Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne
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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