Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne
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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.
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