed the commander of the Second Army, General Ednardo d'Ávila Melo. Later, he fired the army minister, Silvio Frota, and the head of his own military cabinet, Hugo de Abreu, for standing in the way of the strategy. The election in 1976 of a new U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, was not irrelevant. Carter was talking the language of human rights, and South American dictatorships were losing favor in Washington.

Just as there were political frictions within the military regimes, so there were economic divergences. Again it was not easy to generalize, and the economic partisans did not match the different political factions. The issues were various. There were those who were concerned to control inflation, a bugbear of the professional middle class since the 1940s. There were those who were keen to see more international investment in Brazil and an opening up of the economy, which still had high protectionist tariffs. There were those who still saw a strong case for state leadership in the economy—a continuance of the Vargas approach to nationalization and the Kubitschek emphasis on development.

The military regimes relied heavily on economic technocrats, and these debates were often a continuation of those that had taken place prior to 1964. But there were differences. Whereas there had been a strong push from the leftist parties before 1964 on income inequality, land reform, and unemployment, these matters received less attention under the military; income inequality increased dramatically. Also, by the late 1970s the import substitution model for Brazil, which had led to the local manufacture of cars and other goods that had formerly been imported, was losing its power as an engine to drive the economy.

The impact of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and its resulting oil shock, was delayed for Brazil. But by 1975, the year when Lula assumed the presidency of his union, the Geisel government was forced to react. Reis Velloso, the planning minister, prepared a second national development plan, to cover the five-year period through 1979. It aimed to reduce the nation's dependence on imported energy and promoted a national program to produce sugar-based ethanol to substitute for gasoline in vehicles; it led to a deal with West Germany, criticized by the United States, to build nuclear power stations; and it paid for two massive hydroelectric projects at Itaipú, on the Paraguay border, and Tucurui, in Amazonia. These and other infrastructure investments, for instance in steel capacity, were largely funded by foreign loans to state or parastatal agencies.

Although Brazil's economy had raced ahead in the “miracle” years and was still growing, at a more reasonable pace, under Geisel, the reality for workers was that most were suffering from a wage freeze. The pressure was intolerable at a time of so-called boom, when government propaganda was telling everyone how great it was to be Brazilian. The official minimum salary (salàrio mínimo, set by a law going back to Vargas) was not keeping pace with the cost to buy the minimum food ration, which had been laid down in 1938. Whereas in 1970 it would have taken 105 hours and 13 minutes per month to earn enough to buy basic nutrition for one adult, by 1974 the time taken was 163 hours and 32 minutes.¹⁷

Also increasing visibly, even though statistical evidence was unreliable for people living in poverty and on the margins of the cash economy, was social inequality. The newsmagazine IstoÉ estimated in 1979 that 50 percent of the poorest Brazilians had had 14.91 percent of the gross national product in 1970, but only 11.6 percent in 1976; the 20 percent who were richest had enjoyed 62.24 percent in 1970, and 67.0 percent in 1976. A very unequal society was getting more so.¹⁸

It was against this difficult and complex background that Lula began work as a union president. Vidal had achieved something significant in running a first congress of the metalworkers of São Bernardo in 1974. This had opened up discussion of wages and the hiring and firing practices of engineering firms. Several agents of the dictatorship, thinly disguised as factory workers, had managed to get into the meeting. In all, around 250 had attended.

Lula, now the president, made a practice of visiting factory gates and engaging in discussion with the workers. He also shared decision making with members of the union executive, thereby limiting Vidal's influence. He made alliances with a number of leaders of other unions, such as Olivio Dutra of the bank workers of Porto Alegre, and Jacó Bittar of the petroleum workers of Campinas—both of whom helped establish the PT in the 1980s. Together these and others who were to create what was called the “new unionism” liaised to obtain more autonomy for the workers. In theory interunion cooperation was illegal, and the corporatist labor laws that the dictatorship had inherited from the Vargas era were still in place.

