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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.
3 THE PT, THE WORKERS' PARTY
In all the hubbub at the end of the 1970s, with an amnesty, major strikes, and a sense that the military dictatorship was in its final throes, a different note was sounded. Lula and a group of other more progressive union leaders were calling for a distinctive workers' party—the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT. This was a contentious idea and, for many in opposition circles, divisive.
It was divisive because it overtly introduced class-based politics to Brazil. This put off many in the middle class and many traditional politicians and liberal professionals who had been struggling against the military through the tolerated opposition party—the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, the MDB. For them it was essential to maintain a broad front if the dictatorship was to be banished and a full democracy—something Brazil had never had—was to be achieved. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then a young sociology professor returning from exile, was among many who took that view.
It was also divisive on the left. The old PCB had split, with the Maoist PCdoB winning credit for tying up tens of thousands of troops in its Araguaia guerrilla campaign, though the PCB retained support in the unions. Trotskyites were also active. Some Marxists were critical of the idea of a PT because it seemed unideological and too concerned with bread-and-butter issues. As one PCB supporter said, there was already one party that struggled for Brazil's working class, and it had been founded as long ago as 1922.1 The PCB, which had pursued a strategy of infiltration of legal parties since before 1964, was also working for a negotiated transition out of the military regime. The smaller Trotskyite groups were more sympathetic to a PT.
Lula had first brought up the PT question publicly at the conference of oil workers in Bahia in the middle of 1978,2 but there had been informal discussion in unions in the main industrial centers earlier that year. What was the motivation? Undoubtedly there was a feeling that none of the existing politicians were truly representative of the workers. They had not spotted or campaigned against the erosion of the salàrio mínimo. Workers who had been standing up for their rights did not want to be mere vote banks for bourgeois and opportunist congressmen. Furthermore, the claims of the Marxist groups were bogus; they did not have much support among industrial workers, and atheism was anathema to those from a Catholic tradition.
When Lula went to Brasilia to try to get support from MDB congressmen for the strikes and union demands, he found little sympathy. In September 1978 he had gone with a delegation of union leaders to persuade them to vote against a measure of the Geisel government designed to prohibit strikes in essential services including transportation, banking, and petrochemicals. But only two MDB deputies, each of whom had other underground allegiances, gave them a hearing.3 Lula concluded that the existing Congress was totally aligned with the interests of employers.
At the same time, the union movement was gaining confidence. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of workers in the more advanced industries had almost quadrupled, from 2.9 million to 10.6 million.4 The strike wave had shown that they were prepared to use their muscle and take risks.
In 1979 the momentum for a new party increased, stimulated by the knowledge that the military regime was preparing new legislation for the formation of parties. The regime was concerned that MDB was overtaking ARENA, the conservative party that supported the regime. The object of the legislation was to create a multiplication of parties, to muddy the waters, and to make it harder for a more democratic system to undo its economic and institutional changes or lead to revenge.
The proposal for a PT was officially launched at a congress of the São Paulo metalworkers in Lins in January 1979. Lula was not the only union figure involved; among others were those who had been working together to coordinate the strikes—people such as Jacó Bittar of the oil workers and Paulo Skromov Matos of the leather workers. Nonetheless, the key movers took care to keep the party political planning separate from the organization of the strikes.5
But progress that year was erratic, partly because an informal committee consisting of these enthusiasts circulated