Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne
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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