But by 1976 Lula and his union were in a position to begin flexing their muscles. Union representatives were recruiting more members. In a salary campaign that year, São Bernardo appealed to the labor court, the Tribunal Superior de Trabalho, to prevent a deal agreed on by the employers, the Federaçao dos Metalúrgicos de São Paulo, from being extended to all engineering workers. Much to the irritation of the employers, the court accepted at least part of the union's case—limiting the deal to unorganized workers, guaranteeing that young men called up to do military service would get their jobs back, and providing more security for pregnant women. When Lula held a second union congress (attended by the governor of São Paulo, 250 workers, and more police and army spies), militants spoke out against the lack of freedom.

Lula, who discovered that he was rather good with people and in the rough-and-tumble of union politics, also managed to cut Vidal down to size. Toward the end of 1976, the Ford motor company decided to reduce its medical services for staff. Lula told a journalist that he would not hold meetings inside the factory, in case management tried to influence the workforce to accept its plans. Vidal told another journalist exactly the opposite. This conflict became public, and Lula got the executive to approve a new rule—that only he, or in his absence the vice president, was entitled to speak on behalf of the union. Vidal, as secretary, lost his standing.

Lula took trouble to maintain contact with his members, not only by meeting them at the factory gate. He also gave a lift to the union's newsletter, Tribúna Metalúrgica, by encouraging a cartoon figure, Joao Ferrador. This Bolshy worker caught the fancy of members, and his sly and illhumored comments on life and the workplace made trade unionists see their organization as more human, down-to-earth, and sympathetic.

In 1977, Lula, who was still fixated on the rights and incomes of workers and not much interested in national politics, found a cause that energized him. It enabled him to mobilize support not only among the metalworkers, but more widely across the union movement. It made him a national figure.

An economics professor, Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy, wrote an analysis of a World Bank study in the economics section of the Folha de São Paulo that showed that the military government had been manipulating Brazil's inflation figures. The Fundaçao Getúlio Vargas (FGV), a semiofficial institution, had defined the rate of inflation in 1973 as having been 22.5 percent, but the military government had announced that it was 12.6 percent. The issue was serious, because the salàrio mínimo—the official minimum wage—was adjusted once a year on the basis of the FGV index; with strikes prohibited by the military, the labor court (Justiça do Trabalho) simply passed on the inflation increase to all workers. Lula commissioned a study that showed that, with the passage of more than three years, the cumulative loss as a result amounted to 34.1 percent of the value of the minimum salary.¹⁹

Lula decided to fight, but was initially cautious as to the means. More than forty thousand workers signed a petition for the reinstatement of the lost earnings; crowded meetings were held in factories and the industrial areas, and thirteen unions were drawn into the campaign. The sense of grievance gained momentum. President Geisel refused to see the union leaders, but four of his key ministers—finance, planning, industry and commerce, and labor—spent three and half fruitless hours in discussion with them.

When Lula ran again as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers in February 1978, with a slate of fourteen directors, he won 97.3 percent of the tally and twenty-five thousand votes.²⁰ At the union presidential inauguration ceremony for his second term, Lula told a large crowd that it was time to end the exploitation by employers. More privately, he got his union executive to agree to a switch from a welfare approach to a riskier, more confrontational strategy aimed at boosting the workers' wages. He had acquired more skill and confidence, at a time when both police spies and leftist groups with their own agendas were seeking to infiltrate and influence the union.

In July that year he attended the fourth congress of the Confederaçao Nacional dos Trabalhadores da Indùstria, where he was a highlight of the meeting and strengthened his contacts with the autênticos—other union leaders trying to build a free labor movement. There was a burgeoning excitement that trade unionists could create a new kind of movement, more responsive and democratic, and that in the process they could remake Brazil.

At this congress the autênticos adopted a wide-ranging charter of principles. It called for a secret, free, and direct vote (one of the ways in which the military had emasculated Congress and the presidential “elections” was by use of an indirect voting system); a new constitution; amnesty for exiles and those who had lost their political rights; human rights guarantees; a new wage policy; the right to strike; and union representatives and works committees inside factories. Political opposition to the military system was growing, with Geisel forced to close Congress; a Trotskyite group, Convergencia Socialista, was challenging the PCB for militant support in the industrial belt.

But Lula gave absolute priority to the salary needs of his members, and in 1978 he had his hands full because this was the year of the first great strike wave by metalworkers. It began on 12 May, with a strike at Scania, and it ran on until 23 December. Almost every day a new strike broke out in another factory—Lula described it as a kind of fever among the workforce.²¹ The strike wave does not seem to have been directly stimulated or organized by Lula in the beginning, but he and his executive were soon in the thick of it, trying to make deals for the workers involved.

It paid the union leadership to make the authorities think that the strikes were totally spontaneous. They were all, of course, technically illegal under the dictatorship and members of the executive could have been arrested. Because the flare-ups were all over the place and unpredictable, it was more difficult for the police and government to crack down on them. Lula telephoned the new, more liberal commander of the Second Army to give the unionists' side of the story. General Dilermando Gomes Monteiro then told journalists that the strikers were peaceful, there was no evidence of subversive foreign interference, and it was impossible for soldiers or police to force people to work.

The workers also invented innovative tactics—for example, going to work but not doing anything at their benches or machines, or, in the final strike of the year at Resil (a firm that made extinguishers), surrounding the building with a picket of five hundred men sitting down, so that those who had been hired to replace the strikers could not enter.²²

The actual deals that were struck varied—the Scania workers got a 20 percent increase in real terms, others only 15 percent. But their success changed attitudes in the São Paulo working class. Furthermore, the agreements had been reached by direct negotiation between union and employers, without diktats from the Vargista labor court.

There was an informal, popular quality to these strikes. Lula and his colleagues made many of the decisions in a bar in São Bernardo run by Tia Rosa, “Aunt” Rosa, like Lula a northeasterner. They were a group of friends, not union bureaucrats. Marisa too was involved insofar as her family commitments allowed, and for Lula it was a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week occupation.

Lula was disappointed that employees in one of the biggest factories, Volkswagen, never went out on strike as a whole. He criticized the disorganization of his own union, the irresponsibility of far-left students who rabble-roused in factories where they had much less to lose than other workers, the lack of clarity about the objects of a strike, and the disregard of risk. But he was immensely proud of what the hitherto downtrodden workers had achieved, he was tireless himself, and he had become a media figure with fans in unexpected places.²³ The union executive became more professional: its members gave up their own factory jobs to work full-time for the union.

Family commitments inevitably took second place. Just when the first strike broke out at Scania, Lula received a letter from Dona Mocinha that told him that his father, Aristides, had died. Aristides, retired, was living alone and was a shadow of the man who had terrorized his children. He suffered the physical consequences of alcoholism and wasted what money he had on prostitutes. Lula asked his brothers to attend to a funeral, but when they got to Santos they found that Aristides had been buried twelve days earlier as a pauper. Lula's father had had little influence on his career, except that he respected his mother the more for the way she responded to his father's treatment of her, and he was determined to have more to show for his own life.

In July, after the first wave of strikes had been settled, Lula and Marisa had their second son, Sandro Luís. There was no question of paternity leave. Lula was actually fourteen hundred miles away, at a conference of petroleum workers in Salvador, when the baby was born. Lula, Marisa, and their three children were now living together in a small house in Jardim Lavínia, São Bernardo do Campo. It had been bought two years earlier with a loan from the state housing bank. Marisa found it hard to adjust to Lula's heavy travel schedule. The following year she started going to the strike meetings herself.

The strike wave in 1978 had a number of wider consequences, in addition to giving a new direction to the Brazilian labor movement. It was not possible to classify it as a result of foreign intervention by Castroites or by the Brazilian leftist exiles who had been forced abroad after the overthrow of Goulart in 1964. It was not connected to the small groups of armed insurrectionists, now largely killed or rounded up by the military regime. It could not be blamed on agitation by Catholic radicals, members of the communist movement (which had now split into pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese wings), or Trotskyites—although all these had contributed. It was predominantly a home-grown, rather unideological rebellion against the compression of wages in the advanced manufacturing sector.²⁴

For this reason it was seen as a threat by employers and their allies in the military government. It challenged the high rates of return on capital in the early years of the Brazilian “miracle,” which had led to an influx of foreign money. The fruits of growth had not been shared with labor because unions had been decapitated and strikes prohibited. Employers and the government had been caught off guard by the sudden upsurge of labor unrest that started at Scania. They resolved to act differently in the future, mobilizing police and other agencies of force. At the same time, the excitement among workers was infectious and beyond the capacity of Lula and other leaders to control.

What happened in 1979 was a great deal rougher. Whereas in 1978 more than 539,000 workers had participated in 24 strikes, the following year more than 3.2 million workers, more than a quarter of them metalworkers in the auto and engineering industries, participated in 113 strikes. The labor struggles, which involved sharp repression by the government and temporary closure of the São Bernardo metalworkers' union, also interweaved with political developments. On 15 March 1979, in a flamboyant ceremony in Brasilia, General Geisel handed over the presidency to the last of the military presidents, Joao Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo. In an extraordinarily ambitious move, Lula had hoped to roll out a general strike to coincide with the handover. It was an example of his own growing confidence, boosted by media interest in what was nicknamed the “trade union republic” of the ABC districts around São Paulo; he himself had now grown a beard to add to his moustache.²⁵

In fact, three days before the change of president, Lula and other union leaders reached a good agreement with the employers' organization in São Paulo, FIESP. This would have given increases of 63 percent to the poorest metalworkers, and 44 percent to the higher paid. But when Lula tried to convince his members to support the deal at a large meeting in a soccer stadium—he stood on a table in the middle and those nearest to him had to pass his message outward, as there were no loudspeakers—they shouted him down. “Strike, strike, strike,” they cried. It was an awkward moment for Lula. “So, we are on strike,” he replied. He warned that it might last a long time.

Employers and state authorities were still unable to produce a coordinated response. The regional labor court (Tribunal Regional do Trabalho)—an instrument of the corporatist labor system—awarded an increase of 44 percent, but declared the strike illegal. FIESP, the employers, offered considerably more. Armed military police broke up a small cordon round the Pirelli factory, and police threw tear gas at workers outside the Volkswagen factory.

Although paid advertisements on radio stations urged the strikers to return to work, the strike stayed solid. Lula told meetings that the whole future of the working class depended on success. His rhetoric was exalted. “We will give our life, if necessary,” he said.²⁶ By 21 March, Lula and two other union leaders had a private meeting with a new minister of labor, Murilo Macedo, and eight employers in São Paulo. Although Lula authorized one of his aides to make an agreement, he did not try to sell it to a mass meeting, which insisted on a continuance of the strike. Cleverly, he asked for a vote of confidence in the executive, but he returned home feeling devastated, and others called him a traitor.²⁷

After that the conflict sharpened. Authorities shut down the São Bernardo union. Lula moved in with his father-in-law. The Catholic Church launched a relief fund for the families of strikers, and put churches at the disposal of the union for meetings. Not permitted to use the Vila Euclides soccer stadium, twenty thousand metalworkers gathered in the Samuel Sabatini square in São Bernardo, also known as the Paço Municipal. They were met by one thousand shock troops, more than a hundred armored cars, and a vehicle firing sand and colored water. The workers stayed put.

The shock troops threw tear gas canisters, which the strikers threw back at them. The mayor and a colonel asked for calm and trust in the authorities. The workers sang the national anthem. They called out Lula's name. The colonel telephoned the head of the military police, and obtained permission to withdraw his forces. The bishop of São Bernardo, Dom Cláudio Hummes, led the gathering in the Lord's prayer, and the crowd dispersed. Dismissed as unimportant by the government, it was a moral victory for the strike and encouraged opposition politicians to criticize the state intervention in the union.

The 1979 strike had not always seen Lula at his best. At one point he was directly warned by the general commanding the Second Army that if he turned up at meetings he would be arrested. He went missing for a few days, and other strike leaders tried to represent him. When a delegation went looking for him he was found at home, playing with his children, and a left-wing actress, Lélia Abramo, told him that he had to turn up at the next assembly and resume his leadership.

The strikes spread beyond São Paulo and beyond the metalworkers. The unions could not afford any strike pay, and there was real hardship. The metalworkers' strike was not called off until 12 May, two months after it had begun. Most of the workers got an increase of 63 percent, with a discount of 50 percent for the days they had not worked, and their promise to put in extra hours in compensation. A mass meeting, at which tears were shed, accepted the agreement and gave unanimous backing to Lula and his executive.²⁸

There was no let-up in conflict in the rest of 1979. One auto firm would fire a worker so that another could take him on at lower pay. The Ministry of Labor intervened in bank workers' unions in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre. When the metalworkers of São Paulo decided in September to go on strike, over the opposition of their president, Joaquim dos Santos Andrade, they were met with violence. Troops broke up picket lines, churches were invaded to disperse union meetings, and strikers were persecuted in their home districts. In one factory gate confrontation, a Catholic union leader was shot dead, strengthening the church's support for workers' rights.

The salary campaign of 1980 for the São Bernardo metalworkers was more bitter still. The perception among the government and employers that Lula was in any sense tractable or nonpolitical had vanished. There was a feeling on both sides that the union movement was challenging the state and the regime. At the same time, the Figueiredo government, launched by Geisel with the hope that it would complete a return to democracy, was running into difficulty. In August 1979, the government had agreed to a political amnesty, and celebrated exiles, such as Leonel Brizola, Goulart's brother-in-law, Miguel Arraes, former governor of Pernambuco, and Luís Carlos Prestes, veteran leader of the pro-Soviet PCB, had returned within a couple of months.

But Figueiredo's hope that he would disarm the opposition by conceding an amnesty backfired. Instead the opposition wanted more, and quickly. Army critics of democratization exploited the situation. The Machiavellian General Golbery, who was trying to manipulate a controlled relaxation from the intelligence service, was dismissed. Hardliners were getting into positions of power, and right-wingers were organizing provocative acts of terrorism to destabilize the process. The economy was running into trouble.

In 1979, Lula was already in advanced planning for a PT, a workers' party, whose birth is described in the next chapter.²⁹ Its formal act of foundation took place on 10 February 1980. As a labor leader, Lula saw an increase in wages as only one of the demands a union should make. He wanted a forty-hour workweek and freedom for workers to elect their representatives in factories. He was fighting for job security. He sought the right to strike, free collective bargaining, and an end to the corporatist labor legislation. Having built alliances among metalworkers' unions in various cities, and with other types of workers, he wanted an end to the divisive union structure that had been imposed by Getúlio Vargas and maintained by subsequent governments.

He also realized that, in the kind of struggle in which the metalworkers were engaged, they needed a new kind of organization. In the previous two years, they had depended too much on him and a handful of other leaders. Hence the union introduced a system of decentralization, a pyramid in which an executive related to a commission of 450 people elected in factory meetings, who were responsible for factory-level coordination. It meant that, if the union was closed by state intervention and its leaders were arrested, a strike could be maintained.

On 1 April 1980, the metalworkers of São Bernardo went on strike again. The previous day, sixty thousand of them had gathered in the soccer stadium of Vila Euclides, backing the strike and singing Brazil's hymn of independence. Nonviolence was a crucial tactic, and one reason for the sturdy support of the Catholic Church. Although the government was all set to declare the strike illegal and occupy the union offices, the union's lawyer, Almir Pazzianoto, succeeded in persuading the regional labor court (the Tribunal Regional do Trabalho) that it was incompetent to decide the legality of the strike.

On 2 April, Pazzianoto addressed another vast crowd at the Vila Euclides to explain the court's decision, thinking it would enable Lula to call off the strike. But at that point two army helicopters, with eight armed soldiers in each, began flying low over the stadium for twenty minutes, in a blatant attempt to intimidate. Lula's adopted son Marcos, then six years old, hung on to his mother's skirt while Lula called on the unionists to stay calm. An elderly right-wing general had taken over the Second Army and ordered up the helicopters. But the effect was to make the strikers more determined to carry on.

The atmosphere was difficult for militants. A new government incomes policy provided for cost of living increases for workers and made it hard for firms to pass on higher wage awards in higher prices. At the same time, a recession was impending and jobs were becoming scarcer. In neighboring São Caetano, on 9 April, a mass meeting of metalworkers chaired by Lula's communist brother, Frei Chico, voted to return to work. Frei Chico said that the men were going back anyway.

On 14 April, the regional labor court changed its mind and declared the strike illegal. Five days later, Lula, twelve other union leaders, and some lawyers, including the president of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, were arrested. They were held under the regime's National Security Law. The strike went on, coordinated by the improved and decentralized organization of the union.

Although the military occupied much of São Bernardo, dragging unionists from churches, the Catholic Church defended the legitimacy of a strike that the government had labeled “political.” The hierarchy was vocal in support, with Cardinal Evaristo Arns and Bishops Mauro Morelli and Cláudio Hummes speaking out.³⁰ Volunteers provided food and money for the strikers, and there were weekly lines outside churches as the strikers' families came to collect food and money.

Lula was relatively well treated in prison. When he had a toothache, Romeu Tuma, the director-general of DOPS, the political police that detained him,³¹ arranged for him to see a dentist. Marisa visited him in jail with the children, and Fabio Luís, then five years old, said, “Mommy, my father is in Tuma's Hotel.”³² When Lula learned that his beloved mother, Dona Lindu, had been taken to the hospital with cancer of the uterus, he was allowed to visit her. When she died on 12 May, he was allowed to attend the burial.

Lula and the other union prisoners were given preventative detention and went on a hunger strike in protest. Outside, the real strike went on. But strikers were trickling back to work, and on 11 May the strike was called off. On 20 May, after thirty-one days in prison, Lula was released along with the other unionists. When he got home, he set free his caged birds in an act of solidarity. In 1979, some had attacked him as a traitor for being willing to give up the strike too soon. In 1980, he resolved to stick it out to the end.

Less than a week after his release, on 26 May, Lula assumed leadership of the national executive of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT, and a new chapter in his life opened. State intervention in his union ended, the workers went back to work, and Lula finished his second term as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers. His authority within the union was demonstrated afresh.

Much to everyone's surprise, he chose Jair Meneghelli, a thirty-fouryear-old worker from the tool shop at Ford, to be the presidential candidate on “his” union slate. Meneghelli was little known in the union and, like Lula when he was first involved in union affairs, was more interested in soccer than the details of wage negotiation or the labor movement. He was up against knowledgeable and well-known candidates backed by the PCB and by the MR-8, one of the formerly armed antimilitary groups. The MR-8 ran a smear campaign, alleging that Lula's group had made off with the union's strike fund.

Meneghelli had not wanted to be a candidate and, in a press conference with representatives of both slates, Lula answered questions on his behalf. But when the results were declared he had won overwhelmingly, with more than twenty-seven thousand votes, or 89 percent. It was an extraordinary testimony to Lula's popularity.

The real importance of the industrial campaigns spearheaded by the São Bernardo metalworkers from 1977 to 1980 was in the raising of consciousness, rather than in the raising of wages. Many in the São Paulo industrial belt had come, like Lula, from a rural background in the northeast or other areas. Politically and socially they were often naïve, and many lacked formal education. The succession of strikes over these years, with their discussions, mass meetings, and personal hardship, provided a tough and practical schooling. It put them in touch with Catholic radicals, students, and those politicians who were opposed to the military regime.

The “new unionism” of these years, led by better-paid workers in the more advanced industries, was honed in the face of constant repression and the presence of police spies at meetings. The workers involved felt they had to rely on themselves alone. They wanted their own representatives. They wanted to break out of the narrow compartmentalism imposed by the corporatist labor structure, in which union leaders known as pelegos were in the pay of the bosses and the government. They recognized that freedom for themselves and their own bargaining could come only in the context of a freer, more democratic Brazil.

By 1980, there was a growing alliance between the more assertive unions, the Catholic grassroots movement that had originated in the 1960s but had taken on a new life in reaction to the dictatorship, the church hierarchy, and professionals and politicians. Labor unrest had spread widely. In that year there were strikes by primary and secondary teachers in Minas Gerais and the northeast. More remarkably, 240,000 sugar workers, underpaid on the cane plantations in Pernambuco but now seen by the regime as providing a source of biofuel, went on strike. They had often been intimidated in the past but in this year forty-two rural unions got together, efficiently coordinated by the Catholic land pastorate (Pastoral da Terra da Igreja Católica), to organize a strike. It showed the range and capacity of labor solidarity.

The self-confidence of increasing numbers of workers, as the military regime looked to control the timing and nature of its own demise, was paralleled by the ferment of other types of social movement in the cities and the countryside. There was a do-it-yourself and democratic spirit to many of these, although ideological conflicts between Marxists and Catholic radicals were not far from the surface.

In the shantytowns or favelas of the big cities, the residents were getting together in local organizations to demand basic services—drinking water, sanitation, electricity, child daycare, and schools. There were thirteen hundred of these associations in greater São Paulo, and one per week was being formed in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 1980. In 1978, organized favelados managed to collect 1.5 million signatures on a petition calling for a price freeze on basic foods.

In the countryside, where the church's Comissão Pastoral da Terra had been formed in 1975 to improve the lot of laborers, dissatisfaction was growing with the conservatism of CONTAG, the Confederaçao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura. CONTAG was the old grouping of rural unions. Calls for land reform, which had been championed by peasant leagues in the run-up to the 1964 coup—and were a major reason why the takeover had been supported by rural landowners—were bubbling up again. In 1979 and 1980, there were successful land occupations in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo; these led to expropriation of a few properties and their transfer to the landless.

Although some of these social movements were purely secular, many were influenced by the Catholic Church. Since the 1960s, the church had stimulated a network of grassroots communities (Comunidades Eclesias de Base, CEBs) that were involved in social action as well as practical Christianity. They were regarded with suspicion by the military governments, and Dom Helder Camara, a prominent supporter and the archbishop of Recife, was seen as a crypto-communist. But the CEBs, like the Brazilian bishops, had been influenced by the social teaching of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Some too were persuaded by liberation theology that it was the duty of Christians to end exploitation of man by man.

The forthright position of the Catholic bishops in favor of human rights and against growing income inequality under the military dovetailed with the local action by the grassroots CEBs. Both came publicly to the aid of the metalworkers when they were on strike, and both were contributing to a restlessness for social and political change in many parts of Brazil in the late 1970s.

The period from 1976 to 1980 saw Lula transformed from a shy speaker, drawn gradually into the union movement, into a national figure with thousands of workers hanging on his every word. He loved the oxygen of publicity, the mass meetings, the shouting of his name by enthusiastic crowds. He was unafraid.

But in his own attitudes he was still somewhat naïve, still giving absolute commitment to the working class, specifically to the metalworkers and those like them. He was not well-read, though he had The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a biography of Gandhi, and John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World on his bookshelves when he was interviewed for Playboy in 1979. Asked whom he admired, he listed Tiradentes, the dentist who was executed in an early attempt to win Brazil's independence from Portugal, Gandhi, and Che Guevara; then he suggested Mao Tse-tung and, surprisingly, Adolf Hitler—correcting himself quickly to say that he admired Hitler's dedication, not his ideology. In truth, Lula himself, though influenced by Catholicism and some of the leftists he knew, remained unideological.

He was also sustained by a loyal wife. Marisa had been applauded in the São Paulo cathedral on Sunday, 20 April 1980, when she spoke of her imprisoned husband in a service attended by seven thousand people; Cardinal Evaristo Arns was officiating. She had turned up at the Vila Euclides when the helicopters tried to terrorize the metalworkers. It was she who telephoned the jail to tell Lula that Dona Lindu had died.

But if Marisa was as involved in the struggle as Lula himself, Dona Lindu thought he was seriously mistaken. He was so busy that she did not see him often. She worried when she saw his photo on the cover of newsmagazines. A relatively simple person herself, she could not imagine where all this was leading, except perhaps into danger. She hoped a guardian angel would watch over him. Frei Chico had been tortured. Might not Lula suffer the same fate? Taking on the government, the police, and the military was risky. It must have been hard for Lula to know of his mother's disapproval. But he had outgrown the limitations of his family background.